"Distribution of Supplies"

Short story by Vladimir Bolotov (2024). Based on historical events.

On its very crest, as if stuck in time, hung the dreadful year of 1891 since the birth of Christ. A year of cholera, a year of famine, a dreadful year. A year when the chill of pestilential Capital carried the stench of the hog-tyrant enthroned, ruling solely because his dear brother had perished at the most unpredictable moment. And before that, God, angered at the land and its people, seemed to have cast upon it all at once an irreparable fiery, raging deluge.

And there she was, having not yet lived her life, thin as a reed, Nastya sat somewhere amidst the stench of the scorching sun burning the land of Feodosia, hiding near a wagon in the scant shade cast by the hay above her head. She dozed off, and as she drifted into the azure haze of darkness, she heard a whisper, so familiar it tickled her to shivers.

“Nastenka, Nastusha... open for us, open, Nastenka...” The voice at first seemed familiar, like her mother’s or her aunt’s, but then it began to resemble her father’s, or even that of someone entirely unknown to her. Then she began to notice that the voice, which had come more and more often in recent, especially hungry nights, was not just one voice but several. And now it was her father and mother and grandmother, and her deceased elder sister and her departed brother, and her two little living brothers whispering to her in a ringing unison. “Nastya! Open for us!” And evern more insistently, they pressed, “Nastya! Nastya! Open, it’s stifling! Open, Nastya!” They screamed and screamed frantically, hammering on wood and iron, as though not with hands but with metal rods or oak branches, loudly, sharply, drawn out. And they kept whining and whining, louder and louder, until even in her sleep an unbearable ringing filled her ears. “Nastya!!! Nastya, open!!! Nastya, help us! Nastya, where are you? Nastya, everything’s red, Nastya!! There’s no air, none at all!!!” They screamed and banged on some door, eerily familiar to her, hanging right before her blurred gaze.

And then the door and the pounding drifted away from her, and she found herself plunging into oblivion before their old, spacious barn, where once their cow and horse had grazed, long since eaten. She fell to the ground before this barn. Its tall wooden doors creaked with a rotting groan, riddled with decay, and swung open in an instant. Slowly, she entered the barn. No, not entered—she seemed to be carried inside. In her hands were tools she had never seen before, or perhaps had only glimpsed once in her father’s hands. And here she was, carried by some unseen force. But what was this in her hands? What glimmered silver there? Ahead of her burned thousands of yellow candles, and under a lampshade—one that could never have existed in this barn—swayed a rusted-golden chandelier glowing with all shades of yellow and red. Beneath it, a black abyss—not a door, not a chasm—of incomprehensible size, so vast Nastya could not encompass it with her eyes. But she rushed toward this abyss. Sealed... No! Sealed! Sealed with wooden beams, stuffed with hay and straw, locked with hundreds or thousands of rusted iron locks. And Nastya soared above this sealed abyss.

“Nastya!!! Open for us!! Nastya! Release us!!! There’s no air!!! We’re suffocating!!!” The voices grew so loud that she clutched her ears, scratching her cheeks with the tools, but the voices only grew more intense and resonant. She glanced at her hands, glowing red with the light of the swaying, creaking chandelier-pendulum above the ceiling, and a thought struck her like a fiery flash—a reverberation of memory. “A tinderbox... it’s a... a tinderbox!” she shouted, and the voices howled in affirmation once more. She collapsed onto the wooden beams and straw, onto this seal, this gate barring the abyss beneath her, which throbbed with vibrating force and crashing impacts.

The voices surged from below with increasing strength, a thousandfold stronger now, and she could hear not only her family but, in this unison, the voices of the entire village and all of seemingly boundless Feodosia, the voices of those she knew and didn’t know, with whom she had befriended or quarreled in her twelve years of life: angry voices and kind ones, mocking and sincere, booming and faint. Yet all of them begged her for one thing. “Nastya!!! Open for us!!! Let us out!!! Nastya, we are suffocating!!! Let us out, open up!!!”

