Flight
By Anna Persky
The day Jennifer found out her father was dying – August 28, 2001 – she’d been gearing up for a three-hour trek on Royal Arch Trail with Hank, her latest boyfriend.
Jennifer was shoving her feet into her hiking boots, feeling the nylon laces between her fingers, and thinking about whether she had tomato sauce for their dinner afterwards. Spaghetti was one of the few dishes she knew how to make. Another one was borscht, which Hank had described, unenthusiastically, as “your ethnic soup.” Spaghetti was easier anyway.
At first, she ignored the ringing phone, figuring whoever it was would call back. But the phone, perched on the narrow countertop in the cabin she’d been renting the last two years, was insistent.
“Somebody really wants to reach you,” said Hank. Jennifer sometimes called him “Captain Obvious,” although not to his face.
“Yes, somebody does,” Jennifer said.
“You should get that.”
“I should.” Hank was bossy. Jennifer decided that she might be done with him pretty soon. Maybe Colorado too. She hadn’t lived in Wyoming yet. She could get out of the lease, slip away. She knew someone who said he had a job at a tackle shop waiting for her in Casper. She could be gone by September.
“Don’t you think it could be important?” Hank said, grabbing the receiver and handing it to her. Jennifer pressed her ear to the phone.
“Jennifer?” her sister said. Hank didn’t even know Jennifer had a younger sister, knew very little of her past, just as Jennifer liked it.
“Darya.” Jennifer knew something was wrong, something big was wrong. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Daddy.” Darya’s voice was clipped. “He’s dying.”
“What?”
“He has a few weeks, maybe.”
At first, the words didn’t register. Then her pulse quickened. Jennifer felt dizzy.
“How?”
“Prostate cancer two years ago. It went away, and now it’s back.”
Jennifer reached for the countertop to brace herself.
“Cancer?” The Lev Grossman she knew could beat back any cancer with his loud cursing voice. “He’s still so young. He’s what, 65?”
“It’s in bones, Jennifer.”
Jennifer felt a rising fear, then anger at Darya for failing to tell her that their father had been sick before. And then she thought, why should she care what happened to their father after all these years, after all that happened between them growing up?
“Bones?” Jennifer said.
“You need to come home to Philly. I’ll pay for it.”
Jennifer didn’t want to go back to Philadelphia. She didn’t want to face her father.
She wanted silence. She wanted peace. She wanted to go on the hike as she’d planned. She wanted to throw herself into the trail -- grassy meadow, pine forest, then granite staircase all leading to an intoxicating view of wildflowers, an open valley spread against the backdrop of blue emptiness. She wanted to disappear into it all, just another American woman standing against a panoramic Western scene, standing there as the world turned orange with goodbye.
“If you don’t come now, you’ll probably be too late.” Darya’s voice rose from cool modulation to a hysteria Jennifer remembered from the old days. It was Darya’s childlike voice, not the new one. Jennifer felt a stabbing pain in her chest. “Jennifer, we need you here.”
#
When the plane landed in Philadelphia, Jennifer went straight to the bathroom in the terminal. She scrubbed at a coffee stain on her overall shorts. She checked for food between her teeth and sniffed for stink under armpits. She braided her brown hair into two French plaits with trembling fingers.
It had been five years since she’d seen either her sister or their father, nine years since she’d seen their mother. She wasn’t ready for this. She was. She wasn’t.
By the time Jennifer got to baggage claim, the other passengers were already pulling their suitcases off the carousel or jockeying for position, ready to pounce.
Darya, swathed in a black pencil skirt and chartreuse silk top, stood off to the side, tapping an impossibly high heel against the Terrazo flooring. She looked so grown up and, of course, she was grown up, a lawyer, a success. Darya’s hair was longer and blonder than the last time they’d seen each other, but her stance, hands on her hips, was achingly familiar. Shoving her hands into the pockets of her shorts, Jennifer walked towards her sister. Darya straightened herself up even taller to face her. Jennifer felt herself fold up like a centipede prodded with a stick.
Jennifer braced for an insult from Darya, but instead they stood silently, examining each other. Darya had new lines around her mouth, her lips carefully painted a berry stain. Jennifer hesitated, then draped her arms around her little sister in a brief embrace. Darya smelled like she did the last time, amber, and like something new, baby powder. When they were younger, Darya had smelled of peanuts and Prell shampoo.
“You’re here,” Darya said.
