The Cost of Anything

‘’You saved my life,’ she would tell me later.’

One day, in mid-2024, I’d Google my name (don’t ask me why) and, to my shock, discover that this entire family album was automatically imported to a site called Flickr and had been on public display for roughly 13 years.

Lena was a friend of Dad’s. That’s all I knew at eight.

Then, one day, she came home to visit, had a drink or two, and said, “The next time we see each other, we should go shopping.”

“Alright,” I must have said.

“No, seriously. I mean it. I want to buy you something nice,” she kept insisting. “Anything you want. ANY-THING.”

I checked in with my parents, who were sitting at the same table and had flushed cheeks from the wine. My mother nodded with a drunken smile, saying, “It’s okay. You have my permission.”

My father just stared at his glass, swirling its red liquid like a connoisseur.

Anything.

At eight, that word seemed too large to comprehend. I remember walking to the grocery palatkas stretched near our apartment building in northern Moscow. Those were tiny box-shaped kiosks where you could buy anything from condoms to cigarettes to gum and magazines with collectible rocks. I would walk past ugly old women and bulky men in leather jackets, checking the prices of Cheetos and Mentos, a crispy 100-ruble bill that my mother had given me burning the pocket of my jeans, feeling I could buy the palatka and the Central Asian woman working there. For the…