And Nastya struck the tinderbox forcefully, and flames flared up beneath her, blazing instantly with unimaginable force, igniting the hay, the beams, the barn walls, and those nailed-shut gates. Everything caught fire at once, brighter than the sun on the most oppressive, sweltering day of the dreadful year of 1891 since the birth of Christ—beneath her knees, under her feet, above her disheveled head, between her hands scarred from hard labor. But she did not burn; she no longer felt pain. She rose again above the seal and soared upward through the charred roof of the barn into the black night sky, watching as from the gates she had opened emerged enormous black hands and thousands of smaller, translucent hands covered in ashes. Thousands upon thousands of entities poured out, the likes of which she could never have imagined.

And they scattered—running, flying, crawling, blazing, spreading far and wide. She flew away higher and higher. The fire consumed everything: the village houses, the fields, the forests, and the entire village. One translucent creature, seemingly covered in soot, had a shiny, rusted bucket where its head should have been. Others dashed about with wooden, flaming yokes. With enormous teeth, they gnawed at the beams of the collapsing barn, devoured people fleeing in all directions, and tore apart their friends and neighbors. The monsters even attacked each other. Like flayed animals, with flesh burned to the bone and strips of meat hanging from their bodies, they soared above the houses and leaped across the skies over the village, stamping out grotesque dances with their hooves. Then they plummeted downward with immense force, crushing those fleeing beneath them, tearing spines, gnawing bones, and devouring entrails. A horned entity, with a mutilated, blood-soaked mess in place of its face, soared into the air and, with terrifying force, crashed onto the roof of an old, forgotten church. The crooked cross trembled as the rotting roof gave way under its weight, and the creature plunged inside, swallowed by the darkness of centuries-long abandonment. But Nastya, fortunately, saw none of this. She was already far above, enveloped in warm, pale clouds. The voices in her temples had fallen silent. She experienced a peace long forgotten in her short, burdened life—a truly childlike, serene calm.

But then Nastya awoke. The scorching heat had dried her lips, and her face, blackened with soot and grime, stared ahead. The same village, the same fields, houses, that same tarnished, decayed cross, tilted to one side like an old man weary of time, crowns the roof of the abandoned little churchthe same famine and hunger, the same cholera.

She tried to stand but lacked the strength, and suddenly she felt as if she were lifting off the ground.

Turning around in fright and bewilderment, she saw the village blacksmith—who, though reduced to skin and bone, still towered above any other inhabitant of their village.

He helped her to her feet, patted her lightly on the head, and with a warm smile through his thick beard, asked her to pass his regards to her parents, with whom he had once been friends.

Then, without lingering, he walked away toward two of his comrades who were heading off to gather firewood for the stoves.

She left the wagon and trudged toward home. Something seemed to click in her mind as she turned to glance back. The wagon where she had collapsed, fainting from the heat, was filled with corpses among the old hay. "Cholera took them—don’t look, Nastenka..." her mother’s voice echoed faintly. Nastya barely turned her head back when she felt her mother’s thin hand leading her away.

“Nastya, don’t be strayin’ like that no more… Where’ve ye been?” her mother whispered, her voice dry and worn, as she caught the girl by the wrist and pulled her close.

“Mamen’ka… the blacksmith sent his greetin’s. Said… he misses you,” Nastya breathed, her voice unsteady.

Her mother stilled, her hand tightening ever so slightly. For a long, silent moment she stared past the girl, into the gray mist curling low over the withered fields and hollowed-out houses.

Then she spoke, barely moving her lips:

“No blacksmith here now, child… None left.”

She bent lower, gathering Nastya tighter against her, and without another word hurried her back toward the house, where a lone, flickering light trembled in the gloom.

The heat seemed to seep into her very bones, but she pressed on. Half an hour passed, her feet bloodied, before they reached the small house. At the gate, Nastya stopped her mother.

“Mama, what’s in our barn?”

“Nothin’s there now, not since the cow passed. It’s been left abandoned. Why’re ye askin’? Come along inside, I’ve gathered some sorrel. I’ll cook us some soup.”

“Mama, I left somethin’ under the wagon. I’ll run back and fetch it.”

“Nastya! Ye must save your strength; ye’re nothin’ but skin an’ bone now… an’ I still need your help with the soup.”

