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Masha Kurbatova

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Sep, 2019

Stories (47)

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768 Followers

174 Following

47 Stories

2743 karma pts

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right angle cross of the vessel of love

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #52

I wasn’t mad. More so relieved. The worst had happened. I didn’t feel the pain yet -- the pipeline from my brain to my heart had long sprung a leak. I’d process everything later. I couldn’t think. Not because of outrage, I just hadn’t drunk coffee that morning for the first time in 22 years. My breath would smell bad no matter how much gum I chewed, and I was a clumsy liability. Knowing my shaky hands, there’d be little brown coffee spots all over my wedding dress. I wasn’t anxious like everyone said I’d be. Just calm, placat...

36 likes

cold little heart

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #51

I can only be in love with one person at a time. My body is weak, and love is too strong. It requires motors, nuclear facilities, every solar panel in the world to keep burning, energy channeled from every collapsing star in every dying galaxy. I can’t even hold my own back straight or keep my fingers from shaking; how am I to generate the gigawatts for loving everyone? It’s easier to love the small things. I listen to the same twenty-five songs over and over. I drink black coffee every morning, grinning and warm when the caffeine di...

36 likes

we'll still be best friends when all turns to dust

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #51

Mock trial practice ends late these days. The stars are already out when I leave school. I join our youngest team members, the yet-unlicensed fifteen year olds waiting for their parents in the carpool lane. The air is sweet, the grass swells with dew, a breeze gently scrapes the clouds aside to reveal a crescent moon. The kids are buzzing. It’s their first competition tomorrow. They look to me approaching with such awe, it breaks my heart. Three years ago, I was them. I was the one anticipating my first ever mock trial, nauseated and imagini...

58 likes

lovers rock

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #50

It was one of those rare mornings when everything was perfect. Morning light, cold and white, shone through the blinds, casting bright and wide strips on his skin and mine. I didn’t usually wake up before him. I didn’t see the point - I wasn’t a person who knew what to do with an early morning. That day too, I decided to stay in bed. Just look around. There wasn’t much in the bedroom, white walls, a dresser, no decor. Still, I hardly ever go to look at it all in such detail. Usually I was rushing out of bed, stumbling on one foot as I tried ...

24 likes

what could be worse

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #50

My aunt died. It happens. I liked her though. She was a bizarre lady -- some days you couldn’t get a word out of her, some days she jabbered on like a parrot, eyes to the ceiling, hands waving at her sides. She always had some new Thing, some schtick she was working on. She was going back to school, she got a new job, she was trying out some new diet, some new boyfriend, something different with her eye makeup. She was into shawls around one Thanksgiving, then it was those Adidas tracksuits. She shaved her head, grew it bac...

34 likes

anjela

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #48

“I’m not very good at talking about this stuff. So. Nevermind.’’ She buries her face in the pillow. I mean, I’m very good at talking about it either, but I wish she would at least make an effort. Aren’t poets supposed to put their feelings into words? I can’t tell if she’s actually asleep or faking it. Sometimes she’s so still, I worry she’s died. I squint in the dark, stare at her belly, make sure it still rises up and down. It does I crawl out of the bed, feet hitting the cold linoleum. Bed may be too generous a word, reall...

34 likes

dead cat

Masha Kurbatova

Shortlisted for Contest #46 ⭐️

I’m laying in bed, not so much a bed, a bedframe with a memory foam mattress that accelerated my spinal problems all through adolescence. The scene is familiar, it’s nightime, the yellow light bounces off yellow walls and reflects off the window and even the moon shies away, and there’s a ladybug making dumb circles around the room, droning like the teeniest fighter jet. My carpet is nasty -- I never bothered to vacuum all the years I lived here. Old drawings from high school are tacked up here and there, pretty faces disto...

30 likes

bop to the top

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #46

You would think, after being on this Earth for, what, fifty, sixty years, people would be wise. They would be set in their ways, confident in their quirks, complete masters of their own ships. But going on date after date, Robert soon realized that was just not the case. His wife had been dead for nearly a decade then, and he figured Eugenia could forgive him. He wouldn’t marry again, he promised. He just didn’t want to die alone, and really, a nice little lady to just hang out with til then would be nice. ...

