“Alinka, enough already with stuffing yourself with pastries, or soon you won’t fit through the doorway!”
Stas’s voice—loud and self-satisfied—was still ringing in her ears. It had boomed out last night, cutting through the cheerful buzz of a friendly get-together. And right after it—an explosion of laughter. Not malicious, no. Just simple, stupid, male guffawing that only egged him on. He leaned back in his chair, pleased with the effect, and swept his friends with a triumphant look—the look of a man who’d just delivered a first-rate joke. Alina hadn’t said a word. She simply picked up her cup of tea and, very slowly, took a sip, feeling the hot liquid burn her throat. Looking at him over the rim, she didn’t see her beloved husband but a stranger, an unpleasant man propping himself up at her expense.
Now, the next day, in the empty apartment, that laughter still hung in the air like stale cigarette smoke. Alina stood in the middle of the kitchen. Sunlight poured through the window, flooding everything with warm light, but inside her there was arctic cold. Not a single tear. Not a single sob. The rage that should have exploded last night had crystallized overnight, turning into a hard, sharp, absolutely transparent object inside her.
She walked to the fridge and flung the door open. Out wafted the smell of Stas’s smug, well-fed life. On the top shelf lay a half-eaten stick of his favorite dry-cured sausage. Next to it—a pack of hot dogs. In the door—an arsenal of sauces: mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, cheese dip for chips. In the back, in the freezer, lurked two bags of dumplings—his strategic reserve for when she got stuck late at work. And on the bottom, on the coldest shelf, stood six sweating cans of beer. His evening reward for a hard day.
Silently, Alina took the biggest, sturdiest trash bag out of the cupboard—black as anthracite. She opened it and set it on the floor. Her movements weren’t rushed; they were measured and precise, like a surgeon preparing for an operation. First into the black maw went the sausage. She didn’t bother to wrap it—just threw it in, and the stick thudded dully against the bottom. Then the hot dogs. After them—every sauce, one after another. She didn’t squeeze them out, didn’t try to ruin them—she was simply getting rid of them like evidence.
She opened the freezer. The two rock-hard bags of dumplings dropped into the bag with a heavy thump. Then she took out the beer. Each can landed on the pile with a cold metallic clack. She checked the breadbox—yesterday’s baguette lay inside. Into the bag. The leftover cake in its plastic container followed. She wasn’t smashing or wrecking anything. She was carrying out a total cleanse.
When the food was dealt with, she grabbed a sponge and dish soap and methodically began scrubbing the refrigerator shelves. She rubbed the white plastic till it squeaked—until it was perfectly, sterilely clean. Then she scrubbed the door and the freezer the same way. The whole process took about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of absolute, concentrated, silent work.
At last she surveyed the results. The fridge gleamed with the pristine whiteness of empty shelves. She opened the vegetable drawer. She took out a bunch of celery, two cucumbers, three carrots, and a couple of bell peppers. She arranged them on the middle shelf, creating a strict, ascetic still life. On the door she placed a single one-liter carton of kefir. That was all.
Tying the heavy bag in a tight knot, she carried it out to the chute in the stairwell. It crashed down into the shaft’s dark belly. The sound was definitive. Back in the apartment, she sat at the kitchen table and poured herself a glass of water. Now all that was left was to wait. She wasn’t nervous. She was perfectly calm. She had prepared the battlefield. And she knew the fight would be short.
The sound of a key turning in the lock was the only intruder on the silence of the last few hours. Alina didn’t move, still seated at the kitchen table. She heard Stas step into the hallway, the dull clatter of keys landing on the shelf, the sigh as he tugged off his shoes. Ordinary sounds she heard every evening. But today they sounded different—like a prelude to something inevitable.
“I’m home!” his voice called from the hall. “Is there a smell… or am I imagining things?”
He walked into the kitchen, undoing the top button of his shirt as he went. His gaze slid over Alina, sitting at the empty table, then shot to the stove. Empty. His brows drew together slightly.
“So, no dinner today?”
Without waiting for an answer, he did what he always did after work—headed for the fridge. For a cold can of beer and something to chew on right away, without waiting for food. With the usual motion he yanked the handle. The door swung open. And he froze.
For a second he just stared. Stared at the virginally clean shelves, gleaming white. At the lonely bunch of celery and the two cucumbers lying where the sausage had been that morning. At the forlorn carton of kefir in the door. His brain refused to process the scene. He even opened the freezer, expecting to find a frozen apocalypse, but there too was only ringing emptiness.
