Hanging In A Jar

Simeon is still there. The rock gets smaller every day, a change imperceptible to the eye, but he's still up there suspended by some unknown force.  He received a visitor the other day: a wild eyed boy with a poisoned leg, and the gait of a wading bird.  The boy spoke. It seemed to Simeon that he was speaking to somebody else but no one else was there. "They said that I look like an Old Believer. What's the use? I'm clean shaven!". Simeon found it very difficult to keep his eyes on the horizon.  (                                                                                          ) (                                           ...

A recent  poll reanimated the story of Kolpashevo, a Siberian town where thousands were put to their deaths by the NKVD during the Great Purge of the late 1930s.  In 1979, erosion at the banks of the river Ob revealed the bodies of thousands, hidden for decades just below the soil. NY Times  report , 1993:  "From its headwaters on the Russian-Mongolian border, the Ob River flows northwest across Siberia, sweeping through thick fir forests and marshlands before emptying into the Arctic Ocean. Like the Mississippi, which also traverses flat, low-lying country, the Ob flows in lazy bends and loops, and changes its course slightly when it floods.  In May 1979, swollen by melting snow, the Ob began eating away at its banks at a Siberian town called Kolpashevo. As the flood waters gnawed deeper into the base of the river bank, the earth and sand that crumbled into the water disclosed a mass of human skeletons. Beneath this strata of bones was another la...