Samal

by Caroline Tracey, Sarah Sanders (Illustrator), Flyleaf Journal (Editor)

When the building started to sway, Tolkin, who sat in the cubicle next to mine, grabbed my arm and pulled me down to the floor and told me to hold her ankle as we crawled to the nearest interior wall. We were dressed alike, in shiny white blouses, tight black pencil skirts, and pantyhose—we had gone to the bazaar together—though she was more beautiful. Finally, with my kneecaps sore and cold from the tile floor and my thumb and wrist bent oddly from gripping Tolkin’s thin leg, we got to the wall. It was a flimsy thing, like everything else the building was made of, and there probably wasn’t much point in making the effort to reach it, but somewhere in our hearts we were still socialist subjects needing to follow some—any—protocol to make us feel less scared. Everyone from the whole telephone floor was now lined up against it. “In the Soviet era,” one older woman with hair dyed orange was saying, “this would never be happening.”

17 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 12, 2016