About the Author Misha Firer is a 25-year-old writer from Russia. After fighting in the Israeli Army & getting high in Amsterdam, he incidentally wound up in Berkeley, California. This year his short stories, essays and columns have appeared or forthcoming in BIG News (2), Laundry Pen, NuVein (2), Paumanok Review, Pink Chameleon, Rose & Thorn, Scarlet Letters, Slow Trains (2), Struggle, Taint, Vestal Review and WordRiot.

Vlad had his first love affair as an undergraduate at the university. For her it was passionate, consummate, and fulfilling. For him it was fleeting, self-gratifying, and disturbing. The reason for his discomposure was her unplanned pregnancy, followed by her unshakable decision to keep the baby.

By that time Vlad had already become a self-proclaimed man of action with high disregard for the consequences. He honed the technique of dealing with the relentless perseverance of the undesirable consequences of his actions by changing his geographical location. Soon it became his life-style, the matrix of his very existence.

There were always unplanned pregnancies followed by the routine reaction of his women who welcomed the opportunity to become mothers. Time and again, Providence forced Vlad to equate his promiscuous pleasure with its recurrent side effect, as contraception failed to stop Nature from taking its course.

Vlad remained true to his own nature; he expressed his perverse individualism into concrete acts of escaping the responsibilities of a new parent.

Allegedly Vlad had a life-long fascination with the ocean, and it was a perfect venue to escape geographical constraints and the ludicrous laws of almost every country that obliged parents to take care of their children.

For years, Vlad had been successful. The world was big enough for his escapades and escapes, until one day, everything changed.

The phone rang, and when Vlad picked up the receiver, it was not one of his co-workers or recent lovers.

Hi Vlad. I know this is hard to believe, but this is your first-born son.

Vlad immediately hung up, packed his bag and went to look for another apartment on the other side of town. Once he moved, there was a phone call and a voice that sounded ominously like his own, spoke placidly.

Hi Vlad. Sorry to bother you, but this is your son again.

So he moved out, this time to another city. He laid low for a while, thinking that he was safe. There was another phone call.

You can run, but you cannot hide. We have to meet.

Vlad felt too tired to fly the coop again, he felt old and beaten. He recognized that his destiny had caught up with him.


We met at the park. I approached him and introduced myself. He looked at me suspiciously and fearfully extended his hand.

He tried to look at me as an abstraction but what he actually saw was a corporeal manifestation of his egocentric past.

As I stood in front of my father, I wanted to tell him about myself, about my life. But I gradually realized that I had absolutely nothing to say.