I won’t apologize because this is the story that should have been written. 

Sure, the novel was about war and Russia and that long slog back from the front, but I was right to put a dog in the story, because there should have been a dog. A lie to leave that out, wasn’t it? Isn’t there always dog barks in the distance in italics at the bottom of the screen? And if there wasn’t a dog looking up whenever those dark chapters were unfolding, the MC gone too quiet, had they not wished there was a dog? Told everyone they knew, “I want a dog”? Not meant to end up with that pile of cats?

Because we know there must have been cats. Would there not have been, in that worried and creased letter from home in chapter four, that day their teen son came in, snuck off behind closed doors, that whole chapter on the struggle of parenting teens, the fear of drugs and social media and suicide and trafficking and permanent records, and that door staying closed? We know from later chapters, don’t we, that the teen survived, no addiction or surprise grandchildren, and that whole generation, overall, aren’t they just lovely with their optimism? Their soft colors, their hope? So I’ll not apologize for imagining the sounds from behind that teen’s closed doors came from what that optimistic generation would have smuggled in: two cats found at the edge of a road. Mathematical equation: one cat plus one cat might be twenty-two cats by year’s end.

That should have been in the story. At least I know it’s what I heard, what I felt, those late nights pushing to meet deadlines, rent and groceries and utilities due, the cannons blasting on the main character’s front line while I stole hours with my family asleep, the character whispering against my neck, We’ll get through this. Soldier on.

That many kittens, just saying: I’m not apologizing for writing a shine onto each of those chapters of trauma – the one with the flood, the transmission blown at high speed on a 6-lane highway, the dead father, the friend remembered who used to kick out in sleep but never curled into an embrace, the escaped cage pet, the bird that died, the shiver in a linoleumed waiting room, the time realized that when you’re told, You need to know when to ask for help, that when you actually do look walleyed across a counter or window-to-window, car to car, and say, You don’t understand, I need help, that, most often, help does not come. Alls I’m saying. Alls I’m saying, is I wasn’t wrong to tuck a kitten clawing up a pantleg, a wobbling round head, those milky blue eyes. Death, panic, stealing night terror, it was all there. I’m only saying: surely there were kittens, too.

And I won’t apologize for the sex. Call it a lapse in comprehending idiom. A cultural approximation. It’s just. I know they had sex. Readers know they had sex. Readers tipped heads, rolled eyes with I get all that about the lost job, the bills due, the rising rent, the fuckers who drive ten under the limit and stop for a yellow light in the morning commute, the boss who noticed the 17 minutes late without thanking for the seven hours of overtime, know it’s a pain to be the only one who replaces toilet paper when the roll’s spent, to be the only one to change the cat box (which is how I read into it, the existence of those first two cats, ran math to write in the ensuing 22 kittens). I’m just saying, readers lived all that. End of day, not too much to know: they wanted hands to touch unexpectedly. Intake of breath. That little shudder. Breath in the crevice of a collarbone. For the character who had always wanted something more to breathe out ragged and animal, You, I’ve always wanted you. To press translated pages to chest, close eyes, turn out the lights. Read that line again, this time out loud, to themselves in an empty room. You. I’ve always wanted you.

It could have been a happy ending. I get it was Russian. I get the century it was from. But I’ll not apologize because what I am saying, what I saw between the black-squiggled lines of that original draft – painful in its occasional struggle to get ink to even leave a mark – was a wish. The story they knew, sure, all they had to write down. But. Now. Now. In this breath between lines. Was there not. You feel it, don’t you? This begging passion – that it could have been something more? This life? If only.

If only.

There was this chance. Some time. Some one. Someone able to translate it all. See it for what it all could have been.

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Elissa Field is a Submissions Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly, and has stories appearing or forthcoming in Moon City Review, CRAFT, Fractured Lit, trampset, SmokeLong Quarterly, Maudlin House, Peatsmoke, Frazzled Lit, Reckon Review, Citron Review, Monkeybicycle, and in 2026 Bath Flash Fiction and Ghost Parachute anthologies. A story will be published as 3rd place in the Uncharted Cinematic Story Contest, and her novel manuscript was First Runner Up for the 2026 Killer Claymore Award for Best Mystery. She lives in a ridiculously cool historic house under an ancient mango tree. Find her on Instagram, Substack or at her website elissalaurenfield.com.