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When memory betrays us, it seems that everything we experienced was like white snow that dissolved on a hot palm…

About her

She has a pink face, blue light eyes and snowy hair… she could probably get lost among the snow and blizzard, freeze there and not be among people…

Sometimes when I turned her over, she said “Mom!”, brightly and loudly, but more often she cried, just like children running in the yard… In the middle of which stood a large forged spider with peeling blue, yellow and orange paint, sometimes it was called " traffic light"… And in the late 90s. They repainted it green and four months later, like an unborn baby, he disappeared, late at night. The older children scolded the kids that if they did not obey, they would also be repainted and they would disappear in the blue darkness of the night… The summer was strange and hot then, such that it was impossible to go out without a glass bottle of water, plastic was a new thing, and then my cousin went to Israel… To a sunny country, where yesterday's hot buns were given to the poor or simply thrown into opaque bags the colour of a sea lagoon…

Jacques Yves Cousteau, strange and obnoxious more like an old owl, plied the oceans on a small white ship with a scarlet stripe cutting through the bow. Fish, fish, fish and sea urchins, eating the algae that littered the bottom like a disease…

The torn bag in which the doll was then placed was taken first to the mezzanine. They wanted to throw it away, but didn’t dare, and it was painted in gouache in the form of the only object that survived the global catastrophe.

The crows on the branches shouted something after the people leaving early, calling for someone else…

And that first doll turned into a memory and froze forever in a dark basement, which dissolved like memories that never existed.

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Irina Tall (Novikova) is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor’s degree in design. The first personal exhibition “My soul is like a wild hawk” (2002) was held in the museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. In her works, she raises themes of ecology, in 2005 she devoted a series of works to the Chernobyl disaster, draws on anti-war topics. The first big series she drew was The Red Book, dedicated to rare and endangered species of animals and birds. Writes fairy tales and poems, illustrates short stories. She draws various fantastic creatures: unicorny the Exhibition is Irina s, animals with human faces, she especially likes the image of a man – a bird – Siren. In 2020, she took part in Poznań Art Week. Her work has been published in magazines: Gupsophila, Harpy Hybrid Review, Little Literary Living Room and others. In 2022, her short story was included in the collection “The 50 Best Short Stories”, and her poem was published in the collection of poetry “The wonders of winter”.