“I’m here.
“You came.” Darya’s eyes lingered on Jennifer’ twisted red and orange rubber bands at the bottom of her braids. She tugged at Jennifer’s overall bib. “You’re dressed well for what’s next.”
“Meaning?”
“You won’t mind it if you get a little dirty,” Darya said. “There’s going to be a lot of piss and shit everywhere. That’s how these things go.”
Jennifer nodded and walked away from Darya to pull her oversized pack off the conveyer belt. She heaved its weight on her back.
#
Darya drove them through a light drizzle to their father’s home, a third floor apartment in a brick building. Lev had moved about three miles from the old stone house where they’d lived before their mother left, before Jennifer fled West, before Darya went to college. Lev had sold the house when he’d stopped being interested in raking the leaves from the oak and maple trees and keeping up with the leaks from the slate tile roof. When he’d stopped pretending he was just another suburban dad. He’d gotten the apartment, sunk deeper into his books, drank.
In Darya’s Ford Explorer, Jennifer practiced slow inhales, filled her lungs to capacity, emptied them.
Dark was closing in on Boat House Row, framed against the Schuylkill River, shrouded in a misty glow. Jennifer had always loved the view across the river, the houses lit up at night, a comforting beacon. Lev used to point to their outline and bellow, “What a place we live in, eh?” This was Philadelphia, this was the Main Line, this was home, even if she didn’t want it to be. She could do this. She could do hard things. She could help her sister and say goodbye to their father. Then she could leave.
Darya switched lanes, honking the horn with insistent thrusts.
“You’d think they’d never seen water before,” Darya said. She pronounced it “wooder” like everyone who grew up and stayed in the Philadelphia area. Or didn’t stay. Seventeen years after moving away, Jennifer still said “wooder.”
Jennifer thought about Lev, who never quite lost the dragging intonation of his upbringing in Minsk, no matter how much he tried, at first, to fit into American life, no matter how many Fourth of July parades he joined, marching proudly, wrapped in stars and stripes, no matter how many American flags he draped from their front porch. Their mother hadn’t tried as hard to be American. She brought kugel and blintzes, instead of hot dogs and blueberry pie, to neighborhood potluck dinners. She would spit three times to ward off the evil eye and put salt in the corners of the rooms of their home to keep demons away. Raisa also hated planes, said if God had wanted humans to fly, he would have given them wings. But she read American magazines and took accounting classes at the community college.
“I fell asleep on the plane,” Jennifer said. “Dreamed it crashed, just like Mom always said would happen.”
“That’s nice.” Darya turned on the news. Something about a shark on some coast or another. Nothing terrible was going to happen and nothing good – a typical Labor Day weekend. Darya turned off the radio. “I’m surprised you didn’t break into the cockpit and force the pilot to turn around.”
#
They passed the deli, the library, the Jack In The Box that had been renovated into a bank, the supermarket, Best American Hoagie. Jennifer hadn’t thought about Best American in years, its oil and vinegar smell, the aggressively red-white-and-blue decorations.
Every night, Lev came back from his job as a city clerk, wrinkled jacket, slumped shoulders, complaining sometimes about how stupid Americans could be, how shallow, how vapidly unaware of their freedoms. He grumbled about the bribes going on all around him, about American corruption. Sometimes at night, Lev and Raisa locked themselves in the bedroom, him calling her useless and her calling him a bitter drunk, their battle switching from English to Russian to Yiddish, their voices spitting resentment against each other until early morning.
Their father grew angrier, their mother colder, more distant, hardened. She spent less time in the kitchen, ordering hoagies and cheesesteaks from Best American. Jennifer began brushing Darya’s hair, helping her with her homework, playing checkers and letting Darya win, making cookies with her, always chocolate chip, always Darya’s favorite.
#
“Do you still like chocolate chip cookies?” Jennifer twisted her hands together in her lap, playing with a turquoise ring Hank had given her. “Like we used to make together? Do you still lick the batter?”
“I don’t remember making cookies.” Darya drove past the turn off to their old home, further down the main drive. She made a quick left into the parking garage of their father’s building. “I remember you smoking pot with your friends.”
“Oh.” Jennifer shifted in her seat, trying not to let the hurt seep through her.
“I also remember you leaving,” Darya said. “I think you’re going to do it again, bail on us as soon as you see how hard it is.”
And there it was. Said out loud, into the space that separated them.