But Nastya broke free and ran off. Her mother, too tired to shout, shuffled back toward the house, one foot dragging after the other. Not long ago, this young woman had been full of fiery blood, strength, and energy. Now, it was all just a memory—a dream, a faint reflection of a life before cholera and hunger.

On her path leading to nowhere known, Nastya passed by a half-empty tavern and caught snippets of a conversation between two well-to-do peasants.

“Soon the Americans, they say, will come with bread. So she said to me, that woman… well, that… distribution of supplies she said, the food,”
“You’re lyin’! What Americans, by the devil? Why would they help us?”
“By the cross, I’m tellin’ the truth! Why would I lie to ya? My aunt from Gorlyanka said distribution came to them last week, and there were Americans there, speakin’ in language not like our’s,”
“Your aunt’s lyin’. We’re dyin’ of hunger here, barely hangin’ on… likely we won’t survive. My brother—cholera got him.”
“Well, let’s drink to him then. Maybe it’ll ward off this cursed cholera… But the Americans, brother, they will come. I ain’t seen ‘em, don’t know who they are, but one thing I believe, one thing I know—they will come. And they’ll bring bread. And we’ll live, all who’s left of us.”

Nastya ran past the tavern, stumbling as she went, past carts filled with corpses. On either side of her, she saw hollow-eyed, abandoned houses, leaning fences, plots overgrown with weeds, burned-out huts, and empty barns. Nastya tripped over a boulder lying in the middle of the road and, collapsing in exhaustion and pain by a dry stump, she sat down for a moment to think. She listened to the voices, and with great effort, rose and trudged back toward her home, this time from another direction.

She stumbled and fell to the ground near the overgrown gates, tripping over a moss-covered brick that had broken loose from them. Her toes throbbed with piercing pain, and blood from her scraped skin mixed with the scorching sand. She wanted to cry, but she had no strength left. Turning her head to the right, she froze in shock. Before her loomed an abandoned little church, its rusted cross leaning above it as though casting a reproachful gaze. A forsaken place, forgotten. She struggled to her feet, swaying from the pain, and stepped through the gate, where a broken lock hung loosely.

Once inside, walking through the weeds and tall grass, she thought she heard faint whispers to the left of the gate. But she paid no mind, making her way toward the church doors, climbing over the crumbling steps. A massive beam blocked the entrance, sealing it shut. Through the cracks in the doors, she could see that everything inside had collapsed, the ruin rendering the church permanently inaccessible. Yet the whispering didn’t cease—it grew into voices.

She cautiously peered around the side of the church, hearing a faint scraping sound, like shovels grinding against stone. Climbing over the rails, she waded through the grass into the small courtyard behind the church. She crept closer to a crumbling stone partition and looked over it into the yard. There, two men crouched by the church wall, busy with something she couldn’t quite make out. But now she could hear them talking.

“...Efim, reckon we wait fer bread? Mebbe leave it be, to the devil wit’ it?”
“Don’t be frettin’, cut, I tell ye!”
“But it ain’t Christian-like… they’re sayin’ them Americans be comin’ soon, bringin’ bread…”
“Ye believe that foolishness, do ye? Yer head’s full o’ sheep’s wool! Ain’t no Americans comin’, no one’s comin’ no more! Look ‘round, even God’s turned His back on us!”
“I can’t… I knew him since we was lads…”
“Cut, I said, or ye’ll be lyin’ there yerself, ye hear?!”

