“No,” Sasha lies, wondering if the neighbor snitched on Marik, too, wondering if Grandma will save her from what awaits when her mother and Grandpa get home from work. She will never tell anyone about Marik riding the streetcar with her. They did it, and that’s enough.

She is on a bench, facedown, on her stomach. The wood surface is hard, made harder by her mother’s hands that are pressing on her legs and shoulders, holding her down. She turns her head and sees Grandpa pulling the belt out of his trousers, black and thick, with a round metal buckle. She tries to flail her arms and kick her legs, but her mother’s grip is like a vise. She turns her head, the only part of her body she can move, and sees Grandma standing by the door, the light from the electric bulb glaring off her glasses so she can’t see her eyes. The belt swishes above, and she hears it cut through the air before it lands on her behind and leaves a sting so painful, she wails. But she knows Grandpa won’t stop with only one strike, so she keeps wailing and screaming and wiggling under her mother’s hands as the belt does its swishing and stinging, as the tears on her face mix with snot and leave pathetic swirls of drool on the wood of the bench. “I won’t do it anymore!” she howls to halt the belt. “I won’t, I won’t, I swear I won’t!” she shrieks, in sync with its rhythm, and then there is no more swishing, and the air becomes whole again.

“Next time I’ll spank you with nettles,” says Grandpa and threads the belt through the loopholes on the waist of his pants.

Her mother’s hands open so she can scramble off the bench, past Grandma, whose eyes she still cannot see, and run to her bed and crawl under the blanket to pity herself and her punished behind, to think about injustice and the meaning of life.

At dinner, her mother talks about dangers. The dangers she saw at the front, where she was a surgeon until Sasha was born, and the dangers they all read about in Pravda or hear about from babushkas who sit on benches near the shed and chew on sunflower seeds. Mines in the fields and unexploded shells under the forest loam, whirlpools in the river where they go to swim in the summer, gangs of hooligans who get drunk on moonshine and break windows at the school and rip apples off Grandpa’s apple tree. There are already so many dangers lurking around that only an unthinking fool like Sasha would conjure up new ones.

“Do you understand what you did?” she asks, and Sasha nods silently because she can still feel the belt welts and doesn’t want to provoke any more punishment.