09/28/2026
Mom! Can’t you see?! I’m live! You’re distracting me! You always barge in at the worst possible moment!”
Laughter from someone on the other end came through the headphones hanging around his neck. Marina stood in the doorway. The handles of the bag she still hadn’t put down were cutting into her fingers.
The new key was golden, with sharp teeth, and still smelled faintly of metal shavings. Marina placed it on the cabinet in the hallway, beside two sports bags and a plaid tote that Sergei’s winter coat hadn’t fit into. She had to fold the coat separately and tie it up with the belt from a bathrobe.
The kitchen clock showed half past one. The train left at 5:40 p.m.
She sat down on the low stool by the door where she usually put on her shoes and suddenly realized she had no idea what to do with her hands. For thirty years, there had always been something for them to do: a saucepan, an iron, someone else’s cost estimates, her son’s shirts. Now they rested on her knees as if they belonged to someone else.
Sergei was supposed to come back from Denis’s place after lunch. His key would no longer fit the new lock.
Marina Oleksiivna is fifty-five years old. She has worked as a cost-estimating engineer for twenty-eight years: first at a design institute, now at a construction company. She calculates how much it will cost to renovate an apartment, replace a roof, insulate a building façade. Her numbers always balance down to the last kopeck. Her colleagues joke that Oleksiivna can look at a wall once and tell you exactly how many bags of plaster it will take.
But she had never been able to calculate her own life that way.
Sergei’s father left when the boy was four. He left quietly, without a scandal: took the tape recorder, the winter tires from the Zhiguli, and left behind an unpaid electricity bill. From then on, Marina lived alone and carried everything alone.
After work, she cleaned stairwells in a neighboring apartment building so she could buy her son a winter coat. She took her vacation in three-day pieces: to paint the balcony, stay home with Sergei when he was sick, or finish digging potatoes at her mother’s country house. The last time she had been to the seaside was when her son turned three. He got badly sunburned in Kyrylivka, and she spent the entire week rubbing kefir on his shoulders.
She wore the same pair of boots for six seasons. Twice, she glued the soles back on herself in the kitchen, pressing them down with a heavy dictionary.
But Sergei had private tutors in mathematics and English. He got into the Polytechnic to study computer science. And for his graduation, he had a proper suit instead of cheap trousers from the market.
After graduating, her son worked at an IT company for four months. Then he said the team was “toxic” and that “nobody appreciated initiative.” After that came freelancing, then “his own project,” then something else she never quite understood. For the last two years, he had been “running a channel”: spending evenings and nights playing video games in headphones with a microphone, commenting on every move for a few dozen viewers.
Sergei woke up around noon. Every evening Marina found plates with dried ketchup waiting for her in the sink. Her bank card, linked to his phone, regularly showed charges for pizza, sushi, and various “gaming subscriptions.”
“Mom, these are investments in content,” he explained. “You don’t understand. This is how everyone starts nowadays.”
She truly didn’t understand. But she stayed silent. Because it was Sergei. Because he was still finding himself. Because, after all, she had no one else.
That Thursday at the end of September, it had been pouring since morning. Marina got off the minibus with five kilograms of potatoes in one hand and a bag of vegetables in the other. The elevator was broken. She climbed to the fourth floor with two stops along the way because her knee, which had been aching for about three years, hurt especially badly that evening.
The kitchen greeted her with a mountain of dirty dishes and an open pizza box on the windowsill.
She set the bags on the floor, caught her breath, and knocked on her son’s door. He was sitting with his back to her, wearing headphones, loudly arguing something to an invisible conversation partner.
“Sergei,” she said, touching his shoulder. “Please help me. There’s another bag downstairs with the neighbor, and the trash needs to be taken out.”
He yanked off his headphones.
“Mom! Can’t you see?! I’m live! You’re distracting me! You always barge in at the worst possible moment!”
Laughter from someone on the other end came through the headphones hanging around his neck. Marina stood in the doorway. The handles of the bag she still hadn’t put down were cutting into her fingers.
“I’m distracting you?” she asked quietly.
“Yes! Can you just leave me alone for once?”
He put the headphones back on and turned toward the monitor.
Marina quietly closed the door. She went downstairs to get the bag from the neighbor herself, took out the trash herself, washed all the dishes herself. Then she sat in the kitchen for a long time, looking at her hands: red from the cold water, the skin cracked across her knuckles. The hands of a fifty-five-year-old woman who, apparently, was a nuisance.
That evening, for the first time in many years, she didn’t cook dinner.
And for the first time, no one noticed.
On Saturday, Sergei came into the kitchen at half past eleven, yawning and scratching the back of his head. Marina was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee that had already gone cold.
“Sergei, sit down. We need to talk.”
“Mom, if this is about Thursday, I’m sorry. I got emotional. It was a decisive game.”
“It’s not about Thursday. You’re thirty years old. I want you to find a job. Any job. I’m giving you one month.”
He laughed and reached for a plate of syrnyky.
“Any job? You’re suggesting that I, with a Polytechnic degree, should go work in a warehouse carrying boxes?”
“Even a warehouse, if that’s what it takes. After graduating from university, I cleaned stairwells so you could go to school in a new coat.”
“Oh, Mom, here we go again…” He rolled his eyes. “People will appreciate me eventually, you’ll see. The channel is about to take off. Everything’s finally set up right. I’ll even buy you a trip to a sanatorium one day. Then you’ll thank me.”
He kissed the top of her head, took the last syrnyk, and went back to his room.
A month passed. During that time, Sergei updated his résumé on a job site once and twice complained that “employers won’t hire people without experience, but nobody gives you experience without hiring you.” Meanwhile, the bank card showed three pizzas, two burger deliveries, and a new headset.
One evening, Marina took a sheet of graph paper and a pencil and did what she knew how to do best.
She made an estimate.
Utilities — her son’s share. Groceries. His mobile phone and internet. Food delivery. Clothes. “Investments in content.”
The total came to 11,400 hryvnias a month.
She multiplied it by twelve.
Then by seven, because that was how many years had passed since he graduated.
She stared at the number at the bottom for a long time.
With that money, she could have properly renovated this very apartment, where the kitchen wallpaper had been there since the year 2000. She could have gone to the seaside every summer. She could have bought herself boots that didn’t need to be glued back together.
But what struck her most was something else.
There wasn’t a single line in the estimate labeled “For Marina.”
The following week, her colleague Tetiana came back from the Carpathians and spent her lunch break scrolling through photos on her phone: mist over fir trees, a wooden guesthouse, a waterfall, coffee on a terrace.
“Marina, when was the last time you had a real vacation?”
“Me? At the country house in August.”
“No, I mean an actual vacation. Not gardening.”
Marina thought about it and couldn’t remember.
That same evening, Tetiana sent her a link to a guesthouse in Yaremche: massages, walks. Twelve days.
Marina scrolled through the page until two in the morning.
The next morning, she went to her boss and submitted a vacation request.
A full vacation this time, not three days at a time.
She bought a ticket for the night train through an app, checking the date three times. She paid for the trip using the money she had been saving for five years “just in case.”
She decided that the “just in case” had finally arrived.
And then she made a phone call...
Continued in the first comment.