I have to take a look…

Moving a bit farther to the side, she crept forward, keeping her breaths shallow. When she finally found a clear vantage point, she stifled a scream, clamping her hands over her mouth. A single tear rolled down her cheek as her knees trembled. What she saw was worse than any calamity that had befallen her short life, more horrifying than all the cholera combined. The two men, with rusty knives in hand, were carving apart the body of a man lying at their feet. She couldn’t see his face, but the apron tossed aside nearby told her who it was—the miller’s son, a plump, tall fellow who’d never harmed a fly in his life. And these two creatures, their skeletal frames cloaked in the shadow of the church wall, were hacking at his body. They stripped chunks of flesh and stuffed them into their satchels. Their faces were so gaunt, so ravaged by hunger, that she couldn’t even call them human. Suddenly, her wounded foot accidentally nudged the shaky stone barrier. The entire structure collapsed with a deafening crash. The creatures whipped their heads around, their hollow, ravenous eyes darting frantically. In a flash, they spotted her. With knives in hand, they lunged forward like beasts, their movements swift and unnatural. Nastya, not feeling the pain, leapt to her feet and tore through the weeds, running toward the gate as fast as she could. Behind her came not shouts, but guttural growls, the sounds of beasts. It seemed as if she could hear hoofbeats chasing her, but when she burst through the gate and into the open, no one followed. Still, she ran and ran, terror fueling her flight, convinced that at any moment the cannibals would catch her, and she would end up in their bloodied satchels, piece by piece.

She couldn’t even embrace—how could she run so fast without looking back? Suffocating from exhaustion, she reached their land within minutes, emerging from the side of the abandoned barn, drowned in tall faded grass and crumbling skeletons of trees. There it stood—old, nearly collapsed, barely holding together, much like her mother and father, as though it, too, had lost all human strength. Evening was falling, and the red sunset was creeping across the blackened sky, dimming the blistering sun. Nastya approached the barn. To her surprise, a massive, rusted lock hung on its door. How can I break it?.. She crouched and crawled toward the house, making sure her mother wouldn’t see her through the ox-bladder-covered window. Peeking through the blurry surface, she saw her thin, small brothers, her father coughing on the bed near the cold stove, and her mother standing over a pot of watery sorrel soup. Nastya shut her eyes tightly, barely holding back tears. But there was nothing left to cry with. All the water inside her had dried up, and her thirst was unbearable. She spotted a small hatchet hanging on a nail by the wooden wall. Nastya paused by the house and peeked into the window again. Her mother was no longer there; her brothers were eating soup with large wooden spoons from a single bowl.

A tinderbox—I need the tinderbox!… Papa had it.

Suddenly, someone grabbed her by the ear from behind. Turning, she saw her furious mother. In her fright, Nastya dropped the hatchet into the grass.

“Where d’ye think yer runnin’ off to, foolish girl? Didn’t I say I need yer help? Come inside an’ eat yer soup,” her mother said, coughing violently. She doubled over, retching. She collapsed to her knees.

“Mama!” Nastya rushed to help her mother up and supported her as they made their way inside sitting by the table.

“Mama, I know how to save us all… Mama? Can ye hear me?”

Her mother’s face was ashen, devoid of life.

“I dreamt how to save everyone!”

“Be quiet… Sit an’ eat.”

Her father lay curled up on the wooden bed, or rather, a bench, covered with a thin sheet. He groaned in pain, muttering faintly to himself.

“The hog… cursed hog… damn him… no food… the storages are full, the storages are full, the bastards… all for them, none for us...”

“I need the tinderbox, Mama… And I’ll save us all.”

“I told you to be quiet! Soon enough, the whole family’ll rest on yer shoulders, and ye’re still like a wee child!”

“Mamen’ka… I beg ye”

“Don’t ‘Mamen’ka’ me. Eat now, gain yer strength!”

Nastya began to eat quietly. The water with sorrel, as hot as tea, flowed into her empty stomach. A single drop trickled down her thin chin, mingling with something salty. A tear escaped her eyes—just one, a greedy one, all her drained body could muster. Nastya looked at her mother, who was holding her face, and it seemed she too was crying, silently, with a kind of hopeless finality. The girl glanced at the stove, and there, in the dimness of their poor little house, she saw a familiar black tool.

A tinderbox…

Nastya looked back at her mother. She seemed to have fallen asleep. Her little brothers sat still, conserving their strength, their small, dry eyes shut. The younger one, Vitya, with his childish face, resembled one of the corpses in the cart—pale, his body bitten by fleas and mosquitoes that had nothing left to drain from him, so bloodless he had become. The elder, Vanya, had laid his forehead on the splintered wooden table, appearing to sleep the peaceful sleep of a child.

