The Revelation

By Olga Sidorina Wilkins

The way they met was nothing special. Two strangers methodically broke every rule and ended up in a filthy apartment somewhere in a godforsaken shithole also known as Smila. The woman sparkled and shimmered like a jelly-filled, swollen moon. The man kept a straight face and fired off little jabs. Sharp, short jolts of electricity. There – one to the ear, one to the gut, and one straight to the artery. If anything, it only seemed to galvanize her further. So eventually, he smashed a bottle over her head. She burst out laughing, wiping thin streams of blood from her forehead, and then they fucked.

By morning they were back in their home city. Both dragging precious souvenirs from the night before: she had a rose and jeans torn between her ass cheeks; he had difficulty getting hard and a stupid grin on his face.

The very next night, they turned on every light source in her place, opened a bottle of whiskey, both stripped naked and started picking at each other’s old scars. That wasn’t enough. Fetching a knife from the kitchen drawer, the woman first checked its blade with her finger. It better be sharp. Looking straight into the man’s eyes, she slit open her stomach, pulled out her intestines without flinching, and held them out to him. The man didn’t hesitate, just did the same. They swapped, finished off the bottle, and closed the cuts with wide, ugly stitches. The rest of the evening they kept poking each other with the knife, giggling. That was fun. When the alcohol wore off, it became clear their bodies hadn’t taken that swapping well (both lovers would be sick for years: nausea, vomiting, the whole thing).

When it was time for them to part, they held each other tight, sealed their mouths together as if for artificial respiration, and breathed the same breath until both fell unconscious. Living unconscious like that turned out to be oddly fascinating. Switched off and absent, moving through the days – smiling little pricks, insufferably pleasant, entirely dead. Trying to get high on the new gluten-free, ethically-sourced, protein-infused, iron-boosted, cognition-stimulating breakfast cereals. Take two! Discounts apply!

But failing.

– How does it feel to carry someone else's guts inside you?

– Well, you know, that feeling of something inside you that isn't yours, rejecting you completely?

– Hm…

– It feels like home!

Eventually the hangover became unbearable, and those two met again. In a pink room with dirty sheets and unceasing music.

The lovers greeted each other in silence. The woman took a deep breath and pulled down the zipper on the back of her dress. The fabric slid to the floor with a soft rustle. The man pulled his T-shirt over his head. They stepped toward each other. In sync, without a word, they slipped their fingers into the openings of those thick seams below their chests and began working into them. Deeper, slowly. That was a long-awaited pain.

In the dimly lit room, an Elvis record played. The man held a cheap bottle of sparkling wine in one hand, the woman’s waist in the other. He yanked the plastic cork out with his teeth and poured the liquid straight into her mouth. They held each other and swayed in place, sloshing in a puddle of blood dripping from their stitches.

By morning, sitting on the floor in their underwear and T-shirts, they checked their wounds again. Then they spread out on the carpet all their most treasured possessions —

books,

(Little girl walks down the hall

thick book under her armpit –

nobody knows

nobody knew

nobody wanted to know

This too shall pass)

music,

(Small boy

blue pencil in his hand

rewinds the cassette

One more time

One more time

One more time

To no end)

paintings,

(It’s in the Uffizi

just before

entering

“I don’t get

Botticelli at all”

At The Birth of Venus

she cries)

trauma,

(everything

was done

out of love)

orphanhood,

(In the crowded

room. Mostly in

the crowded room)

a loaded gun,

(Do you love me?

Do you love me?)

two empty shells,

(bang-bang)

and a pile of dirty laundry.

(Let me sniff your dirt out)

Piece by piece, they put it together like a mosaic and jointly decoded its message: the world was coming to an end.

Before going to sleep, they whispered their sweetest confessions:

– You’re schizophrenic.

– You’re impotent.

Then they kissed and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

In the morning, he smeared shit across her face. She licked his fingers clean and served him vomit for breakfast. He ate, praising it.

– Tastes like my mother’s!

Time stopped meaning anything. Neither of them remembered the last time they got dressed, ate properly, slept, or stayed awake. Things were fluid, everything bled into everything else. Running their fingers inside each other’s flesh felt sweet, delicate and absolute. While they soaked the sheets with sweat and saliva, outside their windows the world tore itself apart. It raged with hurricanes, tornadoes, plague, locusts, famine, and no one noticed, except those two.

Watching the end approach became their only reality, their wedding march, their secret pact.

– Everything’s going to hell.

– There’s no saving the world.

– I don’t give a fuck as long as you’re here.

– You’re lying.

– Yes, I am.

The sky flooded with every shade of crimson. The earth went empty, violet and dark blue. Kneeling on a mattress in that pink room, thick with cigarette smoke and music, the lovers held hands staring out the window, and smoked. On the horizon, crawling toward them, came four legless horsemen of the apocalypse: stupidity, cowardice, ignorance, and ego. Each of them had a face they’d seen on television.

– I swear, no matter how much time we’ve got left, I’ll torture only you.

– I swear, no matter who kills me, you’ll be my fatal wound.

At dawn, acid rain began to fall. They danced in it, kissing. And when their lips were nothing but bloody rags, he pulled out a gun and shot her in the stomach.

Then himself.

No one noticed anything.

Olga Sidorina Wilkins is a Ukrainian novelist and screenwriter based in Kyiv. She is the author of the novel Gimme Shelter (2025), an urban coming-of-age story exploring female identity, memory, and freedom in contemporary Ukraine. The screen adaptation rights were purchased before the novel was published by the prominent Ukrainian production company 2Brave Productions, with film director Anna Buryachkova, whose debut feature Forever Forever premiered at the Venice Film Festival, attached to the project. Olga is currently working on the screenplay for the adaptation. The project was selected to participate in the international writing laboratory LIM2.

Olga’s fiction centers on the intimate intersections of the personal and the political, with a particular focus on women’s experience, embodiment, and cultural transformation. She is also an advocate for diversity and inclusion, and her work often reflects a deep engagement with questions of belonging and voice.