The Émigré Engineer
The Red Army, early 20th century. Great spread of headwear...
A touch on his arm startled Witold. One of the commissar's men stood there. He held a Nagant revolver out to Witold, and pointed. "Centre of the room," he clarified.
The man was thin but wiry, feral-looking. His teeth were strangely white and even. Witold couldn’t place his accent. He wondered if he was from the east, or the north, or the south. He had already seen White Russians and Tatars, or their heads, at least. The Revolution truly was bringing the peoples of Mother Russia together.
“When you’re ready,” the man said, and added, “it’s loaded.”
The man held an identical revolver in his own hands. He had a tamping rod out, and was going through a rather laborious process of ejecting spent cartridges. Witold idly counted the men on the floor. Seven of them. The man’s words didn’t seep in till he felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. It was only metal, he knew, a series of pipes and chambers, a spring, friction, percussion.
Witold took two strides, raised the gun to the guard’s temple, and pulled the trigger. The bang faded to a ringing note. It scared him. A puff of smoke stung his nose. Fighting the urge to sneeze, Witold saw that he had missed the man’s temple. That was the adjustment made by his glasses, he supposed, and the trembling of his hand. He had shot the man in the eye, instead. A fountain of blood, more than Witold had ever seen outside a farm, was gushing over Witold’s shoulder and onto the floor. Witold watched the arc dumbly, and stepped out of his daze and smartly to one side as it diminished, made a path on the floor then ran down the man’s face, into his bared teeth, and down his front. More alarmingly, almost, the guard was still standing upright. Witold looked closely and fearfully from the remaining eye to the outstretched hand.
My novella The Émigré Engineer has been published by American chapbook publisher Emerson College's Ploughshares. It looks at the fractured, sometimes violent journey of a young man who fled from the Russian Revolution as it spread through the countries caught in the orbit of the Soviet Union. He passes time among the émigrés and refugees in the teeming Paris of the 1920s to finally ‘become’ an American, but has to deal with one last piece of bloody business in Prohibition America before he can finally breathe easily.
I’ve written a lot about Witold and his family, the Galitzkis, over the years, but only ever had parts of the story published. The Émigré Engineer will be the biggest chunk of it to see proper daylight, so I’m pleased and excited to see it out there.
It's available from Amazon right here, as a download for the strange price of £1.46 - probably less than a cup of fancy coffee. It's a $1.99 download from Ploughshares here.
All the Ploughshares stories are available in a printed version in the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus edition, available here for a very reasonable $14.
I'm in very good company with a lot of talented writers, and that's a lot of literature for the price of a few fancy cappuccinos!
The man was thin but wiry, feral-looking. His teeth were strangely white and even. Witold couldn’t place his accent. He wondered if he was from the east, or the north, or the south. He had already seen White Russians and Tatars, or their heads, at least. The Revolution truly was bringing the peoples of Mother Russia together.
“When you’re ready,” the man said, and added, “it’s loaded.”
The man held an identical revolver in his own hands. He had a tamping rod out, and was going through a rather laborious process of ejecting spent cartridges. Witold idly counted the men on the floor. Seven of them. The man’s words didn’t seep in till he felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. It was only metal, he knew, a series of pipes and chambers, a spring, friction, percussion.
Witold took two strides, raised the gun to the guard’s temple, and pulled the trigger. The bang faded to a ringing note. It scared him. A puff of smoke stung his nose. Fighting the urge to sneeze, Witold saw that he had missed the man’s temple. That was the adjustment made by his glasses, he supposed, and the trembling of his hand. He had shot the man in the eye, instead. A fountain of blood, more than Witold had ever seen outside a farm, was gushing over Witold’s shoulder and onto the floor. Witold watched the arc dumbly, and stepped out of his daze and smartly to one side as it diminished, made a path on the floor then ran down the man’s face, into his bared teeth, and down his front. More alarmingly, almost, the guard was still standing upright. Witold looked closely and fearfully from the remaining eye to the outstretched hand.
My novella The Émigré Engineer has been published by American chapbook publisher Emerson College's Ploughshares. It looks at the fractured, sometimes violent journey of a young man who fled from the Russian Revolution as it spread through the countries caught in the orbit of the Soviet Union. He passes time among the émigrés and refugees in the teeming Paris of the 1920s to finally ‘become’ an American, but has to deal with one last piece of bloody business in Prohibition America before he can finally breathe easily.
I’ve written a lot about Witold and his family, the Galitzkis, over the years, but only ever had parts of the story published. The Émigré Engineer will be the biggest chunk of it to see proper daylight, so I’m pleased and excited to see it out there.
It's available from Amazon right here, as a download for the strange price of £1.46 - probably less than a cup of fancy coffee. It's a $1.99 download from Ploughshares here.
All the Ploughshares stories are available in a printed version in the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus edition, available here for a very reasonable $14.
I'm in very good company with a lot of talented writers, and that's a lot of literature for the price of a few fancy cappuccinos!
Illustration by Michael Foreman, for a 2011 excerpt from the story in Ambit Magazine