Darkness had already fallen outside. The night, as if in spite, was bitterly cold in these parts, as if to balance the scorching days. It was so cold that at times frost formed on the windows, but tonight no one had the strength to stoke the stove. Her father seemed to have fallen asleep too, muttering in his sleep: “Bastards… starving us to death, damned hog…” Her mother now lay silently, her head resting on the table, not even tucking in the little brothers.

Nastya rose from her place. Tiptoeing, she took the tinderbox from the stove. Carefully, she opened the creaky door and slipped outside, moving toward the barn like a thief in the night. In the darkness, she could barely feel for the hatchet she had dropped earlier. Finding it in the grass by touch, she crawled toward the barn and, with what little strength she had left, brought it down on the lock. The blow did nothing—the lock didn’t even rattle, so old and deaf it was. She raised the hatchet again, but her strength gave out, and she collapsed near the barn’s gate, breathing feverishly, tears threatening to spill once more.

She hadn’t slept properly in so long, hadn’t felt truly alive in so long, that she had forgotten what it meant to feel whole. Her forehead suddenly burned with heat in the cold night air, and sweat beaded on her brow. Her dry throat and stomach, not fulfilled enough with a sorrel soup ached and stung. Something churned violently in her stomach, and a sharp, outrageously burning pain stabbed through her. With rough fingers, she wiped the sweat from her forehead, and almost immediately she vomited painfully onto the grass beside her desperately moaning from the last shreds of strength she still possessed.

Quietly and heavily, she lay sprawled on the ground, the hatchet slipping from her hand. Once more, the voices began to echo in her head, and her eyelids grew heavy.

“Nastya! I told you not to go there!” Her mother’s voice seemed to call out, but then it faded, and the voices merged again into a soft yet commanding unison:
“Nastya… the barn, the seal… save us! We’re suffocating! Nastya!”
“Nastenka, I told you to eat your soup, save your strength!” It was as though the voices were speaking among themselves, but the unison always prevailed.
“Save us, there’s no air! Nastya!!! Help us!” the voices cried out with terrifying force, filling every corner of her mind, drowning her in a darkness buzzing with hundreds of whispers, screams, shrieks, and wails of those suffocating souls.

She awoke to the first rays of faint sunlight creeping over the horizon. Early morning dew had woken her. She lay on the damp grass, her head feverish and her body shaking with both cold and the searing fire within her. Barely, she turned her head toward the grass. The voices in her head grew louder. Where once they would fade after sleep, now they stayed with her.

Water... drink…

She stuck out her tongue and began to touch the drops of dew, tasting the freshness of the grass. She started swallowing the drops of water, and strength began to return to her.
"Nastya!!! Nastya, where are you? We’re suffocating!!!" they cried, but she was already rising, trembling violently as she stood on her feet.

A swing of the hatchet.
Another.
And the lock fell to the ground. She leaned against the gates and pushed them open.

No chandelier. No candles. Only a massive heap of hay in the center of the dark barn. Her bare feet hurt terribly, raw and bleeding from running. Her bones ached unbearably, nausea churned like a swamp in her stomach, and chills shook her with the force of ten horses. Yet still, she moved forward. She dropped the hatchet by her side. Step by step... each step felt like the lash of a whip on her back. But she kept going. She fell to her knees before the pile of hay in the barn's center. The pale morning sunlight filtered through the barn’s rotting boards, illuminating the space inside.

She struck the tinderbox.
Once.
Twice.
Three times...

And flames erupted. They burned her hands, and she fell back in shock. In an instant, a column of fire shot upward, consuming everything around her.

"Nastyyyyyaaa!!!" the voices screamed as if freed from a prison. "Thank you, Nastya!!! Our savior! Savior!!!" they cried, their tones harmonious yet horrifying, demonic in their unison.

The fire licked at her legs, and with a sudden burst of strength from deep within, she stood up, only to lose it again as she stumbled back to the gates, collapsing once more.

