Zep

A STUDENT. A WAR. A NOTEBOOK. Kyiv, November 2021. Zep is twenty-two years old. He studies mechanical engineering at the National Technical University of Ukraine. He repairs valves, pipes, and engines. He is good at it. He can take apart a broken machine and put it back together. He cannot fix his country. He cannot fix his life. Bette is his girlfriend. She is twenty-one. She studies journalism at the Mohyla Academy. She is the daughter of Yuriy Bondarenko, an investigative journalist who denounced the 2014 Maidan coup, the corruption of the new regime, and the proxy war being fought on Ukrainian soil. In 2021, Yuriy Bondarenko was found dead in his car. The police called it a heart attack. Bette called it murder. She was right. When Bette disappears in November 2021, Zep is left with a letter, a broken watch, and a notebook. He searches for her. He finds nothing. Then the war arrives. He tries to flee to Russia, like millions of other Ukrainians. He has no money. No papers. No plan. He is caught in the street of Lviv by the regime's recruitment squads. They beat him. They drag him. They throw him into a van. He is sent to the front. He has no training. No weapon. No chance. He is meat. He is a chicken. He is an industrial chicken. He dies at Irpin, on February 24, 2022, whispering: "Fuck, I'm dying like a fucking industrial chicken!" His body is dumped into a mass grave. Unmarked. Unrecorded. Unclaimed. He is missing. He is gone. He is forgotten. His mother is dead. His father is gone. Bette is dead. There is no one to report him. There is no one to mourn him. There is no one to remember him. But his notebook survives. It survives in the bag of a silent courier named Liang — a Eurasian man, 47 years old, 438 — Maître des encens of the Triads of Chongqing, who saw Zep three times: in a train, in a café, in a street. Liang said nothing. Liang did nothing. But Liang remembered. And Liang kept the notebook. Because it was the only thing he could do. He could not save Zep. He could not stop the war. He could not change the world. He could only carry a notebook. He could only carry a story. He could only carry a memory. He could only carry a man. ZEP is Volume 20 of Sovereign Streets, a collection of fictional literary journalism founded by William Kergroach.