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July is Flash Fiction Month! I’ll be sharing short short stories here through the month of July. More notes (and translations) at the end of the story
Two heads were worse than one, because only one head could look at the idiom dictionary at a time.
Alexei (the American “Alex” had yet to stick) flipped to the index and searched for “C.” “You told Derek we got Judith concert tickets for her birthday, and you wanted to tell him not to give away the secret.”
Alexei’s partner, Kolya, nodded. “Right. I told him, ‘don’t skin the cat out of the bag.’ And he just tried not to laugh.”
“Hm…” Alexei ran his finger down the index. “Kot…kot…”
The idiom dictionary had been one of the best gifts Kolya had given Alexei. Whenever Alexei thumbed through its pages, he looked like a man solving a mystery. His eyes were bright, and there was a small, satisfied smile on his lips when he finally cracked it open.
Kolya liked seeing him like this. Alexei’s first love had been words. Like most children, Alexei and Nikolai had grown up reading fairytales and Soviet propaganda. But soon, they were sharing samizdat works—illegal poetry, dissident pamphlets, the entirety of The Gulag Archipelago painstakingly typed on onionskin paper.
The trouble with Alexei was that he could never bring himself to burn the novels once he was done with them. He hid them in a hollow behind his bathroom mirror, but the secret police had found them anyway. Alexei had been arrested on the spot; Nikolai was already in questioning.
A chill ran over Kolya as the memories came back to him. The beatings, the imprisonment, however temporary…but he tightened his jaw and turned his focus back to Alexei.
“It’s ‘let the cat out of the bag’ and ‘skin the cat.’ ‘Let the cat out of the bag’ is to tell a secret. And ‘skin the cat’ is…zhdat’…”
“Why is this language so mean to cats?” Kolya asked.
Alexei chuckled. “English is a beast. Vot gde sabaka zaryta.”
“I izhu panyatna,” Nikolai replied with a nod.
“P’erviy bl’in vsigda komam.” Alexei shrugged and went back to the book.
What had happened to Kolya was nothing compared with what Alexei had been through. When they were finally reunited after two long, bitter years apart, the man Kolya had fallen in love with had nearly disappeared. He was broken in mind and body, half-dead when they finally, finally escaped to America.
Healing took time. Alexei was not fully himself again. Kolya knew he probably never would be. But on their first anniversary of coming to the United States, Alexei had started writing again. Nothing important at first, just lists of words to help him practice English.
But he kept writing, and kept writing. English was a labyrinth that Alexei explored with fascination. But there were no minotaurs at its center, only truth. Only words.
“Ah! ‘Skin the cat’ is to take off clothes, or ‘there’s more than one way to skin a cat’ means there’s many ways to do something.” Alexei snapped the dictionary shut, a satisfied smile on his face.
“English is cruel.”
“In many ways, yes. But remember Gogol’s overcoat? Lined with cat.”
Of course Alexei would remember such a small detail from the famous story. Seeing his partner smiling, talking about literature, Kolya saw the person he’d fallen in love with, the one who remained beyond the pain, beyond the nightmares, beyond all the bad days he’d survived.
“You came out from under Gogol’s overcoat,” Nikolai remarked, and reached for Alexei’s hand.
Alexei pressed a kiss to Kolya’s forehead. “Only because I had you to help pull me out.”
Let’s gooooo! First FFM Challenge: Malaphor Madness.
Use at least one malaphor (a combination of two idioms; also known as an idiom blend) in your story!
Mine is “don’t skin the cat out of the bag.”
A little background on these two: I started writing about Alexei and Nikolai/Kolya a couple years ago, when my PTSD symptoms were really bad. At first it was just a lot of painful stories, but as things got better, I started seeing that there might be something in that glut of writing that might be worth working on and even sharing. I didn’t plan on using these characters for FFM, since they come from such a tender place in me (with both meanings of the word), but I thought two English language learners were perfect for this challenge. And then I threw in some Russian idioms just for fun. I don’t know enough about the language to to a malaphor with them, but even a hedgehog understands that’s where the dog is buried.
Alexei references the famous short story, “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Gogol. Kolya references the quote attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky, “We all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.” which speaks to how Gogol’s work influenced some of Russia’s most famous writers.
Kot – cat
Samizdat – literally “self-publishing,” the practice of making and distributing censored literature in the U.S.S.R.
Zhdat’ – wait
Vot gde sabaka zaryta. – literally “that’s where the dog is buried”; to get to the root of a problem
I izhu panyatna – literally “even a hedgehog understands”; something is easy to understand
P’erviy bl’in vsigda komam – literally “The first pancake [blini] is always a blob”; practice makes perfect
Overlooked Books 