Just a Story
V. Ulea

She read out loud, her pupils two black holes pulling in light from the pages. When she finished it was dark—no more spaces between the letters.

“It was all about me,” he sobbed, trying to break through the dark. His shoulders went up and down like damped sinusoids on the dying lifeline.

“It was just a story,” she said, still holding the book.

The stars contracted, pumping up light to the pages. The droplets of still lives darkened in the moon’s hardening amber.

Amber is fossilized tree resin, he recollected, trying to grasp for the roots of the invisible tree.

The night collapsed on decaying plasma.

“It was just a story. Calm down,” she repeated, touching his eyelids, and closed the book of life.

V. Ulea (Vera Zubarev) is a bilingual Russian-English poet, writer, scholar and film director. She has published eleven books of poetry, prose, and literary theory. Her works have appeared in various periodicals both American and European, including The Literary Review, Sein und Werden, Princeton Arts Review, and RE:AL. She teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.

Read a recent conversation between Ulea and TDP's editor-in-chief: A Dialogue Between Two Cultures: Postcapitalism, Postsocialism, and D. Harlan Wilson's Technologized Desire.