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I

Jacob has been dead for years. Your partner, a seven-foot giant with a raucous laugh and freckled, sun-burned skin. The man who adored classical music and quoted Dickens with a British accent. Who bore, without a grudge, your mother’s crude jokes or your own stinginess, your obsessiveness with the waste of water and electricity, air pollution and climate change. Jacob, who made you forget all the holidays you didn’t spend together, who loved you when you were dirty or hungry or sick, or early in the morning, when you returned from work, reeking of cheap coffee and bleach. 

He still haunts your dreams, young and healthy, sitting in a chair or lying under the covers, next to you, his hair burning red against the crisp-white of the pillowcases. You’re afraid to reach out, afraid to wake up, afraid to find the other side of the bed cold, stiff, without wrinkles or creases, the pristine infinity of sheets, like snow, like fog, like your future. There’s a chess game you two started and never finished. The set is in your bedroom, and you forbid your mother to touch a single pawn; you want the wood to retain the memory of Jacob’s fingers. You imagine him brooding over his next move—forehead strained, lips puckered, eyes narrowed to slits—the unwillingness to compromise, to lose a rook or a knight. He rubs together his enormous hands, as though determined to spark a fire, then throws his arms in the air. Work! he says. We must save the dying!

Save me, you say. Save us. 

---

It’s Christmas Eve on Brighton Beach—the dreariest day of the year. Grocery stores explode with people drifting in and out like hungry plankton. Pyramids of foods are displayed in shopwindows: exotic fruit; cured meats; sausages and kielbasas; smoked salmon; pumpernickel and rye breads; marzipan cakes and cream-filled pastries; strawberry, apple, or pumpkin pies; chocolate candy. A holiday cornucopia that makes you dizzy when you imagine how much of it will be thrown away, rotten. You’re a bore and a heathen, a solitary oyster, as Jacob used to joke. You don’t have friends, and you hate Christmas. Such a senseless glee, a waste of effort and money. Even when Jacob was alive, you tried to shrink the celebration to an evening meal. No gifts, no parties, no monstrous turkey the rest of the population merrily digests for days. What right or reason do they have to be merry? In a world that is filled with wars and nuclear weapons? In a time when they find themselves a year older but not a year wiser or happier?   

Tonight, you’ll have to eat your mother’s apple-stuffed duck she cooks every holiday, minus the perestroika years, when you still lived in the Soviet Union, when you gorged on beets and herring, mayo and black bread, buckwheat and hotdogs, standing in lines for toilet paper, salt, or matches. But she refuses to remember that now—you earn more money at the hospital, nursing the old and the sick, than she ever did giving facials and plucking unwanted hairs from women’s bodies, so they could remain slick like frogs. 

 The weather is cold, bleak, and foggy; a nagging mist coats the trees and people’s shoulders as they shuffle home, bags loaded. With red caviar and a bottle of vodka, you saunter toward your mother’s building along the beach, populated by seagulls. Large rocks stick out of the water like once-promised lands. A few couples are walking their dogs. You can barely see them, their silhouettes dissolving into the milky air. You enjoy how quiet and lonely the beach gets at dusk, when the horizon fuses with the ocean before the darkness descends and a few stars pop up. 

The fog is impenetrable, hangs like a bedsheet. Back in the USSR, your mother washed sheets by hand. All your clothes, too. Her strength is inexhaustible, when it comes to you, but not your father whom she refused to help even when he was dying. And not his second wife—the mistress, as your mother still calls her—who’s been trapped in Ukraine since the start of the war. Your mother doesn’t wish to contact them, insists that she has no address or phone number. She can’t be expected to keep up with all the women, all the ill-raised brood, the pain of losing your father first to whores and then to cancer. She spurts fire each time she talks, and your adolescence returns, in cries and shouts, smoke and tears, a drunken amnesia of nights and days when she hardly noticed you, when you missed school or were unforgivably late; when you ate stale bread and she didn’t eat at all; when her black hair hung in matted snarls like an unraveled sweater. You kept pulling, kept jerking the ends, kept hoping to snatch a glance, to steal a word, a gesture, a nugget of attention, your grief bottled inside, hers pouring out. She survived, and so did you. You won the green card, moved to America, rented her a flat two blocks away. 

