For a dollar, paid to a taciturn man from the nearest town, hikers could pass the night in the abandoned Soviet summer camp. Mattresses were strewn across the base of a drained indoor swimming pool where the heat pump regurgitated the same frigid air, offering in its spittle only the added scent of sweet, spoiled beef. Although there were no windowpanes in the floor-to-ceiling gaps that hailed in bad weather, the roof, together with the dip of the pool, offered some facsimile of shelter.
To the credit of our mysterious property mogul, the back-wall of the room was adorned entirely by mosaic. Diving down were the pert but disintegrating bodies of three boys. They reached with undaunted optimism to the ocean floor. The boy on the left, the one closest to the windows, had been thinned out — the floor was littered with fallen tiles of his skin.
Fedya was putting together the camping stove he carried in his rucksack. I had met him on the trail two days ago, and we had decided not to carry on today on account of the black-bellied clouds.
‘You want some coffee?’ He pulled out a ziploc bag.
‘Do you want to use mine?’
His brow furrowed slightly as if to say ‘it doesn’t matter’ so I offered:
‘It’s Nescafé.’
He tipped some of his own muddy, damp grounds into the bowl.
‘You want some of this coffee?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘You’re quiet.’
‘It’s cold, no? Too cold to think.’
Last night I had dreamed I was a bed bug, and had crawled inside his stomach to sun myself under his heart.
‘I need to piss. Come explore?’ He rose, mug in hand. As a keepsake, I wanted to take home a picture of him: martial shaved hair, perhaps a Laika cigarette between his teeth, his pouted lips sucking on the filter tip. Although I had never seen him smoke, I knew in an oblique way that everyone from the old Eastern bloc did.
It was a strange landscape. Patches of snow mottled what otherwise appeared to be barren land: brown slopes that offered nothing to even the most industrious farmer. The place had surely fallen into disrepair after the dissolution of the USSR in the 90s, but the devastation seemed too great to have been caused by negligence alone. A few metres away was a stout grey building; its overhanging second floor had collapsed, and beams struck out of it at odd angles like the legs of a dying spider. Fedya handed me his cup, walked to it, and pissed on a block of reinforced concrete. The winds, unfavourable in all regards, carried no ammoniac scent to where I stood, and only made me shiver.
‘We should do something.’ I told him as he turned, fumbling at his crotch. ‘To warm up.’
He took the mug back from my hands and tilted his head back to drink. The muscles in his throat moved as he swallowed, his larynx rising and falling. He dropped the cup on the ground.
‘We could race.’
‘Where?’
‘The statues?’ Across the complex was a figure, larger than life, head tilted out but with no discernable face. Without warning, he turned and fled towards it — a stunt he’d perhaps seen pulled by the charismatic, romantic heroes of imported American films. I didn’t like to think of him being tainted by anything Western, like Hollywood or aerosol Easy Cheese, but I gave chase anyway. At least I could pretend that he was running away from me.
I was not especially lithe, however, and had taken to hiking less as a form of athleticism and more as a flâneur: a purveyor of oddiments. Paying too much attention, then, to the fantasy of poaching Fedya, I did not adjust my gait to account for the loosening scree beneath me. My mouth struck the grit with a dull and intimate force. When he leaned over me I saw he had been running with his hands in his pockets.
‘Your lip. It’s bleeding.’
‘Oh.’
‘Let me see.’ He crouched down beside me, and parted my mouth by placing his thumb on my bottom lip. A dribble of red saliva curled around his knuckle and trailed slowly toward his wrist.
‘You look like Volchitsa.’ Fedya concluded.
‘Who?’
‘My dog at home. When she got to the chickens.’
‘Cute.’
He frowned, and sat down next to me, ‘No, not really. I pulled feathers out of her teeth.’
