Short fiction from a collection of scary fairy tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

~
There once lived a woman who hated her neighbor—a single mother with a small child.  As the child grew and learned to crawl, the woman would sometimes leave a pot of boiling water in the corridor, or a container full of bleach, or she'd just spread out a whole box of needles right there in the hall.  The poor mother didn't suspect anything—her little girl hadn't learned to walk yet, and she didn't let her out in the corridor during the winter when the floor was cold.  But the time was fast approaching when her daughter would be able to leave the room on her own.  The mother would say to her neighbor, "Raya, sweetie, you dropped your needles again," at which point Raya would blame her poor memory.  "I'm always forgetting things," she'd say.  
        They'd once been friends. . . .   
(From "Revenge," pp. 7-11.)

There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life.  That is, her parents were told that the girl was dead, but they couldn't have the body (they had all been riding the bus together; the girl was standing up front at the time of the explosion, and her parents were sitting behind her).  The girl was just fifteen, and she was thrown back by the blast. . . .
(From "The Fountain House," pp. 97-107, also published in English in a slightly different form in the August 21, 2009 issue of The New Yorker.)

She's a tall, grown-up, married woman now, but she was once an orphan living with her grandmother, who had taken her in when the girl's mother disappeared. . . .   
(From "The Shadow Life," pp. 108-114.)

There is clearly someone in the house.  Walk into the bedroom: something falls in the living room.  Look for the cat: it's sitting on the little table in the front hall, its ears pricked up; it clearly heard something, too.  Walk into the living room: a scrap of paper has fallen, all by itself, from the piano, with someone's phone number on it, you can't tell whose.  It just flew off the piano soundlessly and lies on the carpet, white and alone. . . . 
        Someone isn't being careful, thinks the woman who lives here.  Someone isn't even trying to hide anymore.  
        A person can be afraid of rodents, insects, little ants in the bath, even a lonely cockroach that's stumbled into your apartment in a drugged state, fleeing the disinfection campaign at the neighbors'—which is to say, he's just standing naked and defenseless, in plain view.  But a person can be afraid of anything when she's alone with her cat and everyone has departed, all her old family, leaving this little human roach completely by herself, unprotected. . . .   
(From "There's Someone in the House," pp. 124-138.)

--From There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, a collection of short fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, selected and translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (Penguin Books, 2009).

Fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Yasunari Kawabata, and Louise Erdrich

~
This is what happened.  An unmarried woman in her thirties implored her mother to leave their studio apartment for one night so she could bring home a lover.  
        This so-called lover bounced between two households, his mother's and his wife's, and he had an overripe daughter of fourteen to consider as well.  About his work at the laboratory he constantly fretted but would brag to anyone who listened about the imminent promotion that never materialized.  The insatiable appetite he displayed at office parties, where he stuffed himself, was the result of an undiagnosed diabetes that enslaved him to thirst and hunger and lacquered him with pasty skin, thick glasses, and dandruff.  A fat, balding man-child of forty-two with a dead-end job and ruined health--this was the treasure our unmarried thirtysomething brought to her apartment for a night of love. . . . 
--From There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, a collection by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, selected and translated from the Russian by Anna Summers (Penguin Books, 2013).

Even when he reached Kamakura and the Engakuji Temple, Kikuji did not know whether or not he would go to the tea ceremony.  He was already late.
        He received an announcement whenever Kurimoto Chikako offered tea at the inner cottage of the Engakuji.  He had not once gone since his father's death, however.  He thought of the announcements as no more than formal gestures in memory of his father.  
        This time there had been a postscript: she wanted him to meet a young lady to whom she was giving tea lessons.
        As he read it, Kikuji thought of Chikako's birthmark.  
        Had he been eight, perhaps, or nine?  He had been taken by his father to visit Chikako, and they had found her in the breakfast room. . . . 
--From Thousand Cranes, a short novel by Yasunari Kawabata, originally published in Japanese as Sembazuru, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker, with drawings by Fumi Komatsu (Wideview/Perigee, G. P. Putnam's Sons/The Putnam Publishing Group, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1959).

He was the second, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents.  With a grocery store that included a butcher shop and a slaughterhouse, they could feed as many dogs as they liked.  Nero, a mixture of fierce breeds in a line known locally as guard dogs, was valued for his strength, his formidable jaws, and his resonant bark.  At night, he was turned loose to guard the cash register in the front of the shop, where he paced the waxed linoleum, a ghostly white.  Other unbanked valuables were kept in a safe in my grandfather's bedroom.  He slept behind a locked door with my grandmother on one side of him and a loaded gun on the other.  This was not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water. . . .   
--From "Nero," a short story by Louise Erdrich, The New Yorker (May 7, 2012), pp. 60-67.