Pause and stare into the thickening fog. You can make out faces, all the people who once occupied your days, nights. Jacob, who walked here in late evenings and swam naked while you stood swaddled in a blanket, shivering, warning him about heart attacks, pneumonia, sharks, and other monsters. Humbug! he’d say and dive into the black womb of the ocean. Humbug! Humbug! Humbug! 

II

Floating above the water is a man, dressed in a sheepskin coat and a fur hat with the earflaps pulled down. The strange figure recedes from the view, diminished to a child’s proportions. His hair, sticking out from under the hat, is white with age, and yet his face is smooth like first snow. He has long arms, and you deem them to be of extraordinary strength. The hands, too, in which he holds a branch of prickly pine, but his coat is fringed with silver fur. The figure itself trembles and changes—first it’s a middle-aged man, then a young woman; now her head dissolves into the shoulders, and now the shoulders collapse inside the coat as you’re being swept off the ground, without a warning, by the Ghost of Christmas Past. 

The ocean has entirely vanished, not a trace of water or fog, for it is a clear, cold winter evening on January 7, 1980—the Orthodox Christmas, which no one celebrated officially in the Soviet Union. You see your former self, a ten-year-old boy with awkward limbs and a nest of straw-like hair. The air smells of burnt duck and thousands of other things long forgotten. In your coffin-size kitchen, in Moscow, your father admits to having an affair with a Ukrainian woman he met during one of his business trips. He admits to loving her, to feeling guilty, to moving out, to being offered a new position in Kiev, but also to being committed to you: visiting as often as he can, sending half of his salary, helping with school projects, vacations, and university placement.

Bastard! your mother yells. Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! She throws silverware at him, knives and forks, spoons and spatulas, a ladle; her quick, sharp tongue sprays poison across the table. 

Tears choke you, but you hold them at the back of your throat, the salt eating through your tonsils. You want to say something, to stop him from leaving. Your lips tremble hard as you clasp the back of the chair where your father sits. But your fingers pass through the wood and your father’s back—empty. Ashamed, you pull away your hand.

“These are only shadows,” the Ghost says. “They have no knowledge of us.” 

The voice fades into the mist, and now the year is 1986, a second year of perestroika. The church has gained power, and the old country rejoices in faith while your mother has brought a new man over for Christmas. She’s also asked the neighbors if you could spend the night, even though they don’t celebrate, the mother being Jewish, the father an atheist. Their son Dmitri is a first-year film student at VGIK, obsessed with capitalism, Fellini, and classical music. He’s never learned to play an instrument, but his father is a violinist; you often hear him practice for hours behind the wall while you do homework, folded over a textbook. In your family, music is frivolity, as useless as all arts. You’re in awe of those who prove your mother wrong.

Late at night, in Dmitri’s bedroom, when he’s beaten you in chess three times in a row, when all the sounds have dissolved into the darkness, when a silence is so deep you can hear snow build a fortress under the window, you lie in his bed instead of the floor because it’s too cold and the old radiators are barely heating, and because you like the comfort of someone’s body next to yours. Dressed in flannels—your heart at his back, your crotch against his buttocks—on the cusp of sleep, you fling your arm over his shoulder, your leg over his hip. But he doesn’t move, and neither do you. 

It’s a dream, one of many.

The Ghost touches your hand and points in another direction, where your other self—a young man with shaggy hair and thick beard—exits the airport. It is 1990, and you’re a third-year medical student revering germs because of their stubborn resilience, their ability to be invisible, to live anywhere and under any conditions. On Christmas, despite your mother’s threats of eternal doom, you have flown to Ukraine to meet your father’s family, his nine-year-old son, who looks like a trembling blond apparition with cornflower eyes, deep, tender blue. He keeps bringing you toys: tin soldiers and tanks, plastic guns that flash red when you pull the trigger. While your mother reminds you of a scrawny, willowy plant, the boy’s mother is a tall, full-bodied woman with sunflower hair and hips like towers, wide, sturdy, undamaged by age. The household brims with order at the tips of her bustling fingers. Everything she touches grows prettier, lasts longer, acquires a purpose. Yet, she makes you feel like an extra in a play. You should accept, should try and act, break the fourth wall of your home, your mother-son confinement. Instead, you break the neck of a ceramic vase, your fingers raw with wounds. 