“What is this?” he asked, stunned, turning to his wife. His voice mixed bafflement with the first stirrings of irritation. “Were we robbed? And they took only the food?”
“It’s a diet,” Alina answered calmly, not changing her pose. She looked straight at him, without a hint of a smile. “Our new joint diet.”
Stas snorted nervously, trying to turn it into a joke. He still didn’t believe it. “Ha-ha, very funny. Now seriously, where’s the real food? I just got off work, I’m starving.”
And then she said it. Slowly, clearly, hammering each word like a nail.
“According to you, I need to lose weight—I’m too fat for you, that’s what you told your friends, right? So now you can chew on greens with me, because there won’t be any junk food in this house anymore.”
It sank in. This wasn’t a prank. It was payback. Color began to rise slowly in Stas’s face. He slammed the fridge door so hard the body shuddered.
“Have you lost your mind? It was just a joke! Everybody laughed and moved on! You threw out all the food because of that?”
“I didn’t move on. And I didn’t find it funny,” she said, her voice even and cold as steel. “So now we’re losing weight. Together. As partners. I sliced some celery for you. You can dip it in kefir. Very healthy.”
The word “partners” hit him like a slap. His whole image of the witty, fun guy crumbled to dust before this cold, alien woman. He didn’t try to joke anymore.
“I’m not eating your weeds! I’m a man, I work, I need real meat, not this rabbit food! Do you understand what you’ve done?”
“I understand. I rid our home of everything harmful,” she said, standing, walking to the counter, and picking up the kefir. “If you don’t like it, the door’s right there. You can go to your friends. I’m sure they’ve got beer and chips. You can sit with them and discuss how fat I am. You’ll be more comfortable there.”
It was an ultimatum. Clear and irrevocable. He looked at her calm face and knew arguing was useless. She wasn’t shouting, she wasn’t crying, and that infuriated him most of all. He was humiliated. Here, in his own kitchen, in front of his empty fridge.
“Screw you!” he barked, yanking his jacket from the hook. “I’m going to my mother’s! At least there they’ll feed me like a normal person, not like a rabbit!”
He jerked open the front door and stormed into the stairwell. Alina remained standing in the kitchen. She calmly unscrewed the cap on the kefir, poured herself a full glass, and took a big swallow. The taste was sour and bland. The taste of freedom.
Stas drove through the evening city, angry and hungry. Resentment on behalf of his own stomach mixed with righteous fury. A joke! It was just a stupid joke! Do normal people react like that? Throw away food, declare war… He drummed his fingers on the wheel to the music, which didn’t soothe him—only irritated him more. In his head replayed the image of the empty fridge—white, sterile, insulting space. He was going where he would be understood. Where the fridge was always full and his right to a cutlet with fried potatoes was never questioned. To his mother.
The door opened almost instantly. His mother, a short, plump woman in a housecoat, looked him over, worried.
“Stasik? What happened? Why are you…”
“Mom, got anything to eat? I’m gonna die,” he tossed out, striding into the kitchen and flinging his jacket onto a chair.
No more questions were needed. A minute later oil was already sizzling in the pan, and the fridge yielded its strategic reserves: a pot of rich borscht, a container of cutlets. The smell of frying onion and garlic filled the little kitchen. It was the smell of home, the smell of unconditional acceptance.
“Her again?” his mother asked carefully, setting a steaming bowl of borscht in front of him and ladling in a heavy dollop of sour cream.
“Don’t even start,” Stas grumbled, attacking the food. “I cracked a joke at the party yesterday that she should lose weight. Just for laughs! So today she threw out all the food in the house! All of it, can you believe it? Left kefir and some kind of greens. Says we’re going on a diet together. She’s totally lost it.”
His mother pursed her lips, slicing thick slabs of bread. She didn’t say that she’d always thought Alina was odd. She simply set a skillet of golden, crispy potatoes on the table and put three huge cutlets on his plate. Her actions spoke louder than any words. While her son ate, she watched him in silence with that special maternal pity that turns a thirty-year-old man back into a small, wronged boy. Stas ate everything. The borscht, the second course, washed down with sweet tea. Satiety brought calm and confidence. The anger ebbed, replaced by indulgent annoyance. Well, she overdid it—happens. No matter; he’d go back and she’d have cooled off by now. Where else was she going to go?
At that very moment, in their now-emptied apartment, the phone rang. Alina spoke calmly and businesslike, as if ordering pizza.
“Hello, I need to urgently change the locks on the front door. Yes, both. As soon as possible.”
