Kristina Ten: Childhood Fears: Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble

Kristina Ten: Childhood Fears: Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble

Before I learned to walk, to draw, to use a spoon, to ask for help, to say what I want—before I hit any of these major kid milestones—I learned to be afraid of boiling water.

There was an accident in the kitchen of the small family dorm we shared at Moscow State University, where my mom and dad had met and where they were finishing out their degrees as new parents. A pot of water boiling on the stove. A baby crawling underfoot. I was too young to remember, but I’ve heard the story enough times. It always skews more heavily toward the aftermath than the incident itself, the way we’re told to look at the sun only through special filtered glasses.

They didn’t know what to do. Panicking, they carried me outside, into the snow. I was in the hospital for a long time, getting skin grafts to the affected areas. This was an era of Soviet scarcity—bread lines, drug shortages—and the medicine I took, like many others, had to be bought on the black market. Even after the burns on my feet healed, I refused to wear socks, then developed an aversion to footwear in general. I went through a phase that involved collecting all the shoes in the apartment and tossing them off the balcony, watching gleefully as they fell.

As a teenager, I was mortified to learn that autografts often involve borrowing healthy skin from the patient’s inner thighs and buttocks. As a young writer, trying to find poetry everywhere, I convinced myself that the scar on my left foot, still the most pronounced one, looks like a sunflower.

As an adult, this childhood fear has manifested as a simultaneous aversion to, and obsession with, boiling water—and anything related to burning, melting, bubbling, steaming. I love gory horror, but this is my one no-go zone. I didn’t just watch that bathtub scene in Deep Red through my fingers; I turned around and buried my face into the theater seat. Same with House of Wax, that moment with Jared Padalecki’s face. Even hot tubs I can’t get on board with.

Friends will rent a cabin with a hot tub for a long weekend, and I’ll hang out nearby, joking that it’s a hygiene thing, or it’d make me feel like some herb in a witch’s cauldron, or I left my bathing suit at home—anything that lets me be no fun in a light way that we can all laugh off. The truth is I don’t trust that little electronic control panel to hold its temperature. I don’t trust the tub’s hard cover not to lift up, swing down, lock me under.

For some reason, I’m okay with dry saunas. This might just be a cultural thing: I don’t think you’re allowed to be of Russian and Korean extraction and not appreciate a bathhouse.

All that being said, it still took me until a few years ago to realize that I write constantly about boiling water. I have a story called “Bones in It” about a spirit who lives behind the stove in a Chicago banya. I have another one called “Fisherman’s Soup” about a woman who, while recreating recipes from her grandmother’s cookbook, discovers a group of catty mermaids swimming in the broth.

Then there’s “Kamchatka,” set amid the gurgling geysers and thermal pools of the titular peninsula. Even when my water’s not boiling, it’s not exactly advisable to swim in. “The Dreadful and Specific Monster of Starosibirsk” features a river contaminated by local industries, where all the fish go belly up. And “Bunny Ears,” from my debut collection, takes place at a summer camp on the banks of a lake that, for much of the story, is off-limits due to a toxic algae bloom.

My debut story collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, is fascinated with our bodies—and the external forces that try to control them, and how we might win that control back. It’s acutely aware of the human body’s insubstantiality, too: how very easy we are to physically disappear. I’ve always thought of the body not as a temple, or a fortress, or anything remotely solid, but as a profoundly defective layer of defense, fragile and permeable.

In the book, there are bodies of paper dolls, easily disappeared in water. Bodies of high school volleyball players, easily disappeared by a culture of weight loss. Bodies of women, commandeered and manipulated until they are unrecognizable. And there is hope, too, in the clever ways the owners of these bodies have devised to regain autonomy. 

Another way my fear of boiling water still haunts me is that I’m a truly useless cook. I can’t be in a crowded kitchen with the stovetop on. Even when I’m alone in there with just one of the burners going, I stand a full arm’s length away, warily stirring whatever’s in the pot but always prepared to leap out of harm’s way. The invention of the air fryer has been huge for me, but I’m still most at ease around one of those supposedly depressing frozen meals. Future generations might disagree, but for now the microwave feels so much safer. 

