Minute Fiction II

When Trostya and I went out to play, the church had disappeared. We didn’t know what to do. The church had been there all our lives, wrapped with vines and moss. Our parents played here as children as well, and only our grandparents could remember the days before the thin stone slates of the ceiling had fallen past repair. Now, the church was gone. Only a few of the largest stones at the bottom, scratched with scores of village names, remained.

For days we kept it secret. Had our invocations of magi and demons brought this disaster upon us? Were we somehow to blame? Trostya told me it was more my fault than his. Each day when our chores were done we searched for the stones as far as our legs would take us. The secret came out when our babushka twisted his ear, demanding to know why I was acting so guilty. She played us against each other that way.

All the adults went out to the remains of our playground. They decided the gypsies must have taken the church. Stones covered in moss turned out to be worth more than I ever imagined.

Isn’t it always the gypsies?

Years later, I am shivering in a phone booth on the other side of the world. Trostya is on the other end of the line, shouting above the tired techno of the club he bounces at in Saratov. He needs money, and I am in America, where there is money, so why don’t I send him some? I have to tell him again that it costs five times more to live here, and that I only work part time, and that I have accumulated too many loans for too many credit hours at school already. Rent is due next week. This time I cannot help him. He tells me how much money he’d be making right now if he were in America.

When he hangs up on me I press my forehead to the glass of the phone booth. I feel shame for taking the girl with pink hair in my introductory neuroscience class to coffee after class. Can I in good conscious court her when I can never take her to dinner and a movie? I should have let well enough alone. I will disappoint her.

My breath fills the glass before me with condensation. I wish for the gypsies. I want them to take away the debt, dollar by dollar, in a way the banks will never notice. I want them to take the debt that Trostya has undoubtedly accrued at the club in Saratov.

Maybe, if they are kind, they will take him too.

Struggles

This semester my body has not been very good to me. I have always had an on-again-off-again friendship with my intestine, but the past few months have swung, statistically, toward the off-again side. I am often frustrated because at times when I am in a chipper mood or want to be doing work, queasy sensations bring me down. The past 24 hours also brought me a pounding headache. I tried sleeping it off, a pair of extra-strength tylenol, water, and a long shower, with no improvement. One of the pills left over from my wisdom tooth removal seemed like the next course of action. I was reading about feminist art criticism and suddenly felt the pill kick on– so I’m now a little bit high, but still in pain.

Feminism and my Digital Film Major and skepticism. All are opening my mind and have been helping me think in new ways and I’m glad to have them. But I’m struggling, especially with the feminism, to still enjoy a lot of things in the entertainment world. I need to reconcile the feminist in me that rages at the opening titles of a Bond film with the credits being projected on womens’ undulating body parts with the video-artist who thinks it’s cool as shit and the insecure little girl who wishes she looked that hot. There’s a lot of anger and guilt that builds between those three aspects of me. The skeptical aspect of me is only in conflict with the outside world– teachers, peers. I want to be able to access all parts as I need them, but I do not want to see everything in political terms. The personal is not political. I have sympathy for the women of the 70’s, wondering if they were having “the right kind” of orgasm.

I feel like I am falling behind. My body can’t keep up, my mind is tangled.

I’m not a girl who misses much
Do do do do do do do do, oh yeah.
Why do I sometimes still look at you with the gaze of a stranger, a scientest? Because I think you’re hiding things from me. Because I don’t know what you are feeling, and I am afraid that like all the others you will find a deep well of contempt for me very soon.