Forty minutes later the doorbell rang. A short man in work overalls with a big toolbox stood there. He didn’t ask unnecessary questions. Work is work. Alina silently let him into the hallway.
She didn’t hover over him. She went to the room and sat in an armchair, listening to the sounds. The high whine of the drill gnawing out the old housing. The metallic scrape as they pulled the core of the old lock—the very one whose key was in Stas’s pocket. Then quiet, some shuffling, clicks, and finally the dull, confident clack of a new, foreign mechanism. The same again for the second lock.
“All set,” the locksmith said, handing her a small sealed packet with five new keys.
She paid him, and he left. Alina stood in the hallway. She opened the packet, took one key, and slipped it onto her keyring. The other four she put in the dresser drawer. Then she stepped to the shelf where Stas had tossed his old apartment keys when he came home that afternoon. She picked them up. They were still warm from his hands. For a few seconds she looked at the now-useless piece of metal. Then, without hesitation, she walked to the kitchen and dropped the keys into the trash can. They clattered onto the bottom, where earlier that morning the remnants of his well-fed, carefree life had lain. The air in the apartment changed. It became hers. Completely and indivisibly.
Stas came home closer to eleven. Full, coddled by maternal care, and utterly convinced he was right. He decided he’d given Alina enough time to “cool off” and realize the stupidity of what she’d done. Now he’d walk in, say something like: “Well, rebel, fought your little war? Let’s go get dumplings,” and everything would go back to normal. He could even picture her guilty face. He was ready to be magnanimous and forgive her.
He climbed to his floor, whistling some tune. He slid the key into the lock. Turned it. Nothing. The key hit something inside and wouldn’t budge a millimeter. Stas scowled. Tried again, harder. Same result. He pulled the key out, examined it as if it could have gone bad in a couple of hours, and tried again. No luck. Then he tried the second lock. Same story.
Bafflement turned to irritation. What the hell? He pressed the doorbell. Short, demanding. Silence. He pressed again, longer, holding his finger down until the chime made his ears ring. From behind the door came no sound.
“Alin, open up!” he shouted, no longer holding back his anger. “What’s with the tricks? My key doesn’t fit!”
Silence. He started pounding on the door with his fist. The blows boomed through the stairwell.
“Alina! I know you’re in there! Open up this minute! This isn’t funny!”
Finally her voice came from behind the door. Calm, even, without a single note of hysteria.
“What do you want, Stas?”
He was thrown for a second by that tone.
“What do you mean, ‘what do I want’? I can’t get into my home! Did you change the locks? Are you out of your mind?”
“Perfectly,” her voice replied. “For the first time in a long while.”
“Open the door! This is my home too!” He hit the door again, hard enough now that his knuckles ached.
“Not anymore. It’s my home. You yourself said you were going to your mother’s because there they feed you like a normal person. So stay there.”
His blood ran cold. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. This wasn’t a fight. It was something else. Something final.
“What are you talking about? I ate there and came back home! To my home! Open up, I said!”
“No.”
A short, chopped “no,” without explanations or excuses. It sounded like a sentence. He rested his forehead against the door’s cold metal, trying to grasp what was happening. His world—so familiar and comprehensible—was collapsing right now, on the other side of that oak barrier.
“Alina…” He tried a different tactic; his voice softened a little. “Come on, stop sulking. I said it was a joke. A stupid one, I admit. I got carried away. Let’s have you open the door and we’ll talk.”
And then he heard her final answer. The voice was just as calm, but now it carried a new, annihilating note of icy contempt.
“You know, Stas, I’ve been thinking. You really are better off at your mother’s. Let her keep fattening you up with borscht and cutlets. You love that so much. No need to think about anything—someone will always feed you, pity you. Ideal conditions. Let her listen to your witty jokes now. I’m tired of it. Go make your clever cracks to your friends about how cool it is, at thirty, to live with Mommy again while she fattens you up like a pig for slaughter.”
Each word landed more precisely than any punch. “Pig for slaughter.” The phrase hung in the echoing stairwell air. He recoiled from the door as if struck. Inside, behind the door, silence settled again. But now it wasn’t just silence. It was the silence of emptiness. The silence of a place he no longer had access to.
He stood alone in the dimly lit stairwell. The keys in his hand felt like useless trash. He stared at the door of his former apartment, at the new, shiny keyhole that stared back at him mockingly like a small, pitiless eye. His “just a joke” had taken on a very real, material form—the form of a locked door. And he understood clearly that this door would never open for him again.