What’s this?… I must tell the parents…

In a daze, she closed her eyes, opening them only when she saw a column of smoke and fire rising behind her. She heard human voices. People were running from all sides, milling about and shouting, but at her little house, there was silence. No doors opened. No one stepped out onto the lawn, now shrouded in smoke. The grass in front of the house began to glow red with flames, ruby embers and sparks scattering in every direction. She stood up again.

"Nastya!!! Thank you!!! Savior!!!” Was howling in her aching head.

She wandered through the burning grass as people with buckets full of sand ran past her.

She looked at the roof of her house, a fiery orange haze hanging over it. Above that, she saw the dawn on a sky painted the same red-gold hue. Nastya walked out the gate. Everyone had gathered in front of the house, thin-faced, old and young, coughing and sitting on the ground. They were all hungry, their faces so gaunt and pale they no longer looked human—just leather pulled tight over skeletal cheekbones. Nastya passed among them, her eyes clouded with darkness, a milky haze—she saw almost nothing and no one.

She turned her head back. The entire street was engulfed in the blurry firing mirage. People were now running away from their homes, not toward them as they once did, abandoning buckets of sand along the road. Dust and smoke veiled her path. One street separated her from the village’s center. Just one street, which, in that moment, seemed like an endless labyrinth shrouded in a silvery dusty fog. Her little feet ached even more, burning from the ashes falling from the rooftops on either side of her. The trees were cloaked in red, the sky turned black, and the grass, the wandering people, their homes, and even a dog—half-dead, still uneaten—running ahead, all wore the same fiery hue. The dog yelped and snarled from the searing pain. From a red birch, scarlet leaves fell, and Nastya caught one in her hand. It burned her fingers immediately, but she didn’t let it go.

Hundreds of people from across the village trudged side by side with Nastya, and suddenly, in the crowd, she spotted two men with blood-blackened hands.

Cannibals, the thought flashed through her mind, and she tried to quicken her pace.

But then, one of them raised a hand in her direction, and the other turned toward her, his grotesque, gaunt skull-like face staring her down. In their hands, knives glinted ominously, and they started moving toward her, shouting something she couldn’t make out over the roaring chaotic hell that enveloped her like the burning tar engulfs a body drowning within it. Her focus was locked on the crowd of people gathered at the village entrance. The cannibals limped faster, but they were so thin and feeble that they couldn’t keep up. Suddenly, she saw the village blacksmith—a man who had once been a broad-shouldered giant of strength, now reduced to a shadow of his former self—rose up between her and the cannibals, halting their broken advance. With his towering stature, he forced them back, his sheer presence driving them into retreat as if light were dispelling darkness. For a brief moment, Nastya saw him quietly nod to her in appreciation, and she nodded back, smiling faintly—for the first time in her short life.

Thank you, giant, she thought, as she pressed into the crowd and started to lose herself within it passing by.

They won’t reach me now… They will never reach me again.

Now she could see, through the haze, the central road. Dusty and crowded, everyone was rushing toward it with buckets and yokes, paying no attention to her. And she walked, like a dead thing, step by step, holding the burning birch leaf that was crumbling into biting ash in her fingers. She shuffled along, her bare, bloody feet scraping against the scorching, dusty road where ash mingled with sand and soil. Behind her raged those she had set free. No longer did she hear their screams in her head. They were all around her now—running and shouting, wailing and howling. Some clutching their heads, others their buckets of precious water and sand. The crowd of unmoving, gathered people stood farther down, and as she approached them, they began to part slowly, their thin shoulders nudging her forward, toward the entrance of the village, to the end of its central road.

Something rumbled ahead, wheels creaking. Wagons. No! The whole manifestation of brightly colored wagons against the backdrop of the golden dawn were approaching the village, shrouded in black-red haze, heading toward the crowd of the living dead with blackened hands and long-empty stomachs, leaving behind their sick in the homes, their dirty, disheveled beards and hair, their fallen teeth, and eyes that hadn’t seen anything in a long time. Toward them came this endless column.

And at the front, on the leading, creaking wagon that swayed over weeds and potholes, a field of blue bearing forty-four white stars, alongside stripes of red and white, flapped in the heavy, burning wind, proudly and with a serenity so bright, the saving American flag waved…