Cory's "After the Siege" on The Infinite Matrix

My story After the Siege has been published in a special edition of The Infinite Matrix magazine. Siege is a parable about the Siege of Leningrad, based in part on the stories my grandmother told me about her ordeal in the Leningrad civil defense corps when she was a little girl. The story was previously published in the Russian magazine Esli, and I podcasted a reading of it as I read it. It appears in Overclocked, my new short story collection, Thunder's Mouth Press.

"You can't go!" Popa shouted at her. "Are you crazy? You can't go to the front! You have two small children, woman!" He was red-faced, and his hands were clenching and unclenching. Trover was having a tantrum that was so loud and horrible that Valentine wanted to rip her hearing aids out.

Mata's eyes were red. "Harald, you know I have to do this. It's not the 'front' – it's our own city. My country needs me – if I don't help to fight for it, then what will become of our children?"

"You never got over the glory of fighting, did you?" Her father's voice was bitter in a way that she'd never heard before. "You're an addict!"

She held up her left hand and shook it in his face. "An addict! Is that what you think?" Her middle finger and little finger on that hand had never bent properly in all of Valentine's memory, and when Valentine had asked her about it, she'd said the terrible word knucklebreakers which was the old name for the police. "You think I'm addicted to this? Harald, honor and courage and patriotism are virtues, no matter that you would make them into vices and shame our children with your cowardice. I go to fight now, Harald, and it's for all of us."