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.

a change

On November 5^th we all awoke to a changed world.

Milk puddled in the indentations we left in our beds. When we opened the morning newspaper, milk gushed from between the folds, trickling between our legs.

Feet squirming into steel-toed boots found cream in the heel. Papers seeped out of patent leather brief cases filled with milk. Lunch boxes sloshed in the hands of our children. The clear platforms of the working girls’ shoes turned opaque.

In San Francisco, the thrift stores of Haight and Ashbury swirled with dyes bleeding into the milk. At Kent the sky swept the world clean with a white benediction of high-fat cream. We rolled in it. In New Orleans the milk spread quietly like butter above the buildings, never touching a soul, and we were relieved. The milk spurted from the towers and bastions of a bridge we never built in Alaska. The rigs in the gulf shut off their pumps when all they got from the sea floor was milk. The subways in New York had to be abandoned after the last of the tunnel-dwellers streamed past our sand-bag barricades.

We huddled around the government buildings in DC, looking for answers. They were filled completely, but their doors did not pour forth the gift of milk. Legislation was impossible and the laws of physics distressingly surmounted.

We wept with fear or joy, and our tears were white.