The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight by Gina Ochsner Page B

those subtle movements her mood tipping from gorgeous wrath to toxic indignation and back to wrath.
    'What are you doing?' she demanded. Even through the flight helmet, he could hear her slow-boiling anger. She was ovulating. He could hear it in her voice. The fuel behind her wrath. How dare he fish when her window of baby-making opportunity was so slim and narrow?
    'Ice fishing.'
    Zoya tapped her watch, a cheap Raketa, but he knew she considered it extremely fashionable. 'It's Sunday,' she reminded him.
    Yuri inhaled deeply, waited for his lungs to burn. 'So, it's Sunday.'
    'You're supposed to be at work. At the museum. With me.'

    'I am working,' Yuri said. 'I'm fishing.'
    Zoya sighed. 'Are you planning to have your head up your ass all your life?'
    Yuri thought for a moment. 'No,' he said at last. 'Just through the holidays, I think.'
    Zoya threw her hands up into the air. 'You'll lose the only job you're fit for. Nobody else will hire you, you know.'
    Yuri hung his head. A muted flash of a tail fin caught his eye. When he looked towards shore a few moments later, Zoya had gone.
    Yuri threaded his bait to the hook, a flashy silver chewing-gum wrapper, and bobbed it in the hole.
    He supposed it was his good luck that there was a shortage of eligible bachelors. His luck that Zoya needed a place to live. Because, he was beginning to see, he needed a woman. And as his mother had been slow to object, Zoya simply remained, until asking her to go someplace else was almost unthinkable. He just didn't have it in him to make the big decisions by himself. For the most part, this situation, strained as it was at times, didn't seem to offend his mother's sensibilities as long as he and Zoya conducted their trysts at the museum or on the rooftop of the apartment building where his mother didn't have to see or hear them.
    And living with Zoya, though an unconventional arrangement, sure, seemed natural, logical even given his long-established habit of letting God, fate or other women decide
the course his life would take. And it seemed, always, somebody else—his teachers at school, his commanding officers, his friends and girlfriends—wanted to make these decisions for him. So let them, was his motto. Oh sure, every now and then, he'd make a token attempt, like refusing to work in favour of fishing, to suggest the illusion that he was an active participant in his own life. But the truth was he felt grateful and relieved when events or people conspired to take matters into their own hands.

    All this to say that when Zoya arrived a few months before at the museum five minutes early and descended to the hat/coat-check corridor, a suitcase in each hand, he did not protest, and was, in fact, secretly glad. But even in that small action, her carrying her suitcases, her broadcasting her intent to live with him, there was trouble. He knew that as Tanya quietly exchanged the suitcases for claim disks, Tanya did not understand what the suitcases meant. By the time they all three left work for crumbling apartment building, Yuri carrying the suitcases, he knew Tanya had figured it out: her gaze never once lifted from the tops of her shoes. As Zoya chattered about this thing and that, delighted and taking delight in even the smallest things as people do when they have found love or convinced themselves that love has found them, Tanya did not say a word. And Yuri had wanted to comfort her somehow, to explain. After all, they had always been such close friends. And Yuri would have just as happily allowed himself to wind up with a girl like Tanya, if only Tanya had made her wishes
more clearly known. He wasn't a mind-reader, for heaven's sake.

    But somehow he knew saying these things would not make Tanya feel any better. She was a sensitive soul. One look at that overstuffed notebook told him that. And he knew some things people should keep to themselves. He could never tell Zoya, for instance, that they were an item only because Zoya had