“I wish,” you say, drying your eyes with your coat sleeve. “No. Never mind.”

“What’s the matter?” the Ghost asks.

“That woman,” you say. “She was good to my father.”

The Ghost nods thoughtfully and waves his hand. “Let’s move on, shall we?” 

At his words, the room begins to shrink, the walls crack, and chunks of plaster fall off the ceiling. You skip a breath, and it’s Christmas 1995, a few months before your departure for America. A snowstorm keeps your father at one of Moscow’s airports for hours, until late, until his flight back home, to Kyiv, is cancelled and he asks to spend the night at your flat. There’s a chilly emptiness to the place, boxes upon boxes of books and clothes to be given away. Your entire life—to be trashed, discarded. The wind howls, rattling the windows, behind which nothing can be seen but a shroud of snow. You two drink vodka and argue until dawn—against his leaving, against your emigrating, against your home country that has fallen apart like an ugly choker torn by a drunken, despotic hand—until your mother enters the kitchen and says: Why don’t you kick him out? Let him beg you like I did before he deserted us? Let him freeze to death so I don’t have to suffer his betrayal? She tries to throttle him, and you try to pry her hands open. You weep; she weeps; your father weeps, too. It’s the last Christmas the three of you will share. 

The night lives in your memory, swept with snow, hollowed by winds. It unfolds gently, in the dark, as though on a movie screen, the scenes roll by, the credits, a black nothing.

“Show me no more,” you say. “Take me home! Stop torturing me!”

“Another Christmas?”

“No!” 

But the cruel Ghost squeezes you in his arms and forces you to watch.

A moment later, the screen peels away, like an old wallpaper, revealing a candlelit room, where Jacob, already a phantom, is dissolving into the bedsheets. Medicines crowd the nightstand, empty cups, bloody tissues, your mother’s old icon, the holy water from an Orthodox church in Brooklyn. In a chair, you hold the chess board on your knees, convinced that if your partner makes the next move, he’ll live another hour, another day. A phone rings, and you know it’s your father. He’s been calling for weeks, but you refuse to pick up, despite your partner’s insistence. Despite all the talk about love and forgiveness for the sake of one’s future—your future—where loneliness isn’t a sudden guest but an incorrigible tenant.   

Your hair stirs as if by breath or a belch of warm air from the radiators. Don’t you dare leave me! Don’t you dare! 

I won’t, Jacob says. I’ll be here…many…many a night. He expels the words like smoke rings, and they hang in the air, separating your past from your present, life from death.  

“Ghost,” you say in a drained voice. “Remove me from this insufferable scene.”

“These are the things that happened.” 

“I don’t care.”

When you turn to look at the creature, his face begins to change, his features wrestle, dissolving, oddly, into the scraps and fragments of other faces you have just encountered until you slap your cheeks with both hands, extinguishing the past. 

III

Instead of your mother’s apartment, you have gone back to yours, although you don’t remember how. You’re conscious of being fatigued to the last hair, to the last subcutaneous fat layer of the skin. It’s almost midnight; the curtains aren’t drawn, and the fog, mixed with flurries, is pressing against the window. On your living room couch, you light cigarettes, drink vodka, and eat the caviar, all at the same time. Blobs of iridescent red cover the coffee table, and you bend to lick them off. In the picture, illuminated by a floor lamp, Jacob’s face puckers. 

It’s a dickens of a Christmas, isn’t it? 

“Shut up. You’re dead. Dead as a doornail!”

Bah!

You refill three shot glasses—one for him, one for you, one for your mother.

No angry messages on your phone make you almost shoulder into your coat and shuffle outside, back to her apartment. Unlike you, she hates being alone, drowned in memories and self-pity; her anger, her misery pumps poison. When she finally sends you a text—after you have emptied all the glasses and poured one more, for your father—it’s a mournful procession of black hearts. You switch off the floor lamp and fall face-first onto the couch.

Hours later, when you wake up, it’s so dark you can hardly distinguish the window from the wall. Everything looks hazy as though the fog has penetrated the room, pouring through every chink and crevice. A figure looms over you dressed in a blue-and-yellow robe that barely covers his naked chest tufted with gray hair as though brushed with ash. A war helmet crowns his head; a ribbon of bullets cinches the waist. 

