Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

“But she is kinda cute tho.”

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together… intricately woven in the depths of the earth…”

A couple of months before graduation, Zorka decided she needed a new look. She went to Good Will and bought herself a tight pair of black jeans, a tight black T-shirt and a men’s leather jacket. In the end she looked like a rock ’n’ roll scarecrow. She didn’t want to layer up her skinny body, she wanted to show it off now, like a blade. She spotted a used push-up bra with the black lace on each cup bunched and fraying. It was seventy-five cents. She bought it. For the first time, she felt that her breasts rose out of her shirt, like two knuckled fists.

Then she snuck Gejza’s electric razor and shaved her head.

There were black buckets of flowers outside of the Pick ’N Save grocery store, so she pulled a thin bouquet of soft pink roses wrapped in clear plastic and a magenta ribbon and walked off.

The Union Cemetery was between North 20th and Teutonia Avenue.

She crossed the street into an open plain of grass, with graves spotted throughout the green like handfuls of stones thrown upon the earth. As she walked uphill, the tombstones were arranged with more disciplined intent, in rows, by twos, no longer slightly crooked, but upright and all looking in the same direction. Tall cedar trees and ash trees covered the graves with netting shadows. Zorka spotted an old woman carrying a dark blue bucket uphill with a grey German Shepherd walking behind her.

“Excuse me!” Zorka shouted at her.

The woman turned around and set the bucket down, the dog stopped at her side. She put a hand up to her brow to cover the sunlight and peered out at Zorka.

“How I find a grave, please?” Zorka shouted, her voice curving up, trying to be as polite as she could shape it to be.

The wind blew a piece of the old woman’s hair out of her bun and the white strands flailed at her ear. The woman lowered her hand, picked up her bucket, made her way downhill towards Zorka, the brown and grey dog walking at her shadow.

“Well, it depends which grave you’re looking for…” the old woman said.

“My brother,” Zorka replied without thinking.

“Oh I’m sorry, sweetheart. What was your brother’s name?”

“Ray-Ray. I mean, Raymond Thomson.”

The woman looked at the pink roses then up at Zorka’s shaved head.

“Sure, I remember him. The runner. Nice boy…”

“He was super fly,” Zorka said, nodding solemnly downwards.

“You’re his sister?” the woman asked with a slight squint.

Zorka shrugged.

Zorka got Tiff a necklace she stole from Claire’s and Deandra a Tommy Hilfiger leather wallet she pulled from the Burlington Coat Factory in Brown Deer and placed a twenty into it. She wrapped the presents and took the 14 bus, got off in front of the Taqueria, and walked to the grey and red building on the corner of Lapham, pulled hard on the glass door that jammed, then stuffed the package into Tiff ’s granny’s mailbox.

“Leaving? I’m sorry but that’s the dumbest shit I ever heard. Wait till you graduate at least!” Deandra said.

“I do not wanna graduate.”

“Come on, Z! You ain’t dumb, I know it, so why you playing it like that?”

But Zorka didn’t answer. Instead, she sniffed loud.

“Shit, Dee,” she mumbled. Then the tears began to form in her eyes.

Zorka hummed a tune as she walked, the meaning distant from the melody, the melody a glaze down her throat.

It was like music for a silent film, where a woman turns the corner and the light dilates and we see with her eyes what will become love at first sight. Except this was music for a silent world, where a woman walks onto the stage and the sky dilates and we see with her eyes what will become—

Czechoslovak Radio, Wednesday November 22nd: Wenceslas Square, 12 o’clock and 10 minutes. It’s hard to guess how many people are here, tens of thousands of citizens. They’re expressing their longing for democratic changes in our society. The singer Marta Kubišová, who had been banned from appearing in public for nearly twenty years, will sing her best-loved song, “A Prayer for Marta”.

The singer sang her prayer acapella, give us back our peace, give us back our governance, give us back our decency… her voice expanding into the hollow between the mass of heads and the sky.

Radio Prague: Can you remember how people reacted when they heard the song?

MK: I was very high above those people, but friends told me that all the people were crying and pointing upwards.

Green duffle bag in hand, the one Tammie had got her in the hope that she’d join the soccer team, Zorka raided her uncle and aunt’s money cache, a coral-coloured fanny-pack tucked in the back of a sock drawer.

It was only when the bus crossed the state line that the murmur of memories created a soreness of unidentified longing, like for Ray-Ray with his holy lungs, running through the woods. She pushed her teeth together and smeared her face with her palms, then turned completely to the window and watched the pines passing in rows.

She had spun Tammie’s globe one last time before leaving. She placed her index finger on the spinning surface like a needle to a turning record and listened to her nail run across the grooves of continents.

“Tell Tammie, I’m going to call the cops myself and get that girl deported.”

“Marja, you’re no longer her legal guardian, she’s eighteen.”

On the Amtrak train to Pittsburgh, a man wearing a dark business suit sat across from Zorka, looking at her suspiciously.

“What?” she said straight at him.

“…How old are you…?” he asked.

Zorka unzipped her jacket and squeezed her cushioned tits.

“I’m a porn star,” she said, then zipped her jacket back up.

The man went back to reading the paper, as Zorka continued to stare full-force at his forehead until he folded up the pages, put the newspaper in his briefcase, got up and switched seats.

From Pittsburgh she kept going east, one train then another. In the stations, she studied the railway map, brushed her teeth in the toilet, paced about the halls, eyeing around for predators, then slept in the plastic chairs, curled up over her duffle bag.

The train pulled into South Station in Boston and she decided to stay a moment and have a look around the city. She got onto Summer Street and walked straight towards the flow of water. The river was curling beneath the arches of the bridge and cresting out, towards the tree-lined banks, glimmering at the sheer skyscraper with its reflective windows absorbing the sky above.

Zorka watched the water’s surface unable to rush itself as much as the current insisted, folding into its own burden, and thought of Jana. That serious girl with the puddle-coloured hair and slate-grey eyes. She picked up a pebble and chucked it over the bridge into the river.

“Agnes Dei and the Jans!” she screamed and pinched some air-guitar chords at her gut.

It began to drizzle.

Zorka stopped by a 7-Eleven to get a bottle of Sprite and some of those spicy Cheetos she liked even though they turned her fingertips neon orange. The guy at the register was looking at her. She clocked him a couple times, putting his features together in her head. Short brown hair with a side parting, the front slightly flipped up, his two eyes curved down towards his big ears, just in line with his long, beakish nose, thin lips shaded by a bit of stubble…