Lidia Yuknavitch - The Small Backs of Children

Two casualties of war: childless mother and a motherless child, happening near enough to steal each other’s very breath.

On the ninth day the woman takes the food straight to the girl. She squats down on the ground. The girl immediately starts to point to her creations and name them. The woman nods. They eat carrots. When the girl is finished naming, the woman points to a smooth blue-gray stone, which seems to inhabit a forest of sticks.

Vilkas, the girl says.

Wolf.

On the tenth day, the girl finishes the city and enters the widow’s house.

Hello. It’s me. I wouldn’t write unless it was important.

It began with insomnia. When I lived in Ocean Beach. Remember O.B.? I was sleeping on the floor of some musician’s apartment. Pitch-black, lingering smell of pot, and all the things I thought would slow down and get better if I stepped out of my photojournalist life and into this. . beautiful fantasy of a man’s life. Jesus. Look at him. He sleeps the sleep of the dead. Or of a clueless child.

I lifted the sheet up and looked at my tits and my belly and it suddenly occurred to me, This witless manboy is in trouble. I could roll over and kill him with this middle-aged body — bloated and difficult to roll, laden and slow to sink when dropped in water. Every year a woman’s body degrades. Five pounds. Ten. Fifteen. Fuck.

What was I thinking when I got with him? Do you remember? That I would mother him? Me, a smarty-pants middle-aged childless overachiever? A maternal figure? Are you laughing yet? God.

I remember walking into his bathroom that night thinking, I’d go down on a dead man for some high-powered sleeping pills. And looking in the mirror. And nearly coronarying. What is it — this thing of a woman going from the drive and whir of her thirties into the thick and slow-bodied drag of her forties. . is it just age that ages us? Or something else? I could feel the small feet of crows stomping around at the corners of my eyes. I could feel my ears growing longer, heavier, ridiculous. I could see my own nose growing for the rest of my life, changing my entire face, elongating it and drooping and dropping it as if everything about my face were becoming an enormous, bulbous fishing weight.

My head hurt. I heard a voice. The immensity of the image — larger than any systematized god or belief. Only the image, arrested, can liberate us from the lie which suggests that life tumbles forward toward some meaningful end. The arrested image is an artifact. When one stops the hegemony of life in motion, the truer fiction emerges. We are each simply an arrangement of particles of light, she said. We are none of us anything if not a glimpse of something fleeting and minuscule, weightless as air.

Photographs replace memory. Photographs replace lived experience. History.

The voice was mine.

The me that drives me to be something beyond a woman.

And I remembered who I was. And I knew I had to leave. So I grabbed my car keys and my camera bag and I walked out to my car and I left. Naked. Just like the night I left you in the desert, the only night of my life, I think, sometimes. My camera. Your body.

As I drove away between rows of ice plants on I-5, I thought, Take photos. It’s all you’ve got.

When you try to slow down and rest inside the life of a regular American woman, you fail. And you fatten up like a hog. Just leave it. There is no other life for a woman like you. So I took the assignment. And now they’re telling me I’ve won the prize of all prizes. Perfect.

Am sending you my notes. You’re the writer — please figure out how we can “do” something with them? Will send framed photo when I can. I don’t know what it means any longer.

All my love.

Notes — War Zone — Eastern Europe — Day 23

The night is cold as fuck and the color of ash and soot. . even with all this snow. Ironic: newspaper colored. The town has already been shot to shit, and the soldiers look to me like jack-booted thugs from some B-rated movie, really, ignorant killing machines with ill-fitting uniforms and contorted loyalties. Only their boots and rifles look lethal. Every corner of every building is shot away, making the little village look like pieces of itself. . ghost structures. There’s no telling rubble from real here. None of this has made the news, it’s just gone on and on for years without end, the supposed end of one war giving way to the endless micro-violences of forever. Nobody even knows where I am or what I’m doing or why. Not even me. The ground stinks of blood and shit. Domesticated animals — horses, sheep, pigs, dogs, and cats — wander around or stand like idiots in the paths and streets. There is a commotion up ahead — they want something — badly — and they are yanking people from homes like snatching tissues from a box. They want something — or someone — and they are moving as one entity of brute force against these small families. I don’t know these Baltic languages in any real sense — just bits and pieces enough to stay mobile. I’m only able to be this close because I’m dressed as a garbage man, as my interpreter and guide told me to. We’ve been given the duty of clearing corpses from the street. It’s easy to snap shots from this distance, in this grayed-out light, smoke and dirt and night’s falling covering my hands and sound being swallowed up like it is, though my guide looks angry with every shot I take. He doesn’t think it’s worth it. A photo, he says when we are in the cave of his house — what use is that against what is happening here? Do you even know where “here” is? Do you even know what our story is? How long this fight? I know why you are here. You are here to catch the soldiers committing atrocities. But only because you are American. You want to shame them, to make a big story of their brutality. Where were you when we needed you? During your so-called Cold War, with your promises of nuclear attack — your threat to obliterate them — we counted on you. After the war, we hid in the woods for years waiting for you. You offered us guns and money, and we accepted them. But you did not attack. And so we have been left to fight alone for all of these years.

Sometimes I think my guide wants to kill me. But he merely hands me bread and hot tea with something that helps me to sleep at night. The look he gives me is one of dismissal. I am nothing, or less than nothing, so it costs him little to help me or kill me.

We move closer and closer to the edge of this hulled-out village, its people overexposed and dead with fatigue. We pass through the rubble of some kind of town center building. We pass what was once some kind of café or bar, its windows as black as the eyes of a corpse. We pass something — a schoolhouse, maybe, its doors boarded up like a shut mouth. We are some ways behind them, and more or less part of the detritus. Soon they are at a house that is barely in the village at all. We are able to approach mostly because of our giant, horse-drawn wagon, full of rotting bodies — it seems part of the mise-en-scène.

What I see next doesn’t seem possible, but the first form to emerge from the house is a girl. She looks to be about ten or so. Her hair spreads in waves of nested coils around her face, down her shoulders. Unbelievably, she walks straight toward them. She is wearing the clothes of a boy — and soon a second self, her brother, and her father and mother, come rushing out like blood after her. There is some yelling back and forth, and then it happens — a blast from I don’t know where disintegrates the father, mother, and brother just at the edge of the girl’s body, missing her in some terrifying accident of a fraction. They blow up right before her eyes, her hair lifting for a moment, so that she looks as if she may float skyward, her arms up and out, her face glowing so white that her eyes look like blue-steel bullets, her mouth open in the shape of an O.