The “dead-end branch” again risks ending up in a dead end. Social.* * *Before engaging in literary work, the American writer Ted Kosmatka tried many specialties. He worked as a zookeeper, a laboratory assistant, a volunteer researcher (with a group of biologists working to protect endangered species), an assistant at Chicago's famous Field Museum of Natural History, a theater actor in New York, a metal mill worker, a church minister, a house painter, a waiter and dishwasher at a roadside diner, a college teacher. Kosmatka, in his own words, often found himself homeless (“but never unemployed”). Currently, Ted Kosmatka works in the research department of one of the steel industry enterprises. He made his debut in fiction in 2005 with the story “God's Motor” and has since published about a dozen stories.