Description

There lived in San Francisco a certain Vasily Nikoleyevich, whose horror regarding the state of the world was well known and much discussed in the bars, cafés and music halls of Mission Prospekt. Now, on the brink of the 2008 financial crisis, we find the young man unwashed, unemployed, alone except for the company of his increasingly unhinged father—and the visitations of an archangel of apocalyptic beauty. Is it salvation, the End of Days, or just another degenerate sex fantasy? Jen Burke Anderson applies a layer of hallucinatory strangeness to modern despair and anomie in this darkly comic work of “Dostoevsky fan fiction.”

“The house was empty. Vasily Nikoleyevich sat beneath a hot shower for forty-five minutes, threw on boots and a greatcoat, stepped outside, and began to walk. He circled the block several times, then cut a straight line. He would go west. He would go to the sea. It would be several miles, and he would walk as though walking were a drug from which he could not come down. The idea of stopping terrified him. He would only stop when he could walk no more. You are alone. Keep walking. Not long now. What on earth could she have meant? Not long until the streets ran with blood? Not long until he left this life? Not long until he saw her again?”

Jen Burke Anderson writes about Europe and her town, San Francisco. She blogs on cinema, psychology, and the arts on Medium. Her short story “Shelter: A Photo Gallery” was shortlisted by The Masters Review for the 2022-2023 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers, and published in their New Voices section in 2024. In 2020 she was stranded in Passau, Germany, amidst the outbreak of COVID-19. “Shelter” is the first chapter of a novel in progress about the fear, loneliness, and revelation of her time in lockdown-era Europe. Medium: @jenburkeanderson / Instagram: @jenburkeanderson_writes