I once lived in that house. A small, unremarkable thing, slouched at the edge of the street like a beggar too proud to ask for alms, yet too weary to move along. The roof groaned when the wind pressed its weight against it, the walls wore the stains of old winters, and the floors complained at every step. But it was a house. Our house. Inside it, my family moved about like shadows keeping to their corners. My elder brother, Fyodor, lived mostly behind a closed door. When he did emerge, it was never for long, and his eyes seemed to be listening to a voice that none of us could hear. My sisters, Irene and Sasha, were different; they had friends, or at least the suggestion of them, and their laughter—rare as it was—belonged to those distant companions, not to me. They carried their secrets lightly, like ribbons slipping from their hair. My mother remained. She was always there. She filled the kitchen with the sound of knives and the smell of broth, with the patient rhythm of someone who accepts her own life as one accepts the weather.
My father was not there. He existed only in questions. If I asked where he had gone, my mother gave me an answer. Then the next time, another answer. Stories that contradicted, weakened, frayed. I never pressed her too hard. Eventually, the silence itself became an answer. It was easier to imagine him nowhere at all.
Fyodor spent his hours bent over his desk, writing quickly, as if chased by something. He never explained, and I never asked. My sisters drifted further into the outside world. And so, most of what I knew of family was my mother, and the lamplight, and the Bible in her hands. She read each night in a voice so even it could have been mistaken for sleep. It was expected of me, too. One hour each day, my small eyes straining over the lines. It was not difficult. It was not enjoyable. It was simply the way things were, as ordinary as the sound of rain.
Then there was a day. It is strange how such days arrive without warning, without even the courtesy of a storm on the horizon. I was five. Fyodor was gone. His door was left unlocked. That was all it took.
The air in his room felt different. Heavy, still, as though the walls themselves were waiting. Papers lay scattered, some old enough to curl at the edges, all covered in markings I could not read. But it was the drawings that held me still. Shapes of creatures—half-familiar, half-strange—sprawled across the pages. There were too many of them, as if he had been sketching without sleep for years. They told stories without words: the slow stirring of seas, the crawling of bodies onto land, the tentative straightening of spines. The world unfolding not in thunderclaps or divine commands, but in patient, endless motions. It was not the Bible. It was something else.
I thought I had found something precious. A truth, perhaps. I carried it in my arms like a secret treasure, running to the kitchen where the lamplight fell across my mother's face.
"Mama, look."
For a moment—brief, sharp—her eyes seemed to recoil. She seized the papers with a swiftness that startled me.
"Where did you get this?"
"From Fyodor's room."
"You know you are forbidden to go in there."
I stammered apologies, though even as I did so I felt the stubborn certainty rising in my chest. "But Mama—this makes more sense. How could God make everything in seven days? That's too much, even for Him. And the monkeys—they look like us, don't they? Maybe we—"
Her hand struck me before her words did. A sound, then a sting across my cheek.
"Silence. Blasphemy. God is real."
I pressed my palm to the heat of my face. My eyes widened, but the tears held themselves back. I could not let them fall. My voice, when it came, was small and strangely calm.
"But Mama… this makes more sense. The Bible lies. It lies to you. It lies to all of us."
That was the end of it. Or perhaps the beginning. I cannot say.
After that moment, the house changed, though no one spoke of it. My mother avoided my eyes as though something dangerous had taken root behind them. Fyodor's door remained locked more carefully than before. My sisters grew quieter, their laughter carrying itself even farther away, out of reach, until I no longer waited to hear it. The house itself seemed to sag under the weight of my words, as though it, too, had heard what I said and did not know how to go on.
I do not remember how many days passed. They all seemed the same—gray, brittle things, breaking in my hands as soon as I tried to hold them. My mother still placed food before me, still opened her Bible each night, still whispered prayers into the air as if they might shield her from something she could not name. But the warmth was gone. Even her voice, which had once flowed like water over stone, now caught on the edges of her throat, dry and faltering.
I tried, once, to explain again. I thought perhaps if I used gentler words, she might listen. But she turned away before I could finish, her face tightening into that same unmovable mask. It was like speaking to a wall that had already decided what to believe. After that, I stopped speaking at all.
What happened next did not feel like an event. It was more like the slow shifting of the ground beneath one's feet, unnoticed until the earth finally gives way. One morning I woke in my own bed, and by nightfall I was no longer there. The rooms of our house, the low hum of the lamp, my mother's shadow moving in the kitchen—all of it slipped quietly behind me, as though it had been rehearsed long before I was born.
When I opened my eyes again, it was to a different ceiling, a ceiling that did not belong to any home I knew.