ODDITIES
monthly short fiction esoterica by Sasha Myshkina
MARCH 2025
“WATER CYCLE”
My grandma rests in the Central Park Lake.
It is getting warm again after a winter that felt like it lasted far too long, the days are getting longer, the winds are getting warmer, and soon I will start cycling again. My cycle route takes me past the lake, where I will see how beautiful she is, and smile as the scarf she gave me that I now use to tie my hair back flutters in the wind. The lake is still and calm and shines in the early spring sun. It is a beautiful day.
She became one with the lake on a cold day in January when the sky was a weak periwinkle and the sun was setting. For all the shed tears, it was a nice day. There wasn’t much wind or too many people, and I had started to feel like myself a little, but not much. She specifically asked that a piece of her was to be left in New York so that she could always be with me. My family has long since been scattered around the globe, and I was no exception. She said that she had always wanted to come visit me here, but the toll would have been far too great on her. I suppose that, in a way, she got her wish.
She had always loved lakes and parks. As a child, she would always take me on long walks in the park where I threw bread at the ducks and tried to touch the geese even though they bit me. She probably knew the parks of London like the back of her hand.
Even when she moved back home, back to Eastern Europe, she would always go on walks, but these walks were different, wilder. The forest that grew on the edge of town was thick and tall; the river running through it a glittery silt-blue. She would make campfires and roast sausages. When my sister and I were younger, we would join her in the summer, swimming in the river or in the local lakes, trying to catch minnows in butterfly nets and build sandcastles out of the river-bed sand. We never caught any minnows and the sandcastles always crumbled. The passing clouds reflected in the river water. The black ash circles from the campfires we built years ago are still there if you know where to look.
She also rests in the small fountain in Holland Park where the storks bathe, next to the tree where I would spend so many long summer days hiding from my problems, knitting with the stitches she taught me and listening to music I would tell her about. She rests in the flowerbeds among which she would always walk. The tulips in those flowerbeds are going to start blooming again. They make me sneeze, but I smell them anyway.
She rests in the blue ocean of the French Riviera where she would spend the summer, in the wild waters that lapped against the rocks of the sea-path that zig-zagged through the coastal scrub, in the still endlessness of the ocean we swam in when I was a kid. The ocean burned my skin when the salt-water touched the rashes on my legs. She would put moisturizer behind my knees that always washed off in the water. Whenever she did give in to go swimming with me, she would always take wide, graceful strokes keeping her hair dry.
How she must have also wished to rest in the sea off the endless coastline of Northern Florida. The sand-strip beach going for miles, with holiday houses belonging to retired golfers in every direction as far as the eye can see, the tide pulling the water so far out that it was like the ocean had disappeared entirely. On a clear day, it felt like the world truly was infinite, the sea and the sky becoming one, the taste of salt-water and the rush of waves. She would tell me about the interesting things she saw and found. She kept a jar a shark-teeth and a basket of dried starfish. She once told me of a giant log, a couple miles down the beach where she once walked all the way to, that had been turned into a museum of flotsam. It was decorated with smoothened sea-glass and sparkled on the horizon. She fed the crocodiles with table scraps until the park rangers asked her to stop, but we would still see their gleaming yellow eyes in the headlights of our car, shining in acknowledgement, every time we passed. She would dip her feet in the shallow pools of water formed by the receding tide, and when me or my sister brought home a large shell we had found in a tide-pool that was still inhabited, she would boil it in hot water to end the unfortunate creature’s suffering and sand the barnacles off until we had our keepsake.
I suppose I am comforted with the thought that the water on the surface of the park lake, in the fountain, in the ocean – it will evaporate and condense into the clouds, taking the minerals in her ashes with it. The clouds will circle the earth and bear rain across continents, and soon, my grandmother will be part of the entire world, of every beautiful landscape and seascape, of the sights that she used to embroider and frame, all the places she wanted to see but never got the chance.
When I was young, I never wanted to join her on her morning walks, saying I was always too tired or wanted to do something else, but what I wouldn’t do to go back, to tell her that I would walk a thousand and one miles with her down the coastline, to walk until we could sit at the horizon together and look all the way back, where she would braid my hair with the knowledges of the skies and embroider the story of the universe on a table-cloth.
