Selections

The following is a Chapter from my novel, The Whisper of Falling Snow, which will be published on July 21, 2026

JIMMY AND MARGERY MITROVIC ARE DEAD

John Pavlov leaned back in the old office chair at his desk. It had sat in his father’s office at the factory. Pyotr “Peter” Pavlov had been a man of substance, highly esteemed by his workers and the townspeople. It was comforting to hear the old chair’s squeaks and creaks—sounds from the world before the flood. With the fire turned up in the gas fireplace and a cold wind blowing outside, Pavlov took his journal out from a drawer and sat back to read…and remember.

***

From the Journals of John Pavlov

Wednesday, November 4, 2048:

The PDSJ has won the elections by a landslide. They’ve taken the White House and both houses of Congress. The Party has had a monopoly of power on the West Coast and here in the Northeast for the last decade, and they’ve held a slim majority in the House of Representatives, but they won overwhelmingly this time around. Only a few of the southern states and a string of plains and mountain states, what they once called the “flyover states,” have loudly rejected what is now being called the Second American Revolution.

***

From the Journals of John Pavlov

June 30, 2050:

My sixtieth birthday.

Alie came to me last night. In a dream? It must have been, but I’ve never had a dream like it. I felt her hand. I smelled her hair. I swear that her side of the bed was warm. I opened my eyes, and she was there, young and beautiful.

And then she was gone, but I wasn’t sad. It was as if she had come to let me know she was still with me, that we weren’t so far apart and would be seeing each other again. Wishful thinking? Who knows? Who cares? It was the best gift anyone could ever give to an aging widower on his birthday, and I am grateful for it.

My grandmother used to say the veil between the worlds is very thin and gets thinner with each passing year.

***

From the Journals of John Pavlov

Sunday, January 7, 2052. Russian Christmas.

I went to the Vigil service last night. The singing was exquisite, much of it in English. I was surprised since a lot of the old people, which means most of the congregation, prefer Church Slavonic.

Perhaps more English will bring back some of the young people who have drifted away. I have my doubts, though. The government becomes more hostile to organized religion every year. Young people stay away because they fear for their jobs, their reputations, and, of course, the loss of social utility index points.

There are rumors of uprisings in parts of the South and Midwest. The government news channels are hinting that the President will declare an Insurrection in the Dakotas and Oklahoma during the State of the Union address at the end of the month. This, on top of the new treaty in the works that will create a North American Union with Canada and Mexico to counterbalance the European Union and the Pacific-Pan-Asian Coalition.

And Russia? As always, Russia retains its status as a pariah among nations, in debt to the Coalition and the EU, and still squabbling with Ukraine after all these years. Nothing good can come of this. The barn door is open, and the Four Horsemen are out.

***

Pavlov closed his journal, returned it to the desk, and ordered Google to play Bach’s Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor.

***

A group of self-confessed curmudgeons sat at the “men’s table” in the parish hall, arguing about whether the profound and unexpected cooling trend that had taken hold of the planet over the past decade had been caused by the new fusion power plants.

Pavlov had known most of the men for decades. He’d gone to school with them. Many had worked in his father’s businesses. Over the past year or so, he had started meeting them three or four mornings a week for coffee: Mondays at the Egg in Nashaway, Tuesdays at the Senior Center, Wednesdays at the World Café in the town center, and Thursdays at the General Store in Bromfield. These men, once acquaintances to be greeted in the market and on the street, had become true friends. Their lives, their joys and sorrows, and occasional falls from grace had become precious to him. Though he would never say so out loud, he loved them.

***

“So, Old John, you were a teacher; what do you think about all the cold weather we’ve been having?” someone shouted at him over the happy chaos. He had earned his nickname teaching at the town’s high school, and the epithet followed him after he retired. It was a term of affection, but at sixty-two and still in good shape, it sometimes grated on him.

“How would I know? I taught history,” Pavlov shouted back.

“Did you see those billboards they put up on Route 62? ‘Warmer or Cooler, Climate Instability is a Planetary Emergency.’ They used to call it climate change; now it’s instability.” That was one of the converts, Jack Forrest.

“Looks like they’re having it both ways.” Jimmy Mitrovic muttered next to him.

He sat back and listened as the collective stream of consciousness moved on to snowblowers and then to cars, finally ending in an argument over whether it was better to set the heat at twenty degrees Celsius or twenty-two degrees.

John Pavlov, ‘Old’ John Pavlov, after all your wandering, it looks like you’ve finally come home.

Pavlov’s musings were abruptly shattered by a flash, a bang, and the sound of glass shattering in the nave above them.

***

From the Journals of John Pavlov

Sunday, October 26, 2053

Jimmy and Margery Mitrovic are dead. The church is in ruins.

The newscasters on SNN and the other state networks are telling the world that a “mostly peaceful demonstration” turned violent when “right-wing religious fanatics” (us) threw explosive devices into the crowd. Even the nominal opposition Raven Network reports confusion about what caused the tragedy and who is at fault for escalating it. Our dolt of a President promises a federal investigation to determine who’s to blame. Anyone with even a gram of integrity could tell you where the responsibility lies.