24 likes

the end of the tour

Masha Kurbatova

Shortlisted for Contest #44 ⭐️

It’s no bestseller, but enough people bought the book for thirteen east-coast bookstores to host me for an evening. It shouldn’t have been a three-month affair, but independent book publishers and piss-poor planning are synonyms. My agent told them yes of course I’d be okay spending five empty days in a Holiday Inn in West Virginia between readings. Whatever, I’m lucky to get a book tour at all. It was thirty people in the audience on a good day, about thirteen most of the time. By the time I loop bac...

40 likes

la cucaracha

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #41

“I was born at the wrong time too. A week early. If I’d stayed put, I’d be a capricorn. I’m sure I messed up Mama’s plans. I always did. She was just twenty-five then, just starting to get her career off the ground and move to a totally different country. Terrible time to have a baby. And then when I was born, I’m sure I was a terrible bother. Babies are rude, you know. They cry in the middle of the night, poop themselves at parties, get hungry on a walk to the park, it’s all on their own timetable. I think Mama was always glad to leave on h...

24 likes

bright blue meteorite

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #41

There were wild horses on Mars now, and everyone knew it was Sampson Fields’ fault. The classic tale, an unstable genius, a complete mental breakdown, a lashing out, a break-in at the laboratory where the foals were kept in sterile stables hooked to tubes and monitors. He set all of them free the day after he turned in his resignation letter. Rumor was he’d written it in his own blood on a crumpled lab report. But just a rumor. It was in fact typed in twelve-point Times New Roman and formatted very correctly. No one ever saw him again. ...

29 likes

taking meemaw down to sunny dunes

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #41

“Are you sure?”“Yes! I took two different tests from two different brands and they all said the same thing!” Mary says into her iPhone, biting her lip to trap a sob. It’s not fair to cry during a phone call - the other person is forced to silently bear your auditory snot, unable to give much real comfort. Mary sits on the toilet, knees to chest, back curved, a disheartened queen upon her porcelain throne. “Who’s the dad?” Lily asks from the other side. “Cooper.”“Oh. Does he know?”“No, and he’s not going to. God! I can’t belie...

20 likes

a nice neighborhood barbecue

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #40

I hadn’t seen my ex-fiancee in twelve years and then I moved into his neighborhood. An accident, of course, I didn’t know he’d be there in a cute little gnome house with a pointed roof and brick walls and a turquoise door and a garden of pansies tended by a loving pregnant wife. I wouldn’t have ever found out either, I’m not big on mingling with neighbors, but my new fiancee is and he insisted we go to the big barbeque they were advertising with hand-drawn signs and smiley-face balloons. He wanted to settle in quickly, get ...

22 likes

sole mate

Masha Kurbatova

Winner of Contest #39 🏆

There’s never been a cigarette so impotent as the Yellow American Spirit, but I was twenty-five then, and I didn’t know any better. My roommate asked me to buy cigs at the gas station and the man behind the counter stared at me as if he didn’t believe that I was, in fact, twenty-five and not some eighteen-year-old with a fake I.D., so I panicked and pointed at the prettiest-looking package, not realizing that yellow is code for “mellow” which is code for “flavorless.” “It’s not even that pretty,” my roommate Stacy whined. “If you were ...

195 likes

156 comments 156

clara and the clarinet

Masha Kurbatova

Submitted to Contest #38

I was clinging on, I was okay, until I put my AirPods through the washing machine. One-hundred and eighty dollars in broken plastic because I couldn’t be bothered to check the pockets of my only pair of jeans. Of course I can play my music out loud, but you know it’s not the same; earbuds are like a hug, whereas out-loud music is a wave hello from far away. I need sounds vibrating in my ear canals at all times, words and synthesizers pouring constantly into my brain. Otherwise my mind begins to digest itself, the way stomachs do when left em...

16 likes