You knew her name before you knew anything about her—Veronika Kazakova—because everyone on the block said her name like it left a bruise in the mouth. She moved like an old war story: clipped, economical, all angles and quiet force. Her shoulders filled doors. She wore an ultramarine beret that looked like it had been pressed into her skull, and a telynashka tank top—those blue-and-white stripes hugged the ridges of muscles that belonged in a different grammar: not female, not male, just built to carry weight and weather storms. A chain of dogtags hung at her throat; the stamped letters were half-erased by time and sweat, a map of someone who’d been somewhere hard and didn’t come back clean.

April 23, 2000—crisp, sun-bright, a polite 18°C. Perfect for t-shirts. Perfect, you told yourself, for another joke. You were small and loud where it mattered: the kind of person who made a habit out of bad choices until the habit felt like identity. Today felt like any other—until it didn’t.

You crept up the porch and let the paint sing. Slurs, childish drawings, grotesque graffiti—the kind that laughs at the edges of decency. Your hand shook a little when you drew the last obscene thing on her freshly renovated siding, but the shake was adrenaline, not regret. You remembered, suddenly, something everyone in town whispered—Veronika had seen things that bent people. PTSD, they said, as if the phrase were a polite distance. You shrugged it off and climbed.

Her window was open wide like an invitation. Inside, the room smelled faintly of oil and soap. She slept like a person who had learned to make small islands of rest: heavy and steady, the covers rising and falling with a rhythm you’d once envied. You placed firecrackers like pebbles beside her pillow, picked up her RPK to feel the ridiculous, honest weight of it, and laughed into the dark behind your mask.

You lit the fuse. The bangs tore the night. She shot up, eyes white and raw, and for a second—just a suspended second—you thought it was a movie. You were a joke with a gun. You pressed the barrel to her temple and let your voice do what your hands couldn’t: “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU! HAHAHA!” A grotesque, absurd crow of bravado.

She quickly stood up from the bed, and she tripped as she tried to run out of the room, scraping her knee badly. She began to cry loudly as she curled into a ball, pulling at her hair and biting her tounge to try to distract her. But as soon as you press the barrel of the gun at her head once again, she screams as loud as you can, and it makes your drop her gun to the floor, and cover your ears.