In loving memory of Larisa Tsarenko
It is getting warm again after a winter that felt like it lasted far too long, the days are getting longer, the winds are getting warmer, and soon I will start cycling again. My cycle route takes me past the lake, where I will see how beautiful she is, and smile as the scarf she gave me that I now use to tie my hair back flutters in the wind. The lake is still and calm and shines in the early spring sun. It is a beautiful day.
She became one with the lake on a cold day in January when the sky was a weak periwinkle and the sun was setting. For all the shed tears, it was a nice day. There wasn’t much wind or too many people, and I had started to feel like myself a little, but not much. She specifically asked that a piece of her was to be left in New York so that she could always be with me. My family has long since been scattered around the globe, and I was no exception. She said that she had always wanted to come visit me here, but the toll would have been far too great on her. I suppose that, in a way, she got her wish.
She had always loved lakes and parks. As a child, she would always take me on long walks in the park where I threw bread at the ducks and tried to touch the geese even though they bit me. She probably knew the parks of London like the back of her hand.
Even when she moved back home, back to Eastern Europe, she would always go on walks, but these walks were different, wilder. The forest that grew on the edge of town was thick and tall; the river running through it a glittery silt-blue. She would make campfires and roast sausages. When my sister and I were younger, we would join her in the summer, swimming in the river or in the local lakes, trying to catch minnows in butterfly nets and build sandcastles out of the river-bed sand. We never caught any minnows and the sandcastles always crumbled. The passing clouds reflected in the river water. The black ash circles from the campfires we built years ago are still there if you know where to look.
She also rests in the small fountain in Holland Park where the storks bathe, next to the tree where I would spend so many long summer days hiding from my problems, knitting with the stitches she taught me and listening to music I would tell her about. She rests in the flowerbeds among which she would always walk. The tulips in those flowerbeds are going to start blooming again. They make me sneeze, but I smell them anyway.
She rests in the blue ocean of the French Riviera where she would spend the summer, in the wild waters that lapped against the rocks of the sea-path that zig-zagged through the coastal scrub, in the still endlessness of the ocean we swam in when I was a kid. The ocean burned my skin when the salt-water touched the rashes on my legs. She would put moisturizer behind my knees that always washed off in the water. Whenever she did give in to go swimming with me, she would always take wide, graceful strokes keeping her hair dry.
How she must have also wished to rest in the sea off the endless coastline of Northern Florida. The sand-strip beach going for miles, with holiday houses belonging to retired golfers in every direction as far as the eye can see, the tide pulling the water so far out that it was like the ocean had disappeared entirely. On a clear day, it felt like the world truly was infinite, the sea and the sky becoming one, the taste of salt-water and the rush of waves. She would tell me about the interesting things she saw and found. She kept a jar a shark-teeth and a basket of dried starfish. She once told me of a giant log, a couple miles down the beach where she once walked all the way to, that had been turned into a museum of flotsam. It was decorated with smoothened sea-glass and sparkled on the horizon. She fed the crocodiles with table scraps until the park rangers asked her to stop, but we would still see their gleaming yellow eyes in the headlights of our car, shining in acknowledgement, every time we passed. She would dip her feet in the shallow pools of water formed by the receding tide, and when me or my sister brought home a large shell we had found in a tide-pool that was still inhabited, she would boil it in hot water to end the unfortunate creature’s suffering and sand the barnacles off until we had our keepsake.
I suppose I am comforted with the thought that the water on the surface of the park lake, in the fountain, in the ocean – it will evaporate and condense into the clouds, taking the minerals in her ashes with it. The clouds will circle the earth and bear rain across continents, and soon, my grandmother will be part of the entire world, of every beautiful landscape and seascape, of the sights that she used to embroider and frame, all the places she wanted to see but never got the chance.
When I was young, I never wanted to join her on her morning walks, saying I was always too tired or wanted to do something else, but what I wouldn’t do to go back, to tell her that I would walk a thousand and one miles with her down the coastline, to walk until we could sit at the horizon together and look all the way back, where she would braid my hair with the knowledges of the skies and embroider the story of the universe on a table-cloth.
In loving memory of Larisa Tsarenko