Here is the truth. I was there from start to finish.

We were blindsided. Usually, everyone knows when a ‘spontaneous demonstration of public outrage’ is scheduled to take place. It’s advertised online and in the news. The local police and fire departments are on hand—even if they are ordered to stand down—just in case things get out of control. The ‘actions’ almost always happen when the targeted buildings are unoccupied. That’s not what happened today.

The attackers knew people were in the church. The lights were on, and there were cars in the lot. They meant to do us injury and worse. Why? My guess is that it had something to do with the turmoil in the middle of the country, which the government blames on right-wing Christian nationalists. The media’s been full of rabidly anti-Christian slander for months now. This is nothing new, but it has intensified tremendously since the Des Moines riots last year at the beginning of the purported Insurrection.

We were down in the hall when they started blowing the windows out upstairs. They used fireworks, their tried-and-true method for burning things down. Oddly, there was no shouting, no drums beating, and no chanting of ritual slogans by the attackers as they worked themselves up. We had no idea a mob was gathering until the attack began.

It took a minute for us to register what was happening. Once it sank in, we rushed upstairs to try to put the fires out. It was stupid when you think about it, but we were in shock, and our first thought was to save our church. Besides, we were terrified to go outside.

The attackers worked with military precision. From the broken windows in the sacristy and the church office, we could see people with crowbars smashing car windows in our parking lot and along the street behind the church. Another group followed, tossing explosives into the vehicles to set them on fire. It was so thorough and carried out so quietly.

***

Old John stopped writing and took several deep breaths, almost gasps, swiveling in his office chair and looking about as if to reassure himself he was safe at home. His library’s soft, brown, grass-papered walls remained solid, the books in their assigned places. The air smelled of dust and old varnish; there wasn’t a trace of smoke in it. The light from the ancient electric lamp was low and warm. He ought to have felt as safe as anyone might feel at such a time in such a country, but his heart trembled as he picked up the pen and continued to write.

***

From the Journals of John Pavlov (continued)

The church is in the town center, and the fire station is only a block away. We assumed that the police and firefighters would arrive in two or three minutes to get things under control and us out to safety, but for twenty minutes, we were left alone to keep the building from burning down around us. For most of that time, we were successful.

We had several fire extinguishers because Orthodox churches burn a lot of candles and incense. And, in the traditional Russian style, we don’t have pews—just a few chairs in the back for the old and sick, so the nave is wide open. The iconostasis and the floors are hardwood and polished with flame-retardant finishes. We were well prepared for fire.

Things went from bad to worse when someone outside tossed a canister into the church through one of the shattered windows. Our quick-thinking deacon threw a wet rag over it, thinking it was tear gas, and tossed it back out. In retrospect, it was another brave but dangerously stupid move, though it saved our lives. Or most of us.

The image of that canister coming back out of the window has been viewed almost five billion times in less than ten hours. The government is using it as evidence that we kept a secret cache of explosives on the premises. Explosives in a church!

The plain and simple truth is that the ‘demonstrators’ lobbed a bomb into the church. They meant to do mortal harm, and they met their objective. Only the tables were turned, and the terrorists got the wrong victims.

There was a knot of ‘justly outraged citizens’ under the window, almost certainly the ones who had thrown the bomb, when the thing exploded. The force of the blast sent shrapnel and glass back into the sanctuary. Miraculously, no one inside was gravely hurt. But the terrorists outside, who did not expect to receive their gift back, were not so fortunate. Two were blown to pieces, and six others were critically wounded. If it had exploded inside, I doubt I’d be writing this now. That’s what happened. I witnessed it. I’m not lying.

But that isn’t the end of the story.

There was silence inside and outside for a few seconds, though it seemed like minutes. And then all hell, and I mean this literally, broke out. The shrieks of the injured were quickly drowned out by outraged shouts from the previously hushed crowd. In no time, they were screaming, “Kill the Russian fascist pigs!”, “No mercy!”, “Death to religion! Death to the Enemies of the People!”

We heard the police and firetruck sirens, but the crowd was at the front doors.

“One, two, three, four, batter down those fucking doors!” It was fast. The doors shattered, and the mob was about to pour in. Then someone shouted, “Stand back! Make way! Let’s see how they like this!”

‘This’ turned out to be a bazooka or mortar. It may not have been a military device, but it doesn’t matter. It worked. The person using it was in full black camouflage. He or she or they or whatever knelt on one knee like they knew what they were doing and fired a round directly down the middle of the nave toward the center of the iconostasis.

Everyone dropped to the floor, everyone except Jimmy Mitrovic. I don’t know if he was dazed or thought he could somehow stop the attacker, but Jimmy just stood there, stock still in the middle of the church.

The shell went right through him. I saw this. I looked up and saw him explode in a spray of blood and gore. The shell itself was moving too fast to see. It passed through him and into the altar, where it detonated. The sound was deafening. The iconostasis collapsed outward into the nave. The air was filled with smoke and dust. It all happened at once, faster than the blink of an eye. I was sure that most of us inside the church were dead. I had no idea how I survived.