ABOUT TELL ME YOURS, I’LL TELL YOU MINE

A strange and sinister debut from Stephen Dixon Award-winning author Kristina Ten    

The new kid in school discovers a diabolical presence in the depths of an English-language-learning CD-ROM. A desperate and declining empire designs an elaborate matchmaking system around cootie catchers and soda-can tabs. A former varsity volleyball player reopens the grisly wounds of her youth, haunted by a lost friend. In each story, the game has been twisted. In each game, players must make their own rules. Through a bloody, shattered lens, the artifacts of growing up take on a new and disquieting power—riddles remain unsolved, pranks have perilous stakes, and superstitions won’t save you.  

Populated by living paper dolls, summer camp legends, and trivia nights gone terribly wrong, the twelve genre-crossing tales in Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine wrestle with themes of memory, disobedience, alienation, belonging, and the horrors of inhabiting a body others seek to control. 

PRAISE FOR TELL ME YOURS, I’LL TELL YOU MINE

“Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is a joyous, incisive, inventive, and vital run of stories. I’d put it right alongside Terry Bisson’s Bears Discover Fire and Other Stories, but with the distinct possibility that you might see some of Kelly Link’s stone bunnies on the next page turn. You’ll read this with a nervous grin, and then you’ll read it again, just to see how Kristina Ten pulls some of these magic tricks off.”  
– Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter and My Heart Is a Chainsaw 

“Never have I ever tasted such a delicious cocktail of nostalgia and dread. Reading these stories feels like saying Bloody Mary into the mirror: in Kristina Ten’s expertly crafted world, your own reflection becomes a monster. Fans of Kelly Link and Karen Russell will adore every darn second of this book. I know I did.”  
– GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot and Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart 

“Kristina Ten’s Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is an audacious debut, displaying a comfortable command across a variety of genres. These stories mix the creepy with the touching, the grotesque with the beautiful. My heart ached for some of these characters, pounded in fury for others. Ten is a writer to reckon with.” 
– Nathan Ballingrud, author of The Strange and Crypt of the Moon Spider 

“Imagine you’re playing a game, one of the oldest and best-loved in your collection, a game you’ve always found completely pleasurable, completely absorbing. This time, though, midway through the first round, the rules seem to bend and turn inside out. You no longer recognize the board, you realize, and what’s with these playing pieces? Where did they come from? Did you move that one just now and forget about it, or did it move itself? The game is still pleasurable, still absorbing, but unfamiliar suddenly, and slightly threatening. That’s what reading Kristina Ten is like. Her stories are marvels, and page after page they found new ways to surprise and discomfit me.” 
– Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations  

“The stories of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine delight in trickery. Its collective narrative⁣ voice is somehow one of comfort, of solace; it might even evoke feelings of nostalgia—if you⁣ were raised in The Twilight Zone.”⁣  
– Joe Vallese, editor of It Came from the Closet 

“In Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine, Kristina Ten transports us back to the schoolyard . . . just not the way we remember it. Infused with horror and heartbreak, these stories play at the edges of realism, dip in and out of the fantastic, and showcase Ten’s incredible range as her characters navigate girlhood and womanhood, the immigrant experience, and the indelible marks that our histories leave on our futures. This collection delights from start to finish, each story a fresh take on our oldest fears.” 
– Gwen E. Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw 

Bio:

Kristina Ten is the author of Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine (2025, Stillhouse Press). Her stories appear in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Nightmare, The Dark, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney’s Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. A graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder’s MFA program in fiction, Ten has received fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Find her at kristinaten.com. 

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is available for purchase from Stillhouse Press and anywhere books are sold.

Contact:

Website: kristinaten.com

Instagram: @kristinasergeevnaten

Threads: @kristinasergeevnaten

Bluesky: @kristinaten.bsky.social 

X: @kristina_ten 

Facebook: @kristina.ten

Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8086492.Kristina_Ten

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