What Chekhov Meant to Tell Me by Jill Bronfman

Anton and I were in school together, and while he was a year younger than me, he seemed like an old man to me. First of all, he enrolled in the Academy with the intention to graduate, to make a name for himself, and to become rich, in that order. A logical sequence of events, to him, and to most people, but not to me. I hated order then, and while I have some respect for it now, all these decades later, I still see it as antithetical to passion.

And yet, Anton managed to conjure passion as if it was on a list of imperatives.

Thanked him for that, often, often out of breath. 

He began to write when we were still students, and I started editing his work to add what he called color but I, secretly and only to myself, called life. 

I added the dog.

The dog meant a lot of things to me, but mostly it meant chaos, the way all animals are chaotic in their behavior and in their tendency to die at odd moments. Usually they die when you have come to love them almost completely, forgetting that they can die, forgetting that such a thing is even possible.

I would throw my arms around the dog’s neck and smother it with kisses when it barked while Anton was studying, to quiet it and also to show both of them who loved the dog more. Anton bought it food and took it for walks, and while I knew that the dog considered Anton his person, I still hoped, the way secondary characters always do, that I could move up in the ranks.

But not the gun. I had nothing to do with guns, never did, except that one time when I found Anton’s father’s gun on the top shelf in a closet, in his mother’s lovely hat box, and I pulled it out of the box and lifted it to see if it was as heavy as it looked, was it real or not. It was real, which I could tell not only by the weight, but by the look on Anton’s face when he surprised me by coming home early from class and looking at me from the other end of it.

He coughed.

I put the gun away, wrapped in Anton’s mother’s silk scarf and back into the hat box. Pushed it onto the closet shelf to await further instructions. And so it stayed until yesterday.

Anton, long gone, just a ghost now really, except for all the musty books and the high-noise shuffle of theater-goers’ frocks and umbrellas, still sometimes asks me what he meant to tell me. I tell him that my name was just a stage name, that I never wanted to be Irina, just her understudy. If I was her understudy, I tell Anton, you would have loved me. Oh, says Anton, handing me the gun, you are probably right.

Jill Bronfman’s work won the Irish Writers Centre’s Novel Fair 2025, placed second in the Joan Ramseyer Memorial Poetry Contest, was named a semi-finalist for both the James Applewhite Poetry Prize and The Waking’s Flash Prose Prize, and received an honorable mention in the Storm Cellar Force Majeure Flash Contest. Her work has been accepted for publication in five collections and over thirty literary journals. She has performed her work in The Bay Area Book Festival, Poets in the Parks, The Basement Series, Page Street, and LitQuake, and had her story about a middle-aged robot produced as a podcast by Ripples in Space. She is a reader for The Masters Review, and a Poet-Teacher for California Poets in the Schools. She has a J.D., and M.A., and is completing her MFA in Fiction at Pacific University.