ode to an era in shoes
April 26th, 1986
A fire starts.
Nadjiesda [Nah-jee-es-da] first sees the crimson glow through her kitchen window.
She had been making lunch
when her husband came in,
saying something about fire, radiation.
She places her knife on the counter,
opens the door to the balcony.
Other wives stand out,
wiping their hands on their aprons.
Men park in the middle of the street,
lean on their open car doors.
All eyes are upturned to the same
blooming light stretching out into the sky later Nadjiesda [Nah-jee-es-da] will say,
“I didn’t know death could be so beautiful.”
The day after the fire starts,
in Pripyat [Pree-pyet], the people simply live. Mothers prepare breakfast.
Children play on the ash-covered sidewalks. Their radios say there is nothing to worry about, so they don’t.
On the third day,
families are told to evacuate.
Nikolai’s daughter begs him to bring the cat. Three years ago,
the only thing she wanted for Christmas
was a cat,
so she asks him
to put her in a suitcase,
tuck her under his coat,
but she hisses and claws.
The family leaves with open wounds.
The cat watches them from the living room window. Zinaida [Zee-nigh-ee-da] is on the sidewalk alone.
In her hands is a shallow bowl of milk,
a bowl given to her by her daughter two years ago, the daughter she visits in the cemetery every Sunday. She walks on pin-pricked legs,
the nerves pinched and coiled now,
but she walks anyway.
She walks for two days,
until she sees the wide eyes of a cat
glowing from under the foundations of the store. The cat is not hers,
but she calls him Vaska
and walks home with him anyway.
On the fourth day,
the town of Pripyat [Pree-pyet] is empty. Terriers and shepherds sit at the front door, on the living room carpet,
by the window looking out at the street.
Hounds and spaniels
scratch and whine and pace.
The dogs wait for people who never return.
But the dogs and cats of Chernobyl still live. Generations later,
descendants of the pets abandoned in 1986 still wander the now overgrown streets
of deserted towns,
nearly 800 of them.
They visit the nuclear site where workers give them scraps on their lunch breaks.
They live, wild and irradiated,
and beautiful.
THE DOGS OF CHERNOBYL
ANNA MILLER ‘24 (ODE TO AN ERA IN SHOES)
“I made this piece as a part of my sustained investigation based around the idea of future nostalgia. In my portfolio I'm aiming to create a series of works commemorating my current life by predicting what I will find nostalgic about this time in the future. I find looking back on clothing and shoes to be a great way to remember a particular time of my life, especially because styles and trends change as we grow. This specific piece is a still life of all of my current shoes together, as a way to look back my current stylistic preferences, and remind a future me of my shoes back in high school.”
Oil pastels
PHOENIX MEDLEY ‘23 (THE DOGS OF CHERNOBYL)
“I was inspired by a video I watched about the stray dogs living in cities left barren after the Chernobyl meltdown. It was incredibly bittersweet, seeing photographs of these beautiful animals, knowing that they would face the effects of radiation if they didn't have shortened life spans from the harsh conditions. It was too heartbreaking not to write about.”
Poetry