Igor Beloded’s collection of short prose includes stories with unusual characters: a cat on the verge of death; a pensioner sustained by malice and hatred; a teacher suffering from dementia; an emigrant woman from a red-light district; a girl in a destructive relationship with her father; a pathologist; a person who met his double. All these characters balance on the edge between such opposites as grief and happiness, reason and madness, life and death.