Three Ways of Being Poor
1. The Moonshine
A frosty night, windows covered in patterns that never repeated, right on Christmas Eve. I mean the Orthodox one in January. That day just meant parents at home, guests coming over, bowls of meat jelly, and drinks. Where we lived, Jesus wasn’t part of it anymore.
A whisper woke me. My parents were in the kitchen.
The curtains—thick, brown, winter ones—were pulled tight. Their rustle felt like a password. A canister sat on the stove with a long tube, and the kitchen turned into a workshop where night boiled down into a celebration. It ran into a glass bottle drop by drop, quiet, as if the neighbors were asleep and no one was counting coins.
“Don’t tell anyone,” they said. I nodded and kept still. Some secret—right there on the table. This one smelled a little sweet and tinny, with a breath of gas. I stood in the doorway and watched the bottle fill. The adults whispered, “Almost,” “Hold on,” “Take it off while it’s still clean.”
By morning, pale rings from glasses marked the windowsill, and the sink still smelled no matter how much tea we brewed.
The air still smelled faintly sweet, like something burning slow and private.
2. The Salary Was Bowls
They didn’t pay wages at the factory; they handed out dishes instead. Glass bowls so dull they looked brown, not white. Olive-brown patterns along the rim trying to look festive. Everyone had the same ones.
Once, in kindergarten, there was a contest. Parents brought salads in those bowls—one per family, full of food and pride. I thought my parents were hiding food from me. At home we had the same bowl, but no salad.
All the bowls looked alike, so I reached for another, just to taste. My parents stopped me. “Only the carrots are ours,” they said. Inside our bowl was carrot salad—the kind with garlic and vinegar everyone called Korean. Theirs had peas, eggs, beets, mayonnaise—things that smelled like a party.
The carrots glistened, bright and lonely.
3. Cocoa with Bun
They paid for my school lunches in the first grade. We had only buckwheat and potatoes at home. At school they served rice and liver. The rice was warm, a little sweet and sticky. The liver smelled like liver—thick, heavy. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I set the plate aside.
The cocoa had a milk skin. I drank it anyway because it was familiar. There was a roll too—dry, with cinnamon and a walnut inside. Not café-soft, but good enough. I wasn’t hungry. Just went back to class as if that’s how the first day of school should be like. Later they told my parents I hadn’t eaten. They went to the office and took back the money for the rest of the week. They’d scraped together only a week of lunches. Scolded me the way back home—said they’d paid good money and I just sat there.
I stopped liking cocoa. It reminded me how small a week could be.
Iryna Somkina is an author based in Kyiv, Ukraine. She came back to writing in 2025 after a ten-year silence. Her work appears in ANMLY, Gone Lawn and Livina Press, and Star 82 Review. She writes about visibility, labor, and coming-of-age, memory, and grief.
