Anya’s passage, excerpted from National Dish:

On February 25, 2022, I woke up after a turbulent night checking news updates about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Amid the shock, bouts of crying, and adrenalized doomscrolling, a seemingly trivial yet intimately unsettling thought entered my mind. I realized that after years of investigating national cuisines and identities, I no longer knew how to think or talk about borsch—a beet soup that both Ukraine and Russia claimed as their own.

I grew up in Soviet Moscow eating borsch—борщ in Cyrillic, no “t” at the end (that’s a Yiddish addition)—at least twice a week. For better or worse, it always signified for me the despotic, difficult home we had left. Here in Queens, a big pot my mother had just made sat in my fridge. But who had the right to claim it as heritage? That tangled question of cultural ownership I’d been reflecting on for so long had landed on my own table with an intensity that suddenly felt viscerally, searingly personal.

Back in Moscow, at the height of Brezhnev’s “stagnation,” I never regarded borsch as any people’s “national dish.” It was just there—a piece of our shared Soviet reality, like the brown winter snow, the buses filled with hangover breath, or my scratchy wool school uniform.

Our socialist borsch came in different guises. Institutional borsch, with its reek of stale cabbage, was to be endured indistinguishably at kindergartens, hospitals, and workers’ canteens across the eleven time zones of our vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Personal borsch, on the other hand, brought out every Soviet mother’s and grandmother’s quiet ingenuity—although to me, it all tasted kind of the same in the end.

My mom was inordinately proud of her hot, super-quick vegetarian version. I still have an image of her in our trim Moscow kitchen, phone tucked under her chin, shredding carrots, cabbage, and beets on a clunky box grater right into our chipped enamel family pot. It was her recipe, she always insisted—a miracle of a shortage economy conjured from a can of tomato paste and some withered root vegetables.

Gabby’s passage, excerpted from Dead Boys:

Just beyond the edge of the path, an upended water tower was half-buried in a mound of debris, and beyond its rusted curve lay a view of the River Lethe unparalleled in the city proper. Jacob, despite his unmoving lungs, gasped.

Its purplish waters were wide and slow-moving. The motionless corpses that floated on its surface were surrounded by glittering shoals of refuse and roiling rainbows of oil. There, past the bobbing shape of a claw-footed bathtub, was the stretch of river-bend where he’d thrashed out of the mud and onto his newly lifeless feet nearly a decade ago. With this unexpected glimpse of his point of deathly origin, it all came rushing back: how, after days of toil, he’d propped his numb body up on one palm, then another, only to lose his purchase in the slippery mud and splash face-first into those amniotic waters, where the whole humiliating process began anew. 

Giving his full attention to his footsteps, Jacob was surprised at how well-tended the interrupted path became as it led to the seer’s door. Someone had packed it down, forcibly and recently. Stepping lightly now, he rubbed his reupholstered palms together, the high-pitched scrunch of their leather soothing his mind. 

“Greetings!” he cried, jerking one hand over his head, but as soon as he’d had a good look into the murk of her chamber, he choked on his prepared speech. From the roof to the rust-bitten curve of the floor, the room was packed with filth-encrusted children’s toys. Quilts and blankets spewed moldy down onto jacks-in-the-box with broken springs. Board games missing their pieces served as tables for eyeless dolls. In the center of the candy-colored sprawl sat the seer known as Ma Kicks, her body so thoroughly ravaged by time that Jacob felt a professional ache at the sight. From forehead to foot, her skin was full of holes, flashing elbows, cheekbones, and knuckles alike. Her face was a soiled handkerchief askew on her skull, incapable of expression.

“My name is Jacob Campbell,” he said, steadying himself enough to bow. “I come with a gift — and an uncommon question.”

Ma Kicks still hadn’t moved, but at the sound of his voice, something within her did. Startled, he staggered backward, fixing his attention on her belly.

She must have been near her ninth month of pregnancy when she’d died. Since then, her womb had given way, and from its dark cavity two tiny, skeletal feet emerged, dangling over the edge, kicking into the open air.

Daniel's passage, excerpted from Walk the Darkness Down.

At the age of eighteen, when he first started scalloping full-time, Les suffered from sleep paralysis. The condition is not uncommon among fishermen. It lasted only a few years, fading away as the work–rest cycle on the trawler normalized. Back then he went down easy, but dreams would float up fast, mischievous and terrifying dreams from which he would attempt to will himself awake so urgently that his mind would come alert though his body still slept. At first, confused by this disharmony, he hallucinated a presence sitting on his chest, pinning him down as his mind screamed and flailed and wept until he bolted upright in the berth. But as the condition advanced, the dreams evolved. The presence disappeared and the time it took Les to wake lengthened. He could be trapped inside himself for what seemed like hours. In that paralyzed state, he would feel himself falling down, down, down into a depthless sea. Body still, mind wild, he watched the light near the surface of the water wither as he dropped deeper into a blackness so vast that it used the world for a reservoir.

That is what it feels like when Les loses consciousness over the hollows of the sea.

Despite his immersion suit, the cold stunned his limbs once he dove into the water. He swam with desperation, with purpose, swam for survival, for warmth, restricted and protected by the buoyant neoprene. He swam toward the blinking light on John Wayne’s suit, away from the boat, powering through the swell, churning onward. He imagined his body like a machine, the kind that recycled its byproduct as fuel. When his limbs grew tired, he swam for rest. When his breath was short, he swam for air. When dread crippled his mind, he swam for courage, for faith. He swam and swam until he ground to a halt, lungs burning, and stopped to take his bearings. The light on John Wayne’s suit had vanished. The trawler was nowhere to be seen.

He rested for a moment before sinking into a fear that sputtered like his breath.

Panic surged and he swam again, this time with wasteful, failing strokes.

He changed directions impulsively, his entire body filled with unexpected movement.

Sucking air, he vomited from the salt water and exertion.

He was forced again to rest, to calm down, held up in the swell by the suit’s flotation.

Les did not lose time, but the hours that passed took on the effect of sleep. There was blackness above, blackness beyond, the sea a glistening obsidian. Rain poured down relentlessly. Cold set in, creeping up from the toes, slowed the flow of blood. Stilting his thoughts. Mind lurching. Lunging? Lurching.

He swam for clarity. Only a few strokes and stopped. Spasms in his feet, his legs. His mind. Shivering. He couldn’t feel his fingers. Fangers, as his father said the word. Old man dead in all this wudder for water. Locals used yuh for yes. Marlene spent a year trying to get their daughter to say it right. Daughter. Her name. Angie.

Angie.

Angie.