The Pillar of Smoke

Before the pandemic, but close to the end of twenties of the XXI century, 12.5 million people lived in Moscow, and among them — almost indigenous (moved more than ten years ago) Muscovite Petya. He is an intelligent, quiet, shy librarian, although when he looks at himself in the mirror he sees a completely different person. He has a dog, who loves him, and Zhenya, whom he loves. He doesn’t have a grandmother anymore, but he has his grandmother's inheritance: an apartment, a workplace and Marya Semyonovna. And when he does not look in the mirror, forgets about the party and does not peer into Dostoevsky's bronze face, he can even imagine that nothing irreparable has happened. This is a short story about Moscow —vicious and affectionate, about how our ideas about ourselves differ from what others see in us, and about the way those moments when a person least of all resembles himself, irreversibly change his reality.