Story of the Week

Olga Zilberbourg is the author of a short story collection published in Russia, where she was born in 1979, as well as the collection Like Water and Other Stories. She received a BS in international business from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an MA in comparative literature from San Francisco State University. Her essay on Lydia Chukovskaya, a Soviet writer and poet who devoted her career to defending dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, accompanies two works of Chukovskaya’s fiction. Zilberbourg is a consulting editor of Narrative and lives in San Francisco.

A Dark and Empty Corner

A Story

by Olga Zilberbourg

God was present that Thursday night in June when Peggy and Winston volunteered at the Family History Center. He hung about the one-room building behind the parking lot of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and listened in on their conversation from the dark corner dedicated to microfilm research.

During the school year, when his grandkids were around, Winston volunteered in the mornings, and this was his first evening at the center. During the two years since he’d retired to this town, Winston and Peggy had taken notice of each other at church and organizational meetings, but they had never been together in an intimate setting like this.

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