“I’m not Mom.”
“Not quite.” Darya parked in a spot marked reserved. She led the way because Jennifer couldn’t remember which floor was his or how to get to the elevator.
#
The elevator was out of service, so they climbed the stairs. Darya had a key. Once inside, Jennifer absorbed the darkness of the hallway, the empty hall.
“Yaya?” Lev’s voice was faint.
“Yes, Daddy,” Darya said. “We’ll be right in.”
“You brought Jenny?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“My baby girls.”
Jennifer followed Lev’s voice past a pull-out sofa, past their childhood kitchen table to stand in the doorway of her father’s bedroom.
Lev sat propped up on pillows, a bedside lamp illuminating his sallow face, bald head, skeletal hands gripping a book with a crumbling red cover. His room was mostly bare except for books, scattered throughout, and a few framed pictures of the four of them from the old days. There was a television fastened to the wall.
“The Discourses of Epictetus?” Jennifer said. “Some light reading?”
Lev loosened his grip on the book to crook his finger, indicating she should come closer to him.
Jennifer inched towards him.
“Come give your father a kiss,” he said, and Jennifer cautiously put her lips to his cool, sunken cheek.
Like Darya, he smelled like baby powder, not the like musky scent she remembered, and also not like the alcohol his younger body had exuded. He smelled like a stranger, a strange baby, but she was drawn back into him, resting her cheek against his.
#
After Lev fell asleep, Jennifer found Darya in the kitchen making them both tomato soup from a can.
“I’m staying,” Jennifer said. She had three part-time jobs, none of them particularly interesting. “I told my bosses I’ll be back when I’m back.”
“Easy to just take off when you don’t have a real career.”
Jennifer ignored the barb.
“So how does this go? How do we do this?”
“You mean without making ourselves miserable?” Darya ladled soup into two bowls.
“Yeah.” Jennifer took a chipped ceramic bowl from Darya. The bowl was white with a dainty blue flower design, another remnant from their childhood. “That.”
“I don’t know.”
After dinner, Jennifer pulled out her sleeping bag from her pack and unrolled it onto the floor next to the couch where Darya had a makeshift bed and office. Darya sat on the couch, ignoring Jennifer, immersed in law books and her computer, twirling her hair as it fell in her face.
Jennifer picked the pine needles and dirt off her sleeping bag from the last time she’d used it. That had a been a glorious adventure, a week on the Continental Divide with Hank.
Darya looked up from her work.
“He’s refused food for a few days, says he’s ready to go,” Darya said, fiddling with her cell phone. “I think he was waiting for you. Maybe he’s waiting for Mom to say goodbye too. That’s where we are.”
“Mom is coming?”
“That’s what she says,” Darya looked back at her computer screen. “Who knows?”
“Anything else you want to tell me?”
"Don’t expect to sleep through the night,” said Darya, biting a manicured nail.
#
When Jennifer was born, she’d been given one of the most popular American girl names at the time. By the time Darya came along four years later, her parents had felt a little more comfortable in their new identities. Lev always described it like wearing in a new pair of stiff jeans. Lev and Raisa named Darya to remember their past, their share heritage.
Jennifer often wondered how different their lives would have been had her parents come to the U.S. just a few years earlier, when they’d been children rather than young adults. Would Lev had found satisfying work, maybe been a philosophy professor somewhere, steeped in academia? Would he have married someone else, not the woman he met on the way over, as scared and confused as he was? Would he have married an American with roots in this country to help him assimilate, like so many other Soviet Jews had done successfully? Would he have been happy, sober? Or would he have made the same mistakes, rotating between frustration, anger, joy, and bitter disappointment at both them and the new country he wanted to love, but didn’t understand?
One night, in Jennifer’s junior year of high school, her father threw a whiskey bottle at her mother. Raisa hissed, “I didn’t cross an ocean to take this abuse.” Within a week, she was gone.
#
In the morning, Darya made coffee, holding her body rigid. She walked into Lev’s room leaving Jennifer by herself. Darya reminded Jennifer of their mother, the stiff back of resentment, making breakfast for the family, putting a plate in front of their father first, but without meeting his eyes.
She thought about Lev taking a few gulps of coffee before leaving for work. He would put his finger in Jennifer’s face and say, “You stay out of trouble.” Then he would pat the top of Darya’s head.
