• This is one of my favorites among the stories I’ve written recently. I was most active as a writer in the 1960s and 1970s, but returned to short stories in 2013, essentially in retirement from the mundane jobs I’d held for the previous two decades. Nikola is a character with whom I fell in love when I wrote this story. I admire her literacy and her guts. She lives alone in a grim world, but she’s a survivor.