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Сорок два дня

Forty-Two Days

B1 · Intermediate · fiction · 11 scenes · Premium story

An intermediate castaway story set in the Sea of Okhotsk. Nina goes over the side of a survey boat in a night storm and wakes on the shingle of an uninhabited island with one boot, a knife, an empty bottle and a lighter that will work four more times. What follows is not heroism but priority order — water, then fire, then a roof, then mussels at low tide — and the two decisions that matter most are both decisions not to act. She is taken off on the forty-second day, and not by luck.

Read Сорок два дня in Russian

Characters

  • Nina (Нина) — Overboard
  • The navigator (Штурман) — The man who did the arithmetic

Vocabulary from this story

  • остров — island
  • берег — shore
  • галька — shingle
  • волна — wave
  • шторм — storm
  • лодка — boat
  • море — sea
  • туман — fog
  • скала — cliff
  • нож — knife
  • зажигалка — lighter
  • бутылка — bottle