Short Story Serial: ‘Saturday Afternoon, Odessa’: Part Seven

               ...There's a dust cloud drifting towards me on the breeze from the direction of the 'highway' meaning a car must be coming this way. Ugghh. The dirty air coming off the rubbish is faint corrosive yellow as it hits the window pane. I have absolutely no desire to gaze out the window to watch the 'workers' down tools (only figuratively, you understand) and look longingly at the person who has either enough influence or the right contacts to be able to put petrol in his car. We manage it occasionally, but then where do we drive to? My mother will put on a skirt and treat it like an occasion, but better the shithole you know I reckon. Odessa city centre is no better than here, just so you know; it's just the extended version with more hip hop, graffiti and crumbling high rise, and the odd restoration thrown in to put the dilapidation in its rightful place. The Potemkin steps haven't changed much though. I guess inside I'm screaming like the mother and the baby rolling down the hill. I'm not sure which one is me though. Ugghh. Who thinks that kind of thing at 15? Better that I was stupid and that kind of thing didn't occur to me at all. 
...






Short Story Serial: ‘Saturday Afternoon, Odessa’ – Part Six

         ...My mother's a hypocrite, anyway: she's knows what it's like to be part of a great country and yet she'd keep me here to nurse her and feed her in her old age. If only they'd been on the other side of the border. I reckon she'd hand me over to some teenage gangster tomorrow if it meant I'd stay. No thanks Mum. You live your life, I'll live mine. She must have some kind of pension so why does she need me? And I can't imagine my sister will ever leave.
...






Short Story Serial: ‘Saturday Afternoon, Odessa’ – Part Five

         ...All I want to breathe proper air and have someone look me in the eye and see exactly what I'm worth. I'm not an idiot, but the constant cloud here cover cotton-wools my wit and sometime I can't breathe for disgust and shame. Is this it, really? My mother says I'm a snob but why pretend I'm happy compromising my life to remain in the familiar? I only get to do this once and I won't let my youth be wasted on my youth, or whatever that saying is. It's in my English textbook; in a second I'll go and check. Please correct me, by the way, if I make a mistake; rather I did it now than when I'm on that plane or at that reception, destined for more salubrious skies.

...






Short Story Serial: ‘Saturday Afternoon, Odessa’ – Part Four

           ...Maybe, instead of heading for the Russia that rejected me and left me here and I should go west like the Poles and forget that Russia every existed for me in any tenuous way. If I speak Russian and look Russian and spend my evenings watching Russian television in a country that used to be Russian doesn't that make me Russian? No, it doesn't. Screw them. There are plenty of other countries waiting to welcome me with open arms. I quite fancy seeing America, with the sunshine and the cherries and the pie. There seems yellow and here seems dull rusty steel and cloudy dishcloth white.
... 





Short Story Serial: ‘Saturday Afternoon, Odessa’ – Part Three

          ...To be a little poetic for a second, I guess that the moment I was proclaimed Ukrainian, by accident of timing and location, Russia became my Ithaca, but I can't sit here and wait, hoping the road is long and boring and useful. Now is my time, and if I wait much longer to go and be a success in the place where things actually happen my time will be over and I might as well come back here to my parent's house and raise a couple of kids. I've yet to find out what these Ithacans mean, I guess. Huh. Apologies, Cavafy probably isn't on everyone's reading list, but why cater to the lowest? My mind will be my fortune one day and they will clamour then for the diary I wrote when I was 15 and stuck on this infernal building site a few miles back from the sea.
 ...






Short Story Serial: ‘Saturday Afternoon, Odessa’ – Part Two

        ...Other than us, that is. Or more to the point, why must I live here in this dump, with a view of six weeks' of rubbish that hasn't been collected so the bags have burst like pimples and the rusty end of a disused rail track that once led away from here to anywhere else? How I'd have loved to be on that train when it was working, travelling away from here on the outskirts of Odessa towards Poltava and onwards to the land that was mine by birth but not mine by the time I entered pre-school. A great land was what I was born for, born in, and is obviously the reason I have this brain, these eyes, this wit; they are my weapons against suffocating mediocrity, but I feel as if before I've had any chance to use them the army has retreated and I've been left standing in a field with tools that are no use because there's no success to be had. When there's nowhere to go, who cares what means you might have to progress?
... 





Short Story Serial: ‘Saturday Afternoon, Odessa’ - Part One

     And so begins November's short story serial, 'Saturday Afternoon, Odessa'. I'd love feedback on this character as this is actually background for a longer  piece that I'm writing, which involves this character (provisionally called 'Ekaterina') 10 years on from this point, after she has tried some of the things she talks about here, and is at the point of having to resort to other means.