Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

Altogether, the children began to wedge their small hands beneath Jana’s stomach, getting at her trousers and pulling them down to her thighs. They grabbed her underwear and pulled that down too, the elastic rolling on the flesh of Jana’s buttocks, bunching with her trousers.

Jana was choking on the towel when the kids all huddled in closer and began lulling in unison, “Shhhhhhh…”

“MADAME,” one of the children whispered. “I’m a piece of shit.”

“Me too…” another hushed.

“Me three…”

“Me four, Madame.”

“We are unhappy here…” the first pouted louder.

“We’re homesick…” another murmured.

“We just wanna go home…” the fourth voice trembled.

The children began whimpering, trying to find their words. Then they grabbed hold of Jana’s buttocks with their small hands, taking handfuls of flesh and pulling her butt cheeks apart.

“We wanna gooo hoooommme…!” they whimpered even louder as they stuffed their noses into the open flesh between her butt cheeks. They pushed and pressed against each other’s messy heads, trying to squeeze further inside.

“WE WAANNNAAA GOOOOO HOOOOOOMMME,” they sobbed into her anus.

Aimée was watching TV on the couch when she noticed the light-blue hardcover book sticking out of the bottom shelf of the white bookshelf. She walked to the rows of books and crouched down and grabbed the corner with her fingers. She gave a tug and the book slid out from its tight spot.

Aimée sat right down where she was, leaned her back against the bookshelf, opened the book and began to read.

Next to her elbow, in the space where the book had been, a trail of blue smoke began to seep out, just barely brushing across her skin.

As she turned the page, the paper rubbed against itself, like a throat cracking in mid-breath.

The blue trail continued groping its way along her arm, around her shoulder, against her neck…

Gejza parked his truck on their driveway, on Argyle Avenue the one lined with red bricks and a yard sprinkler he’d installed himself. It was almost summer. He was sweaty. His wife Tammie was still at the nearby public high school, no less than ten minutes up, past Johnson Controls and right below Bayshore shopping mall. Tammie was a petite woman who always wore ‘creative’ tops, where the neckline veered to one side or a zipper allowed a two-inch opening to occur at the bottom seam. She taught French classes at the high school and had her greying-blonde hair cut into a childish bob that she wore with a thick fabric-covered headband as if she were Godard’s mod ingénue, refusing to age.

One of the reasons she even fell for a Czech immigrant construction worker at the time, was that, instead of whistling at her, he had said, “Oh la la!”

Gejza had always worked with his hands – he had been labelled a labourer from boyhood. But even during the brownest polyester years of communism in Prague, he still lived his little life as if it were a French film. His older sister Marja, however, lived hers more as an experimental screening. Whereas Gejza walked down the listless street with a private poetic gait, Marja kept her right hand in her pocket, acute and suspicious, as she found certain trees, like birches, incredibly funny, and others, like pines, brought her to tears. On one of Marja’s school trips, doused with Soviet socialist values and allusions to State-building, they were going to help plant apple trees. On the way to the farm they had to cross over train-tracks. Marja lagged behind and lingered too long over the tracks and almost got run over by a train. Even Ruzena, the girl with the lazy eye, saw it coming. But Marja was looking at a patch of grass that leaned into the metal rail with such sumptuousness that the girl could not bring herself to part with it.

When one of the older boys retold the story in Gejza’s presence, the consensus was that, perhaps a girl that was slow in the head should be run over by a train. Gejza drifted away from the group, broke a low branch off an oak, then came back with a focused calm, raised his branch high as if he were simply bearing a flag, then started whipping the boys in the heads with it.

Although the episode only left them with some lashes on their cheeks and upper arms and necks, Gejza and Marja’s parents decided that their weird daughter was having a bad influence on her normal little brother. They explained that having one off child is enough. Opportunity coincided. Gejza was sent away to an apprenticeship, to learn construction. Their parents focused on Marja’s one asset, her looks. The thin nose, spark-eyed, fluffy haired girl grew into an attractive woman in the 1970s, where her quirks were suddenly decade-appropriate, and she caught the eye of a square-jawed, handsome, hard-working Slovak, and for a moment Marja was just right in her doses. They married.

But in their first year of marriage, Marja suddenly began to speak her mind and act her will in a way that surprised even her. She couldn’t quite find the balance between what she should resist and what she should bend towards, so she ended up twisting in all the ways that proved to those around her that she was a cripple of her gender, not quite a righteous woman, and not wholly a defunct one.

Her husband broke down the bathroom door and grabbed Marja’s flailing legs into his chest, pushing her up, and reaching one hand high for the rope’s noose.

After Marja tried to hang herself in the bathroom, it was unanimously decided that she needed electricity. And so, a couple of sessions of shocking did it. Marja was fixed. Voilà.

Then their first and only child, a baby girl, was born.

By this time, Marja’s little brother, Gejza, was long distant, in America, after getting a chance ticket to come over, passing as the son of his employer.

And now, long after, Gejza was an American citizen, married to the local high school teacher, Tammie, living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Gejza hadn’t heard about his sister for decades. But when he got news that she was recently widowed, left all alone with one daughter, a problem child, unmanageable, with nowhere to turn… Gejza talked it over with Tammie and they decided it was the right thing to do. Besides, Tammie had this thing where she couldn’t have children. And she liked spinning the stand-up globe on the table next to the TV and watching where her finger would land. The last few times, it was Madagascar and she thought perhaps a child would come to them from that region somehow. Then this promising black kid, for whom Tammie had a special fondness, just fell over dead one track meet, one of those inexplicable heart attacks. Star athlete, star scholar. He was her favourite student in her intermediate French 3 class. Weeks later, when she spun the globe, her finger kept landing in water. Tammie cried sparingly and said she knew it wasn’t her place, but she just didn’t understand why the world wouldn’t explain itself a little more, why certain children couldn’t be born and others just dropped down dead.

To cheer up their spirits, the couple went out to eat at Taco Bell, but midway through their taco menus, there was some sort of fight in the kitchen where a teenage girl stormed out from the back, her long braids swinging over her shoulder as she pulled her visor with the restaurant logo off her head, screaming “Ain’t nobody wanna see your ugly-ass dick” and “Never axt you for no raise,” then flung the visor like a Frisbee at the manager who was just rushing out from behind the cashier station, in his blue polo shirt and shiny name tag. He got nailed right in the forehead, then screamed, “Dammit, Djamilla!” Then the cops were called, and Gejza and Tammie got a voucher for a free meal.