“Are you the Ghost of Christmas Present?” you ask, throat parched, brittle. 

“I am indeed,” he says and pulls you off the couch by the arm.

In the next moment, the two of you are in your mother’s living room, watching her thumb through an old phonebook that belongs to another life, another century because who uses phonebooks today, when the world has gone virtual decades ago? She can’t see you when she tosses it on the floor and drags a few shoe boxes from under the sofa, jerks the dusty lids off your childhood. She touches every picture, every trinket, every seashell you brought home from summer vacations, every odd-shaped pebble, every letter you sent from pioneer camps, every birthday card, every note, your first lock of hair, your first booties, the teething ring. Hundreds of smells float in the air, hundreds of thoughts and hopes, each one a memory tethered to your heart. It pounds and pounds like a trapped beast.

And then—lifting you up on his shoulder—the Ghost flies across the ocean, your ears deafened by the thundering of water as it heaves and roars beneath. You two land on the snow-choked street you visited before. The sky is gloomy; the wind scours the naked trees. The building looks black, contrasting with a sheet of snow on the roof. You see ruins where other buildings stood. A charred swing. Smashed-up cars. The yard is empty, save for a few teenagers getting warm by the fire. In their hands, they cradle baked potatoes, peeling sooty skins. 

You recognize the flat you now stand in, the Ukrainian woman with hips like towers, her grown-up son, who holds a Kalashnikov in his hands. He’s a soldier, a warrior, whose duty is to protect his homeland, to fight for freedom. A candle blinks on the table where you sat in 1990. You remember a cooked goose bloated with green Antonovka apples, potato deruny, and borsch, red like your cheeks when your father’s wife kissed them. She kissed all the men at the table. She gave blessings. 

A younger woman walks into the room and clings to the soldier’s chest, weeping; a boy of six or seven pulls at his father’s gun. Your stepmother crosses herself and then the air, just as your mother does when things get scary, unpredictable, when ten years ago you’d told her that Jacob had leukemia. There are no Christmas decorations anywhere and no curtains; a paper X is glued to the window glass. The walls are bare, split with cracks as though hit by lightning. Somewhere, in the distance, a missile flies across the sky and then explodes. The walls shake, the ceiling, too; the brass chandelier swings like a pendulum. You crouch on the floor, next to the little boy, who’s unaware of your presence. His tiny violin falls off the chair, and he grabs it, hides it under his weight. He’s shaking, and you can’t help but brush your fingers over his blond hair, weightless like poplar fluff. 

“Will he live?” you ask and raise your eyes at the Ghost.

“I see an empty seat, an empty room, an empty flat. A violin without its owner.”

“But can he be spared?”

“If these shadows remain unchanged—”

“I won’t hear it! I won’t!”

“Touch my robe!”

In a matter of seconds, a foreign city springs upon you, with a gaudy fountain splashing water on tourists’ phones as they try to snap pictures. The day is warm and jolly, herds of laughing children, their arms loaded with gifts. Festive garlands loop around lampposts and windows of ancient buildings with wrought iron balconies, where scarlet poinsettias bloom. Everything appears so clean, so picturesque, as though just-painted, unlike in Brighton, where time lingers indefinitely, trapped in the Soviet nostalgia that defies all progress, the need for beauty. A giant Christmas tree rises in the middle of a cobblestone piazza, and you catch a glimpse of your own haggard face in one of the glass balls as you trail after the Ghost, whose robe flutters, exposing muscular legs dressed in scuffed army boots. You take ten steps to his two. 

The Ghost halts in front of a café, where a man your age or a bit older is drinking coffee and reading a letter. Tears slide down his cheeks, betraying the cheer of a holiday morning. He takes off his thick glasses and wipes them on his shirt. Something feels oddly familiar in the way he rubs his eyes and under his nose before fitting the glasses back on. A toothpick is in his hand, and he breaks it in two, then takes the longer half and breaks it again. Your body, your ears, your chest burns. 

“Dmitri?” you ask. “Is that you?” 

The man in the window looks around, as though sensing your presence or that of the Ghost, who has now placed his hands on the man’s shoulders, skimming the letter on the table.

“What’s wrong?” you ask.

