Opening
It happens with the regularity of climate cycles. Once a season Sergei faces the greatest challenge of his life. No, not an away match in Grozny. The sofa, on which His Wife materialises.
She is not here for the high art of the low block. She is here because the Turkish pashas from her favourite series have taken a week off, and the sofa is the only place in the flat where gravity feels like an embrace. For Sergei, though, this is a missionary opportunity. He looks at her as if he were the last keeper of the Library of Alexandria and she the only surviving literate person on Earth.
