Second Place | My House

The House never stood still.

When I was little I heard stories of Baba Yaga, a grandmother who made borscht and played pranks on wanderers. She lived in an unending emerald forest, in a House that stood on two chicken-like legs and roamed through the forest like a sleeping shark, moving through the stillness of an air so silent it was liquid. In some stories, she is the boogeyman, but not in the ones I heard. All my life I wanted to live in a house like hers, that could move for exploration, whereas the House, my house, never stood still, but never ever moved.

The House never stood still, it favored the number four, but secretly the number five. 

Four made more sense, like a sturdy oak table, and five is an awkward number of legs for a table, is it not? My parents bought the House shortly after I was born at the turn of the twenty-first century, planting roots in a New Jersey town full of other strangers to the United States. The three-bedroom House became home to us three, my brother, my grandmother, and at some point a cat, a brief interlude which included a guinea pig, then two more cats. Always around five. 

The House never stood still, she offered refuge.

I learned of Baba Yaga through my mother and hers, who were born in Kyiv, Ukraine, a place I have felt to be home despite having been there only a handful of times. Her House was an apartment in the city, one I have only known through photographs. There was a Russian blue named Masha who caught pigeons on the balcony, gifting them to my mother as if the cat knew she needed to eat more. There were Turkish rugs that adorned the walls, and cups of tea scattered around the mismatched coffee tables that encircled the model-looking group of friends exchanging soft laughs on the couch. They dressed like a Soviet cast of “Friends,” and you’d swear they looked happy with only the subtlest smiles. 

The House never stood still, it crumbled and was rebuilt.

The House went from a five legged table to four when my father passed away. I was thirteen, he had cancer. Those are the facts. What is the truth though, is that I missed him in ways that didn’t feel like missing, my missing him was my living. My mother started to date someone and I got happier, in time. A few years ago he showed me how to jet ski when he took us to the warm beaches of Cancun. The sun beat down on my pale, vampire-like skin, my green eyes glittering against the Gulf waters. I noticed the nicotine patches that decorated his shoulders when I looped my arms around his bony frame, holding on tight. We jumped several waves, and I saw the fish cower beneath us in the reef below. I felt all powerful acceptance over the part of our House that was rebuilt. I liked that our table stood on five legs.

The House never stood still, she was bombed and raped. 

Ukraine, unlike Baba Yaga, could not run away on chicken legs when Russia invaded her in the winter of 2022. I saw on the news the House, my cousin’s grocery store, my mother’s high school, my grandmother’s office building, crumbling to waste while CNN reporters argued about what the right thing to do was. We waited for phone calls in the aftermath of airstrikes while I sat in the comfort of the House, intact with running water, WiFi, and fresh vareniki in a country safe from war, unsure if I had the right to feel that loss. Can I grieve this, can I claim this recipe, this tradition? I think these questions often circulate through the minds of first-generation Americans, or at least I hope I am not alone in wondering if where I come from matters as much as where I came from. 

The House never stood still, it was left unattended.

While Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a malignant tumor invaded my mother’s partner in the tail end of that same year. He passed away in September of 2023 after undergoing several treatments. Those are the facts, but the truth is that I was away working and at college for most of the year. I wasn’t there to tend to the House, our House, that seemed to catch fire.

The House never stood still.

It was always changing, breaking, rebuilding. So what did my mother do? She repainted the walls, changed the fridge out, bought new floating shelves from Crate and Barrel. New window treatments. A Costco couch. New Christmas stockings, one fewer than before. She repainted the colorful walls that witnessed the changing, the leaving, and covered them with a gray.