Jennifer grew up with a clenching fist inside her heart, opening, closing, then, one day, staying shut, immutable. That fist at her core made her solid, tough. It allowed her to thrust her body out of a sky-diving plane or shove her mountain bike over a rough course. But it made her a challenge to date, even she knew that, because to open herself up meant to remember all that happened in that stone house, all that she had lost and how they had all failed each other.
After Raisa had left, their father, steeped in alcohol, raged nightly against their mother, her new job, her life in New York, and the stupid American she was determined to marry. As soon as Jennifer graduated high school, she left with some new friends for a trip out West that never ended. When she told her sister she was going on a short adventure, Darya had looked at her with cold hatred, hands on her hips, and turned her head away.
Jennifer joined her sister in Lev’s bedroom. Darya handed her a bedpan filled with steaming urine.
“Dump that,” Darya said brusquely. Then together, they readjusted their father’s limbs and torso so he wouldn’t get bed sores. He smelled rancid, like trash left out in the sun. Jennifer choked back vomit. Lev could barely talk, except to whimper about the pain. They gave him morphine. He told them to hurry, that they had to hide the Shabbat candles quickly. He switched to Russian, calling out for his older brother, who, as a teenager, had been tortured and killed in one of Stalin’s purges.
“Hallucinations,” Darya said.
#
Shana, the hospice nurse, came to the apartment at 9:30 a.m., all grey hair and chirpy sing-song voice, bathing their father while Darya and Jennifer drank their coffee. Jennifer brushed her teeth and braided her hair. Darya didn’t bother with her lawyer clothes, instead opting for a velour sweatsuit.
“You both look like little kids,” Shana said, not disapprovingly, but with a note of curiosity.
“She,” said Darya, pointing to Jennifer. “is a little kid.”
Shana cocked her head at Darya, then scrutinized Jennifer.
“Darya’s been doing a great job helping your father the past few days.” Shana pulled out a pen and a clipboard with a checklist. “I’m sure it’s going to be a relief, though, to have you here.”
Darya looked like she was going to object, then shrugged.
“Better late than never,” Darya said, turning away from both of them, walking into Lev’s bedroom. Darya sang softly to him -- schlof mein kind – a lullaby their mother had used to comfort them.
Shana looked at Darya leaning over Lev, then turned to Jennifer, smiling reassuringly.
“Lev, your father, he’s filled with regret, I think,” Shana said, touching Jennifer on the shoulder. “He keeps talking about you. He’s proud of you.”
“For what?”
“He calls you more American than ketchup or mustard, whatever he means by that.”
Jennifer laughed. “I’m not sure he means that as a compliment.”
“Still, it’s good you’re here,” said Shana, on her way out. The woman had other patients, Jennifer knew, and this was just one stop in her day. Just one dying person among many.
Jennifer joined her sister in Lev’s room. She thought about turning on the television, maybe importing some relief with a sitcom, but she didn’t. Jennifer sat with her sister at the edge of Lev’s bed and watched his chest rise and fall, haltingly, as if each breath wondered if another was to follow.
#
Lev woke up hours later. Darya had left the room. They could hear her voice. It sounded like she was on the phone with a paralegal or some sort of assistant because she was barking orders about depositions and statutes that needed to be researched. Jennifer helped Lev prop himself up on pillows, gave him some morphine. She moved to the faded blue carpet; legs crossed underneath her.
“Darya’s something else, isn’t she?” His voice was creaky, but his face displayed the same awe he always had when talking about Darya. Who wouldn’t be impressed by her? Darya graduated Swarthmore, then law school at University of Pennsylvania, top of her class.
“Yes, she is.”
“You were always getting into trouble,” he said.
“I was. I was bored.”
“Yes, American childhood is so boring,” he said.
“I see you haven’t lost your sarcasm.” Jennifer traced a stain on the rug. She imagined it was from him knocking over a bottle of whisky or vodka.
“Perhaps it will be the last of me to go.”
Jennifer looked up at Lev and their eyes met briefly. She remembered the few stories he told about his childhood, about waiting for the knock at the door, waiting to be dragged out of his house at any moment.
Jennifer had read enough novels to know that now was the time she should get the answers to any questions she had remaining. She could ask about his childhood, his escape, his life here. She could assure Lev of her love for him. She could forgive him. She could stroke his face, hold him. She could get closure, as her old therapist would say, before she was out of time.
“I have been in terrible pain,” he said.
“I know.”
“It’s better now.”