***

Old John’s right hand shook so hard that he dropped his pen. Gasping again, he looked up as if he expected to see the bleeding pieces of Jimmy Mitrovic scattered down the nave toward the collapsed iconostasis.

He could smell the sharp mixture of burnt wood, sulfur, and resin, and the faint, acrid tang of scorched eggs as the icons on the iconostasis began to catch fire. He felt the furious beat of his heart as he ran with a nearly exhausted fire extinguisher through the slippery mire that was once his friend toward the imminent conflagration, others staggering along with him, all of them near dead from the shock and horror of what was happening.

This was a normal country when I came here as a kid, a country with laws and real elections, a country where people might disagree with the government and not be afraid of disappearing into the night or found hanging from an overpass. The United States of America, for all its strangeness and outrageous foolishness, was still a safe haven, the envy of the world, a place whose initials, U-S-A, carried the weight and glory of the S-P-Q-R on the standards of the Roman Legions. No more.

How did it come to this, that the name of the grand and mighty republic, which survived so many perils, should be spat out and replaced by a hollow confection like the United Federated Districts? Even the communists could do better than that! I’ll take the bald-faced lie of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics over the insipidness of a name for a country that carries all the weight of a poorly run rural county.

Shaking his head with disgust, Pavlov read over what he had written, picked up his pen, and continued writing.

***

From the Journals of John Pavlov (continued)

In the end, though, only Jimmy and Margery died. Margery stood up and stumbled over to what remained of her husband. She stood there for a few seconds and then fell to the floor into the bloody mess that was once the love of her life. Dead. We didn’t know it at the time. Everything was happening so fast. She might have fainted. But, later, when it was all over, the medics took her out in a body bag and Jimmy in half a dozen large black garbage bags.

At the time, we fully expected that the attacker would keep firing shells into the church until we were all as unidentifiably and indistinguishably dead as Jimmy, but the police and fire department had finally arrived, and suddenly, the camouflaged shooter and the rest of the mob were gone. They evaporated as silently as they had arrived.

Maybe the attackers were shocked by their own violence. Perhaps they didn’t expect it to go so far. Maybe they planned it that way. But it was over as fast as it started. Two of us were dead. Thirty were injured, but incredibly, none critically. I had a couple of scrapes on my neck and face, a bump on my head, some minor burns on my hands, and a bloody nose. The whole thing was over in twenty minutes.

***

John Pavlov was not a drinker, but he drank that night. Three tumblers of vodka straight up with three tumblers of ice water on the side, the way his grandfather had drunk when Pavlov was a boy. Vodka to get drunk, water to chase away a hangover.

He awoke Monday morning, shivering, on the couch in the library, momentarily without any recollection of how he had fallen asleep there. When he sat up, his head spun, and his tongue felt like it had been glued to his palate, but he felt no pain. Until memory arrived with consciousness and tears.

***

From the Journals of John Pavlov

Wednesday, October 29, 2053

The Mitrovics’ funeral was today. It was held in a snowstorm under a large tent in the churchyard. Over five hundred people attended, most standing out in the snow. Many were strangers, people from Oakridge and the surrounding towns—some from as far away as Hartford, Connecticut, and Concord, New Hampshire. They came to show solidarity. It was as much a political demonstration as a funeral, though no one carried signs or shouted slogans. The funeral service went off with a sense of sobriety and solemn beauty. Thank God the terrorists weren’t present. The Party honchos at least had the decency to see that that didn’t happen. Maybe they have a sense of shame, after all.

The authorities drew the line when it came to the burial. Only the priest, the family, and the choir were permitted to go to the cemetery. It seems that the government was afraid that the crowd would multiply on the way to the graveyard and things would get out of hand. I can’t blame them.

We didn’t have the traditional mercy meal after the service, either. The parish hall is unusable. There must be a meter of water in it from the Fire Department’s hoses the other day. Besides, the church is taped off because of the investigation. And when that’s over, how will we ever pay to have everything put back together? We’re a small congregation. We don’t even know where we’ll be worshipping going forward—if we’ll be worshipping anywhere. We can’t spend the winter in a tent. It was almost unbearable today, and the temperature was only 0°C.

God help us.

***

Old John reread the previous two entries in the light of day on the couch by the fireplace in his living room. His tears were spent, and he was drinking strong black tea. He’d made and received a flurry of calls over the previous two days. The fog of disbelief and heartbreak enshrouded everyone. For Old John, though, the bright chill of the new day was doing much to, if not raise his spirits, confirm that he was still among the living and that it was good to be alive.

Wasn’t it Nietzsche who said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?” It’s a pity he had so much contempt for the one who said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” You put those two quotes together, and it explains why we’ve outlasted them all: Romans, Turks, Mongols, Communists, Fascists, and a whole sewerful of others. And why we’ll still be around when the current mix of them all sinks back into the slime.

The smile that played over Old John’s face was not one of resignation or bitterness. It was the silent declaration of a man who had been tried and endured, a man who knew his enemy’s strength and found it wanting.