Sumerki zhenskoy dushi

In the gas-lit twilight of a pre-revolutionary Russian city, a porcelain-complexioned heiress—her silks rustling like frost on marble—abandons the jeweled cage of privilege to drift among the city’s ulcerous alleys, where sooty children gnaw on candle stubs and consumptive mothers barter lace for black bread. She pours her rubles into crusty palms, sleeps on straw, learns the sour perfume of moldy crusts, until one white night a stray spark from a toppled lantern kisses the hem of her coarse new coat; flames bloom like scarlet chrysanthemums, devouring the hovel, the children, the last filament of her innocence. Scar-knotted and limping, she emerges from the inferno’s mouth no longer angelic, a charcoal sketch of her former self, convinced that charity itself is a vanity, and spends the remainder of her days weaving shrouds for plague victims in a Franciscan cellar, her face turned always toward the wall.