Lev fell asleep.
#
The next few days had a rhythm to them. Shana came in every morning, bringing the heat from outside, her cheer, and news from the world. Darya and Jennifer took turns caring for their father as he slipped away from them. He stopped reading. They rubbed him with baby powder to mask the smell of decay.
They didn’t call a rabbi because Lev wouldn’t want one, wouldn’t want religion inserted into his life again, against his will at the last minute. He had already planned with Darya to be cremated, to be ashes, to be dust once again. Each day, his body grew colder, the skin on his hands turned mottled and purple.
Jennifer called Hank from Lev’s phone.
“Hey babe?” Hank said. “I’m just getting ready for a beer haul in the truck.”
Breaking up with him was easy. Afterwards, Jennifer snuck out for dinner. She bought a cheesesteak at Best American, but the bread was drenched in grease and melted cheese, the meat stringy. She could barely eat more than a few bites.
She remembered that in Colorado she was a vegetarian.
#
On the sixth day after Jennifer arrived, Shana came and went, and then Raisa showed up at the door, all gold bangles, gray curls, and bare, muscular arms. Jennifer didn’t know much about Raisa’s current life. She knew Raisa and her husband lived on the Upper East Side and that she worked as an accountant in the World Trade Center. She didn’t need to know more. When Lev had first found out where she worked, he had clapped his hands in fake applause.
“Oh, sweet success,” he said. “The Twin Towers of greed and hubris.”
The last time Jennifer had seen Raisa was for Darya’s college graduation. Raisa had brought the husband. Jennifer had made small talk with them both, for her sister’s sake. They hadn’t even bothered showing up for Darya’s law school graduation, which Jennifer had flown in from Arizona to attend, even though Darya barely talked to Jennifer the entire day.
“Why are you here?” Jennifer snapped at Raisa as Darya opened the door and gave their mother a quick hug.
“I invited her.” Darya said, shoving Jennifer aside to give Raisa enough room to walk through the hallway. “She wants to say goodbye. Leave her alone.”
Jennifer shot her sister a look. Why could Darya forgive their mother for leaving and not her?
“Hello, Jenny,” their mother said in her soft, slow way that pulled at Jennifer. Even after all these years, there was no denying the draw of her voice, the ancestral call.
“Mom,” Jennifer said coldly. They didn’t hug, but she looked at Raisa’s face, her eyelashes, still long, fluttering.
Darya led Raisa into their father’s room. Jennifer followed and stood in the doorway. Lev’s eyes were closed. Raisa kneeled next to Lev’s wilting body.
“Lev, honey, can you hear me?” Darya stood next to their mother, while Jennifer moved to the other side of Lev’s bed. “I hope you know we’ve made these wonderful daughters, and I hope you feel all our love.”
Darya and Jennifer looked at each other over Lev’s body. Darya raised an eyebrow, and Jennifer stifled a laugh. Next Raisa would be talking about God, which Lev always said was a load of shit.
“What did believing in God ever do for us except cause us trouble and make our lives harder?” he used to say.
He had been astounded when Jennifer, as a child, had recited for him the Pledge of Allegiance.
“Under God?” Lev had laughed. “You say that in school, because of a flag? What does the flag have to do with God? That’s some special kind of indoctrination.”
But Raisa didn’t talk about God. Lev opened his eyes for a moment, then closed them again.
“Leybele,” Raisa whispered in Yiddish.
Raisa left in a taxi for 30th Street train station soon after that, back to New York, back to the life she’d made for herself, back to her job, promising to call to check in with them. Raisa gave them both kisses on the cheek, and Jennifer, begrudgingly, allowed it.
“You can come to visit us in New York,” Raisa said pointedly to Jennifer. “We could talk out what we need to talk out.”
“Maybe.” Jennifer said. “Maybe not.”
“I understand,” Raisa said.
At some point, Jennifer knew, she needed to confront Raisa, expose and unfurl for her the hurt she left behind when she’d packed up two suitcases, put a note on the fridge, and disappeared in a taxi. But not now. There was time for that later.
Jennifer and Darya sat next to each other for dinner that night, another silent meal. They said nothing about their mother.
#
In the next days, Lev’s body collapsed further. Mostly he slept. Occasionally he would cry out, calling for Darya, Raisa, and then his own mother. He clutched at Jennifer one late afternoon, anxiously asking her what happened to their sled.
