Masha Kurbatova

“let's work it out on the remix” by Masha Kurbatova

   I had my first cigarette at a Mac Demarco show. It was 2017. I was 16. My best friend Tony and I stepped out for air after the opening act, pushing past sweaty hairy denim-clad bodies. Every self-professed indie kid in Atlanta flocked to the Tabernacle that spring night, and on the patio, constellations formed from the lit bright tips of their American Spirits and Lucky Strikes. An orgy of cigarettes inhaled and shared and deliciously, conspicuously lingered on between fingers, and someone dropped a whole, new, clean ciggie...

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“Hot dogs or legs?” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #256

I was only 13, so no one believed me about the bats.  Mom said, “Sara, bats don't live in trees. Don't be silly.” I knew she was objectively wrong. Wikipedia said so. And a whole colony nested in the crepe myrtle outside my window. At night, skeletal branches tapped the glass, bending under the bats’ weight. Their green eyes glowed through the bug screen. They watched me. I couldn’t sleep. I was in ninth grade, much too old to recruit parents in the fight against night terrors. So for a week, no sleep, just me tucked stiff, sore, unmovi...

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“Too good to be true ” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #256

   I’ve only seen my sweet darling father cry about soccer. Because he cheers for Atlanta United, he cries a lot. On Saturday, another artificial turf drama unfolds on our TV, and once again, Giakoumakis is on the ground two minutes into the game, rolling and howling and clutching his knee. Again, bleach-blond Saba kicks against the goal post. And now, they’re sending Etienne Jr in? We’ve already lost.    86 minutes in against Cincinnati, my father sheds tears into his beer, a glass full of Heineken he clai...

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“let's meet up in uncanny valley” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #228

At work, you text me the link to a headline: Decatur Town Square Moth Man. And you say he’s here!!! And I read the article, and it’s a Decatur in Texas, not ours in Georgia.  But you so seldom text me at work now that I reply only wow!! When I scroll through our older messages, it’s just you saying wanna come over and me saying sure over and over, and sometimes, you send articles about whatever cryptid caught your eye this month. Sasquatch stuff in October. Now, November, Mothman.  The article says that a person named Tur...

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“cultured” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #224

My sister has twice tried to convince me that Daylight Savings Time becomes permanent this year. A common conspiracy, it seems: my wife and three coworkers thought the same. Some national miscommunication in 2023. That bill hasn’t passed, people! I insist, sending them all the same NPR article.  My sister has a hot date with the bike shop boy. At breakfast, I ask questions. Still sleepy, she slurs her answers. I’ve been buzzing since 6 am, two cups of coffee like bees in my brain. She, despite the time change, is still late waking for...

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“haunted mansion” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #221

Nelson Muskrat’s father made a fortune in the coffee futures market. Divorced from any material coffee trade, this market saw invisible, imaginary tokens swap hands in a global game of poker that ballooned the bank accounts of key players in Europe and the U.S. while farmers in the Global South tore up unharvested crops of low-grade Robusta coffee plants because production costs were so high, it made no sense to let them bloom. Muskrat Senior’s profits put his son through private school, then Yale, and pumped funds to the young man’s million...

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“it sings to itself ” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #207

You, my reader, used to do science experiments. Bianca did too. She got a kids’ chemistry set in third grade, and stained her mother’s rug blue with copper sulfate. Her baby safety goggles imprinted pink into her skin; she looked quite funny as Mother fussed about the rug. Mother wanted a freaky-geeky genius kid. She didn’t want the mess.  Hunger coiled like a fat worm in Bianca’s stomach then. She fed it with experiments, mud pies, scabbed knees, Mother’s makeup smeared grotesque onto her babyface. But everyone told her (maybe you to...