‘Sorry. Doesn’t it get at you a little? All of the-’ I gestured out at everything, meaning the weather. The sky was dark even though it was still morning. Perhaps the storm would begin and never end, and we would be stuck here indefinitely. Perhaps he would die of cold, and I would have to eat him. I had not seen his body, but knew from the way his clothes fell that it was a lean, reticent thing. There would only be enough meat on him for a few modest portions of soup and most of it would be rigid muscle. He would be preferable, I think, to the agent of an underhand organ harvesting ring, the stretched skin of his abdomen pulled so taut that it would burst open at the slightest edge of a scalpel, his liver offering itself like ripe, low-hanging fruit. I was financially comfortable, and thus had no such inclinations.
‘Let me see again.’ He said and I showed him. ‘Yeah. You look like Volchitsa.’
He placed his hand on my hair, ruffling it as a demonstration: I was his dog. My teeth bared, drool gathered between my bottom teeth and lower lip, faltered, then trickled down my chin. I heard him say something, vaguely, about me, and that he didn’t have a girlfriend at home but I was distracted by the metal beginning to clot against my cheeks. When I was younger I’d had four teeth removed because I was born with too many, fresh canines on each side descending over the ones I had already borne. The pain of extraction that throbbed in the hollow of my gums was a bright, brilliant ache; the first time I touched myself, it had been with the gauze still pressed over the sockets.
His hand made a fist in my hair. I did not know him and I hardly cared to. He started to tug at the roots, lifting slightly the thin skin at my scalp. In fact, knowing would be a detriment to pleasure. He said something about Volchitsa, then pulled me across his lap. I let my tongue roll out in response, meaning: okay, your dog, who I could be like. He yanked my head back. I imagined his spleen.
Against him I could feel the small degradations of posture, his free hand pulling with a childish want on my hips as he pressed himself into the crotch of my Spandex softshell trousers. His eyes were desperate. I hoped one day he would have to work very hard to make very little money, and would stay in the sort of vocational work that hardened men like him into apathetic, confirmed drinkers. I imagined them in thirty years, a now dull blue.
The first drop of snow landed on my lid. He pushed his hand under my waistband and then waved his damp fingers in front of my face. I sucked down on them.
‘Good dog.’ He laughed as his fingertips pressed the base of my tongue. What could I find if the roles were reversed, and I reached down his throat with my silver spoon nails? In his stomach I imagined buckwheat, matchsticks, orange peels, woollen threads, rosary beads, the residue of his mother’s milk. The idea that he had certainly not been bottle-fed arrived as a gnawing sensation. In fact, I was sure his body had no plastic in it at all. I held his bicep and pushed his hand further, to feel his knuckles rest against my two top teeth.
I found my own body’s pains sometimes too recursive for the purposes of true relief. His pain, by contrast, felt like acquisition. The taste of foreign iron was sweet, but the curling motion of his suddenly contracting hand almost made me gag. Still, my jaw was locked and his blood came hot and thick and animal in my throat. I could have held him there until we lost all our sinews, our fat, our tendons. We could have wasted into two skeletal lovers, his index in my mouth as I swallowed the world, but he backhanded me with his free fist.
‘Fucking bitch.’ Gripping his wet hand, he stood in a low crouch and backed away, but he only managed to walk a metre before slumping back down into the snow. His face matched the crumbling buildings behind him. Both were drab and blanched by snow, qualities exacerbated by the contrast of a slow cherry red trail dripping from his fist and spreading at his feet.
With his still good hand, he pulled a lighter and cigarettes from his pocket, placed one carefully between his lips, and lit it. The pack read American Spirit. I found myself suddenly cold, and made my way back to the swimming pool as the storm began in earnest.
Olive Mills is a UK based writer whose work often explores landscape and the body. She is currently undertaking an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge, and was a 2026 Charles Causley Trust Poet in Residence. Her work has been published by Seedlings, Thread Lit Mag, and Ancient Times, among others. Aside from writing, writing, she can be found swimming, dancing, or spending an inordinately long time sitting outside various cafes.