“His father died an awful death.”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

You remember a tight closet in Dmitri’s flat in Moscow, you two are still teenagers, groping in the dark. You remember an old movie theater years later: Fellini’s 8½, a surrealist comedy-drama, which oddly resembles life in the Soviet Union. You remember Dmitri breaking toothpicks in his kitchen, proposing sex, not proposing sex, fearing you both will get arrested. The love-lust delirium when you finally dared to and then lay naked on the floor, smoking, arguing about the meaning of the film’s muted opening scene. How the main character nearly suffocates inside his car while others watch, but then escapes, floating in the sky, above the sea, with a rope tied around his foot. The lower end is in the hands of another man, who keeps tugging at the rope, trying to bring the character back down. He protests. And you do, too. You want to be free, to live long, to rise above others. 

IV

On the couch, your legs kick and kick. A ribbon of pale light has escaped into the room, and your eyes draw in a huddle of glasses and an empty vodka bottle. The floor is littered with cigarette butts and chunks of bread as though you were feeding birds in your dreams. The air reeks of fish and alcohol; your stomach churns; your heart threatens to rip a hole in your chest. You have no idea what time it is, what day, but it seems as though you have been drugged and dragged across the earth.    

Not an echo in the apartment, not a squeak, not a drip from the kitchen faucet. The wind has died, but the fog persists; it has spooled layers, woven a cocoon. A shadow slinks against the wall, hunched, hooded, draped in diaphanous garments with wide, loose sleeves. Slowly, silently, dreadfully, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come beckons you with his crooked finger and then scoops you into the folds of his billowing cape. The room falls behind, the building, the boardwalk, the beach. The ocean heaves, giving way to land like a hot tongue under your bare feet. 

You stand inside an orphanage without windows or a roof; walls scarred with bullets; ashes between your toes, between your lips. 

You stand in a train station crowded with suitcases but no people, and then you see them—piled along the tracks—women, men, children, as though asleep. 

You stand at the edge of a ravine filled with bodies of young men, who look like your father’s son, with yellow hair and blue frozen eyes.

You stand on a battlefield, where mutilated bodies have been tossed in the snow like chunks of meat. 

You stand in a cold, dark, wet basement, among young women, teenage girls, stripped naked and forced to kneel at gunpoint on the dirt floor.   

“No!” you cry. “No, no, no, no! I can’t bear it. Why show me things if I can’t change them?”

But the Ghost is silent; his robe sleeves spread like wings that lift you up and carry you along. 

Towns pass, roads, buildings, people, faces, which somehow mold into one—your own, framed inside a window of a poorly lit room. A child lies on the dinner table covered with a white sheet. The violin rests on the chair, a broken bow.  

All around you, shadows crouch and waver: of lives passed, lives present, lives yet to come.

“No more! Please! I don’t wish to see it!” You shut your eyes, recoiling. 

When you open them, you’re in a graveyard, entering through the tall iron gates decorated with wreaths of pine and holly. It’s late evening, a shy moon a silver stitch in the purple sky. Everywhere tombstones resemble petrified bodies. You trip and fall on your knees, sinking, crawling after the Ghost. He stops and points at the grave heaped with snow you can’t bring yourself to scrape. You refuse to move any closer, to acknowledge the inevitable—your mother’s name etched into the granite stone. Tears choke you.  

“When?” you ask. “How soon?” 

V

Jolted awake, face wet, you sit up and view the space flooded with sunlight. The couch is your own; the room is your own, the window, the apartment. On the coffee table, Jacob’s face stares at you in a half-smile half-grin. You gulp water from the pitcher on the floor, although you’re clueless who left it there or when. It feels as though you have slept a lifetime.

Staggering to the window, you force it open. The crisp stillness of an early morning bathes your face. The fog has disappeared, burned away. The air is charged with brilliance and thus hope that underlies the beginning of each day. A young man garbed in a black parka and a red Santa hat is walking three dogs, who pull and tug at the leashes, propelling him forward. 

“What’s today?” you shout. 

The man stops and lifts his head, peering into the empty windows until he spots your scruffy face. “Christmas!” he shouts back. “Where’ve you been?” 

---

Your mother isn’t an early riser, never was. She’s never bothered to put on makeup. Her long, gray hair falls all over her face like rain. The flat stinks of the fried duck, the melted grease she collects in a jar for cooking, which is why all her dishes taste the same.

