It was an account of how the strange attacks near Pripyat had grown worse in the last few weeks, and how this man, Alexi, was considering talking to his uncle in Kiev about them coming to live there, at least for awhile. There was more, but it was lost in a growing haze of confusion and fear.

These words, all in a language I shouldn’t understand but was somehow able to read, looked like they were written in my handwriting.

****

The journal had come without a return address or any kind of accompanying note or explanation. It had just been pushed through my mail slot one day when I was away at work. I asked my neighbors if they had seen anyone leaving me an envelope, but no one had. I actually waited until the next day to try reading the journal again, my delay mainly born out of my fear and reluctance at confirming that something so strange had come into my life. I half hoped when I picked up the journal again, I’d be unable to make any sense of it at all. Instead, I began comfortably reading it from the first page.

It seems that Alexi had originally started the journal in October of 1984 after receiving the book as a gift from his mother. Like happens for so many people, the entries started out regular before quickly petering out to nothing as his interest waned. Those first writings covered a period from when he got the journal until December of 1985, and that whole fourteen months only amounted to seven entries. Two of which when he was sad and one of which when he was drunk.

It felt strange and somehow wrong reading this man’s inner thoughts and feelings, even when they were put down in such a sparse and perfunctory fashion. It wasn’t as though he was bearing his soul that much, but I still felt uneasy when he started morosely talking about disappointing his father (who apparently had named him after an old Russian Tsarevich who was tortured and killed by his own father according to the internet) or how he really liked this girl who had moved to town a few months earlier.

It wasn’t until January of 1986 that the entries started to grow more frequent, and there seemed to be several reasons for this. For one, he got engaged to that girl he liked. For another, he got a promotion at his job. He was now the shift supervisor for the Number 3 and 4 light water reactors at the power plant. The power plant was named Chernobyl.