Harry Steinman - Little Deadly Things

“Well, stories are for pretending. I don’t have to make up stories. I could read books with fairytales,” Gergana offered.

“No. I don’t want stories anymore. That’s for little kids,” said nine-year-old Eva.

“Well, don’t you play pretend games with your friends?”

“I don’t play with the other kids. And I don’t like pretend games.”

“What about your friends? Don’t they like to play house or have tea parties?”

“I don’t know,” Eva said. “Anyway, you’re my only friend. And I’m not Little One anymore. I’m a woman.”

Gergana chuckled. “You’re a woman now? How very grown up. When did you become a woman?”

“A while ago,” said Eva, in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Oh, a while ago, eh?” Gergana teased. “And how did you decide that you’re now a woman?”

“Papa told me.”

Gergana began a vigil outside Eva’s door when Papa staggered home. She was Eva’s guard. Sometimes she was Eva’s alternate. She had no choice. She would protect Eva, no matter what.

What replaces fantasy and imagination for the child exiled from the acres of make-believe? Where does the mind travel when fairyland becomes forbidden territory? Eva found sanctuary in science with its logic and its immutable laws. Banished from enchantment, Eva found chemistry. She could create new worlds, real ones. Leave illusion to children who could pretend in safety. Science offered Eva the means to travel from her perilous world to an orderly one.

Sisters grow and sisters change. Gergana ripened into eye-catching adolescent beauty. She bore the hallmarks of classic loveliness—symmetrical features, full lips, high cheekbones and captivating green eyes—and her interests centered on boys. Gergana’s breasts were full, and she turned and stretched to display them. Her toned legs drew admiring eyes up to wide hips. The owners of those eyes sought to accompany Gergana. Eva no longer had an unrivaled claim to her sister’s attention.

Eva considered herself in a mirror. Her hair was unkempt, her features mismatched. She had no experience with style. Her single experiment with makeup led to calamitous results.

“How come you’re so pretty and I’m so ugly?” Eva asked one evening as she walked into her sister’s room following Gergana’s return from a social outing.

“Would you knock before you come into my room?” The tone was abrupt.

“Why are you ignoring me? Those boys don’t care about you as much as I do.”

“Well, I like boys and it gets me out of the house.”

“I wish you would play more with me,” said Eva.

“Little One, we’re not little kids anymore. You’re my sister and I love you. But I have friends. You will, too.”

“I doubt it. I’m not pretty like you are.”

Eva clung to her sister but she was as awkward as a skittering foal and her efforts to hold onto Gergana fed the distance between them. The distance grew as Gergana’s experiments with boys became experiences with men, her delight in schnapps and then liquor broadened to include marijuana and then cocaine.

Late one night Gergana stumbled home. Her key fought with the lock until the tumblers clicked into place and she staggered in. Her hair was matted, her clothing rumpled. Her words were slurred and coated with the sweet aroma of a flight of vodka. Eva helped Gergana into her bedroom, helped her get undressed. All the while, Gergana was singing popular songs or talking about her boyfriends, comparing one to another.

“Why do you do this?” Eva asked.

Gergana was lying on her bed. She reached for a stuffed animal, a plush pink rabbit with a blue waistcoat. Thin flexible wiring inside the toy’s ears held a shape, and Gergana alternated between bending the ears down, flopped over one moment and then alert and erect the next. She brought the bunny up to her face and cooed to it as she stroked its length.

“Why do you do this?” Eva repeated.

“Do what?”

“Get drunk. Get stoned. Give yourself to the boys. That. Why do you do it?”

“Flopsy,” Gergana whispered to her rabbit, “Little One is jealous.” Gergana’s words trailed off in an alcoholic haze.

“The boys don’t care about you. I do. You should spend your time with me.”

Gergana snored.

Gergana’s widening social interests claimed her. Now, when Papa’s clumsy steps shook the stairs leading to the Rozens’ third-floor apartment, the post outside Eva’s door was abandoned. Eva felt helpless. Her father was a big man, and she was small.

An unexpected warning from a surprising source gave Eva a solution to her growing dilemma. It was an ordinary spring day. Eva was dressed in her usual navy blue gabardine cargo pants. These were hemmed to fit her four-foot frame, cinched with a functional black leather belt that matched heavy black boots. A dark green work shirt gave her the appearance of a dwarfish custodian, and Eva’s trademark black cloak made her look like a walking toadstool.

Mama’s shapeless form greeted Eva that day. She was staring through eyes that were partitioned from the rest of her face by dark circles of fatigue. Despair carved hollows into her face. She shuffled along, wrapped in a frayed bathrobe despite the hour.

Mama started to speak, and then stopped. Eva had removed cleaning supplies from a storage area under a rust-stained sink. She held a bottle of bleach in her right hand and one of ammonia in her left.

“What?” Eva asked.

Mama stood just beyond Eva’s reach. “You might not want to mix bleach with ammonia,” Mama suggested.

“Why not?”

“It makes a gas if you mix them.”

“What gas?”

Three simple questions from this adolescent girl carried the force of a State Security interrogation.

“Um, bleach has chlorine in it.” She pointed to a label on the bottle. “See, ‘chlorine bleach’. If you mix it with ammonia, it makes chlorine gas which can hurt you. What are you trying to clean?”

Eva showed Mama the offending spot. Mama examined the stain on the heavy fabric’s sleeve. She reached for laundry soap and peroxide.

“Blood?”

Eva nodded. She offered no explanation nor did Mama ask for one. Mama dabbed the spot with peroxide, waited, and then scrubbed with laundry soap. She handed the cleaned shirt back to Eva and retreated down the dark hallway.

The label’s warning puzzled Eva. It told her what was hazardous but not why. She went back to her room to find an answer on her bookshelf. Every volume was a text. Each bore the bookplate of Sofia’s public library or of its university. Eva enjoyed the feel of paper and the heft of books and she handled them with the reverence of a rabbi cradling the Torah. Textbooks were her playmates and chemistry was her best friend.

Eva found her answer. Bleach breaks down in ammonia to release chlorine gas, a powerful greenish-yellow poison. During a world war in an earlier century, the gas earned the title of civilization’s first weapon of mass destruction. Eva pondered these facts and determined that she must experiment and learn. It would be easy to find a subject for her investigation. Wild dogs roamed the streets of Sofia. Victims were widespread: the deer enclosure at the city’s zoo suffered an attack and only the largest-antlered bucks survived; a British tourist in Nedyalsko, mauled almost beyond recognition; a child visiting her grandmother, dead. Eva had been set upon as well. She’d had the presence of mind to snap open an umbrella into the dog’s face. Startled, the dog ran.