“What the hell?” she asks. “Are you drunk?”

Silently, steadily, you push forward, through the mounds of shoes, plastic bags, hats and gloves in the hallway. You search for her phone—on the countertop, the bathroom, the nightstands, the bed. “Where is it?”

She takes it out of her robe pocket, baffled. “What’s the matter?” 

“Call her!” you say. 

“Who?”

“The widow, the stepmother.”

“No.”

“Call her and tell her that we want them to come over. The whole family. Her grandson and her daughter-in-law. We’ll sponsor them. I make enough money. There’s a website—ukraine.welcome.us—they should apply. I’ll cover the expenses.”

“She might not live there anymore.”

“Call her!”

“I don’t have the number.”

“Bullshit! It’s in the old phone book.”

“I don’t have it.”

“You had it yesterday, right here, in this room.”

You walk to the sofa, drag out the shoe boxes, start throwing memories in the air. The booties. The teething ring. A diary. A letter to your father you never sent. Dmitri’s picture you forgot you had. 

Halt, clutching the black-and-white photo. 

“Remember him? Our Moscow neighbor? His father was a violin teacher?”

“Composer.”

“What happened to them?”

“The mother died years ago. Dmitri made a few films, unsuccessfully. He left the country soon after the war started. The father burned himself to death on Red Square, protesting. I talk to the old woman next door.” She pauses and rummages under the coffee table. “Here,” she says, and passes the phone book. “They’re hours ahead, should be awake.”

In silence, which can only be outweighed by your sadness—past, present, and yet-to-come—you stare at her tired face, her sharp shoulders like rocks rising on each side of her head.

“You already called, didn’t you?”

Shrugging, she fidgets with the mess of her hair. “I hung up before anyone answered. I’m a chicken,” she says. “Or a duck.” Her smile is lopsided, and you step closer; your arms reach around her body limp with defeat. 

“It’ll be okay,” you say. “I promise.”

---

At night, in bed, smoking, you’re trying to recount all that has happened during the day, all the conversations you had, all the fears, all the excitement. For the first time in years, since Jacob died, you feel that you did something important, something that gives meaning to your fatuous existence—you made a promise to help the people you used to loathe more than your home country. You know you can’t stop the war or save many, can’t mend the world, your world, your family, marked by deaths, the loss of those whom you once loved. But you can still long, and you can still imagine—other journeys, other destinies. Your heart expands, pushing at the ribcage, from all the hope, all the unbidden tenderness it now harbors. A cigarette smolders between your lips, and then inside the ashtray as you watch the ceiling tiles swell like clouds and break open, revealing the ink sky aglow in lights. 

Touch the stars, touch the planets, touch the years—rolling, speeding before you—empty of wars, thick with life. 

Somewhere, a child has grown into a renowned violinist. 

Somewhere, the Kyiv Symphony is being performed in a concert hall. 

Somewhere, two old men play chess and drink vodka on the beach. They are surrounded by memories and a horde of gluttonous birds who pluck red caviar from a tin can. The place is deserted; the moon tosses silver breaths across the water. One man is a filmmaker, the son of the last Soviet composer; the other is his former neighbor, who keeps Christmas well by celebrating it twice—in December but also January. 

Bah! a voice coughs through the darkness. It’s dry yet gentle, a suck of air in the hollow pipes.

 

---

KRISTINA GORCHEVA-NEWBERRY was born and raised in the Soviet Union before moving to the US. in 1995. She’s published over fifty stories and received eleven Pushcart Prize nominations, as well as four special mentions in the Pushcart Prize Anthologies. Her work appeared in Zyzzyva, Subtropics, Zoetrope: All Story, Joyland, LitHub, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Gorcheva-Newberry is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, the Tennessee Williams Scholarship and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the 2026 Shane Stevens Fellowship in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her first collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, was awarded the 2021 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her debut novel, The Orchard, was a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Prize and was picked by the New York Post as one of the best books of the year. It has been translated into many languages. Find her on Facebook at kristina.gorchevanewberry, Instagram @gorchevanewberry, and X @kgnewberry.

Featured image by Rodion Kutsaiev, courtesy of Unsplash.