“I think you sold the Flyer when you sold the house,” Jennifer said.
“No, the toboggan, it’s snowing. Let’s go to the hill,” he said. “Tell Momma we’ll be back soon.”
“I will,” Jennifer said, patting his arm. “I’ll tell her.”
Shana taught them how to put a diaper on him so there would be less for them to clean up. Darya stopped trying to work, no longer shuffling through papers or at her computer. She put in a call to one of the law firm partners, asking for some time off.
Each day, Darya looked less and less polished and more like the little girl Jennifer remembered.
When Lev slept, it was no longer quiet. His chest crackled, protested.
Jennifer looked out the window at the people below still going to work or out for a run in the bright September sun.
#
“He has a few days left,” Shana said on September 10th. Neither Jennifer nor Darya argued with her about her assessment. Jennifer just assumed she’d been with enough dying people to know.
After Shana left, Darya washed the dishes, clattering them against the sink, scrubbing them down with fury.
“I think they’re clean now,” Jennifer said. Darya threw the sponge into the sink and turned to face Jennifer.
“You never do the dishes. Did you ever notice that?” Darya’s hands balled into fists as she moved from the kitchen into the living room towards Jennifer. “I do them every day. Did you ever think about contributing?”
Jennifer backed into the door frame to Lev’s room.
“Oh, that’s right, Jenny. Just run away anytime anyone confronts you on your bullshit.”
“This isn’t about the dishes.”
“No shit.” Darya was yelling. “Of course, it’s not about the dishes. It’s about you.” Darya’s hair was pulled back into a ponytail, her face naked of makeup, pale, scared.
“I’m sorry about Dad,” Jennifer said. “And I’m sorry I left, Darya. I’m really sorry.”
Darya dropped her fists.
“I’m here now, aren’t I?” Jennifer waited.
“And if I turn away and turn back, will you still be here?” Jennifer started to protest, then stopped, bowed her head.
“I was just a kid too,” Jennifer said, but Darya had already turned back to the kitchen. Jennifer went into Lev’s room and wiped the saliva from his mouth. His breathing was slow. She put her ear to his chest.
She heard the faintest of heartbeats, what was left of the man.
#
In the morning, Darya and Jennifer had their coffee in Lev’s room, sitting on the carpet by his bed.
Shana came in fifteen minutes later than normal. She rushed into the bedroom, her face contorted into a grimace, her hands shaking.
“The news,” Shana said. “Turn it on.”
Jennifer put her coffee on a bookshelf and turned on the television. The picture abruptly appeared, the World Trade Center, the Twin Towers, surrounded by smoke, licked by fire, seared by metal. A frantic newscaster crying, talking about airplanes and terrorists attacks. There were people streaming out of both buildings, firefighters rushing in the opposite direction.
Darya and Jennifer turned away from Lev, transfixed by the television.
On the screen, people started falling or jumping from buildings, twisting in their ties and skirts as they plummeted down. The camera caught one man on his flight downward, headfirst, white shirt billowing in the air.
Shana murmured prayers that were unfamiliar to Jennifer and crossed herself.
“Darya?” Jennifer said. “Isn’t that where Mom works?”
As Darya answered, one of the towers folded onto itself, collapsing floor-by-floor, building turned to dust.
“Yes.” Darya kept her eyes on the screen. “We should call.”
In slow movements, Darya dropped her coffee mug on the carpet and reached for her cellphone. She pressed the numbers. She cradled the phone against her ear.
“It went to voicemail,” Darya said. Jennifer reached for Lev’s hand. His eyes stayed shut.
There were no clocks in their father’s room to delineate the passage of time, just the television revealing the second tower falling.
Months later, Darya and Jennifer would wear black coats and black dresses, a wide berth between them, the ashes they scattered disappearing into a thin veil of snow on the frozen ground near the Schuylkill River. But in this moment, Shana crossed herself again, and Darya crawled on her knees towards Jennifer, Darya still holding onto the phone, Darya pressing redial, redial, redial.
THE END
Author Bio: Anna Stolley Persky, a lawyer and award-winning journalist, lives in Northern Virginia. She’s pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at George Mason University. Her fiction has been published in Mystery Tribune, The Write Launch, VOIS, and The Plentitudes Journal. Her poetry has been published in the Sad Girls Club Literary Blog, You Might Need to Hear This, Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and The Closed Eye Open. Her creative nonfiction has been published in The Washington Post.