Almost Like People

All of us— from a private to a generalissimo—are dead. But we are ideal soldiers. We stabilized the front, and in three years the cross-eyed enemy didn’t advance even by a micron. Us, the annihilators, everyone calls Andrei, Antip, and Anton. The pilots—Lekhs and Lenky. The artillerymen—Artyoms, Arthurs, and even Aristarchs. And yet, no matter what they call us, we were called something else before the war. For us, the world is an uncomfortable and dangerous abstraction.