Day 1541

Wind-water

Russia is attacking Kyiv at the moment, so I will be brief. The text and images in this post may appear disjointed, perhaps bizarre.

As the rockets and drones and bombs came whistling in this morning I learned there exists a fortuneteller in Kyiv, a woman of fifty-one years, called Veronika Anikiyevich, though she prefers the title “astrology consultant”—which possesses a certain dignity that “fortuneteller” lacks, the way a man might insist he is a “beverage historian” rather than merely a drunkard. Her contact list presents her more frankly as “Veronika Fenshui (Feng shui?) Office” and “Veronika Anikiyevich/Fortuneteller Yermak.” She runs a Telegram channel called “Lunar Hours” and, since 2024, operates as a registered sole proprietor offering “other individual services”—a classification so vague it could encompass anything from tarot readings to the rewriting of history itself.

Her Russian father, named Fedor Anikiyevich, once headed some provincial political organization in a town c…