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“sand” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #184

   Owls screamed in the cold, wet night; Danny was following them. Two more birds to tick off, and he’d have seen every avian species in the northeast. He descended deep into the forest’s bowls, searching. His broad shoulders brushed pine trees. His boots shuffled pine straw. He hummed.      Magic brews in frog ponds. Danny didn’t know. His pale round face greeted its twin – the moon – and watched not his feet. Rocks, sudden and slippery, circled the frog pond. He stepped, he didn’t look, he slipped. S...

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“how the passenger princess lost her crown” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #183

A month before heartbreak, we were in the car. My phone was hooked to the speaker by an umbilical cord of pink wire. Melly drove – I didn’t have my license yet. “I’m gonna play a cover. It’s funny,” I said. A whiny man’s voice screeched from the stereo. “Can you play the original version? The Kate Bush one?” she asked.“Aw, come on. The original is overplayed.”“This one sucks. No offense.” “Mm. Okay,” I obliged.Such were the conditions of my being a passenger princess: driver held the music veto. Fields dipped down an...

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“it's time to move” by Masha Kurbatova

   I read somewhere, perhaps an internet forum for women who dread falling prey to sociopaths or pathological liars or narcissists, that you can only pretend to be someone else for three months; afterwards, the timer dings, your cracks show, and like a bloodied chick, you emerge once more from your false shell. Though of dubious origin, this statistic is comforting to me. I, like Barbie, cycle through friends and outfits and jobs and haircuts and breast-to-waist ratios, but eventually both the doll and I tire of being astronau...

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“wait around a while” by Masha Kurbatova

Ana gets married in flip flops. Twenty minutes before the ceremony, she’s sweaty, red-faced, with anxious rats chewing holes in her stomach, with bare feet in the church basement, rummaging through the residue of her bridal party, kicking aside empty gift bags and garment bags, and where are they, the little white shoes? Nowhere. Escaped. They were pricey, they had heels just tall enough to wobble, but you get married once, Aunt Marcia said, so splurge. The basement smells stale and cinnamon-y like old Christmas wreaths, with boxes and boxes...

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“all the things she said” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #77

Work was ghastly. Roman needed a break. No better time than the winter holidays, when cheer sloshed through the city, unbearably wet and merry, like the snow melting on asphalt and mixing with confetti left behind by endless parades. He’d go up to the little cabin, he decided, up in the mountains, relax away from the forever-smilers and the always-happy. Clear his head.  He’d given his boss a note. The man, a veteran of the trade and accordingly wrinkled and grey, with a face and a heart of stone, raised a fat eyebrow.  “People...

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“in my room” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #76

15 minutes until Adeline’s holiday performance, and she was curled up somewhere in a little ball. No one could say where exactly. Caroline, twin sister, PR manager, sat on the couch, smiling with just her mouth, not her eyes. Sometimes Adeline pulled through last minute. Sometimes, she didn’t.  A dozen people were scattered in Nikolai’s living room, a scrappy holiday post-tour party. There were the backstage technicians, the bearded and pot-bellied lighting specialists, the tour manager locked up in the bathroom with yet another im...

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“girls who eat caterpillars on the playground” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #67

I. It was halfway through LIT 201: INTRO TO AMERICAN LITERATURE that I realized I hated American literature. Every book we read ended the same way: our plucky main character gets on a train and thinks wistfully to the past, then brightly to the future. It’s a cheap metaphor, the train, a symbol for progress, forward movement, Westward expansion, rfonwards & upwards, etc. And American stories are just like that, straight lines, like train tracks, flat, giving the illusion that you ended up somewhere different, further ahead, than when you...

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“teethfallingoutdream.org” by Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #66

   I woke up stinking and sweaty, hot under my armpits and between my thighs, my mouth drained of moisture. It happened again, the teeth dream. I was climbing the stairs of a rickety lighthouse, talking to someone pretty. It’s a horrible feeling, putting your fingers in your mouth, your nails confirming what your tongue already knew: the hardest, most stable structure of your body is wobbling. You just want to get it over with then, and yank on the tooth. This time, a big chunk came out, a molar, blackened on the bottom. There...

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