Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

“I remember. She threw the best fits,” Jana said solemnly.

“Yeah,” Zorka exhaled, “no one topped Mamka’s cuckoo.” Zorka crinkled her nose. “Yeah. Fuck. I hated that looney bitch. I hated her so much and I hated my papka for dying early, for leaving me with her, and I hated myself, cause she was in me, her genes, her foulness, kept wondering, when I’d go nuts like Mamka…”

“You’re not going to go nuts like her, Zorka. You’re just on fire, you know.”

Jana was suddenly at the end of her drink, she slurped the remains with her straw. She was feeling the wall between her thoughts and articulation thaw and become one flowing gesture.

“You’re a fallen angel with her wings burning off…” Jana continued.

Zorka began to laugh.

“There we go, Janka’s coming back!”

“I was always here. You’re the one who fell off the edge of the earth, remember. And you never even asked me, by the way.”

“Asked you what?”

“If I wanted to come with you.”

“You kidding? Come with me where?”

“To wherever, wherever you were going, I don’t know, you could’ve asked me!”

“I was going nowhere, Janka! You were the one going somewhere…”

Jana felt her eyes fluttering and the music pulsing in her throat. She thought of the kitchen table legs, and her father’s razor, and the roll of money and the Vltava and Vilèm and stacks of books, and fur on fire, and three droplets of blood.

“You were my future, Zorka,” she mumbled.

Zorka put her hands on Jana’s shoulders.

Jana’s eyes began to close as she shrugged.

“It was a long time ago…”

She continued to watch the memories in her mind, the colours of their jumpers, her mamka’s scream, the bruises on Zorka’s skin, the sky as it moved like secrets above them.

Jana began to squeeze her eyes until spots of light burst into a hollowing darkness in her pupils.

The snowfall. Her tongue. Two fingers spread apart. The top of her head a sleek black, her pitch eyes and her fuzzy way of laughing and her knuckles against Jana’s sternum—

Zorka was shaking Jana’s shoulders. “Don’t get sleepy on me.”

Jana opened her eyes.

“Come on, let’s get you another drink,” Zorka was smiling like a flashlight in the forest.

Zorka was reaching back from the bar with two shots of blue liquid. She handed one to Jana.

“What’s this?” Jana asked.

“Tastes like piss, feels like bliss,” Zorka said and picked up her own shot glass, clinked with Jana and both women shot the liquid down their throats. Jana shook her head and squeezed her eyes as the liquid went down. When she opened them, Zorka was handing her the new glass filled with sizzling copper liquid.

Behind them, people were pushing their way to the bar. Right over Jana’s shoulder, an arm ploughed through, on top of the hand an odd tattoo, blue and red, of Spiderman reaching his arm out to spray his web. When Jana turned around, she saw a girl with short-cropped hair, wearing baggy blue and white overalls, one of the straps undone and hanging, at her gut a small, embroidered image of Bugs Bunny pushing a thumb’s up forwards.

Jana made eye contact with the girl, who took her glare as a sign and pulled her bottom lip down, revealing another tattoo, on her inner lip – block letters sewn into the rose-coloured flesh, spelling out J A N A.

The girl let go of her lip and it rolled back up. Zorka pulled at Jana.

“Come on.”

They went downstairs and made their way through the dance floor, Zorka pulling Jana forwards, trying to get to a woman with her head back, her neck open and catching the light, in a tight white T-shirt, with one of her pierced nipples jutting against the fabric. The woman lowered her head, her gelled blonde hair shining like a helmet, caught eyes with Jana and smiled.

“Hey you,” Claire said.

She reached out and touched Jana’s jawline as if she couldn’t quite make out where it was, then leaned in and kissed her sweetly on each corner of her mouth.

“It’s sooo good to see you…!” she drawled.

Jana stepped back and turned to Zorka.

“I thought it was just us.”

“Nah, chill, don’t worry,” Zorka yelled out in Czech, “she’s high off her ass, you won’t even notice she’s here.”

Claire closed her eyes and flopped her head back and began writhing her body in between the strangers around her. Zorka started moving her shoulder angrily to the music, while glancing over at Jana. Jana wasn’t sure how to start dancing to this techno beat, she thought about whether she should move her hips, or just bob her head a bit, but when she looked down at her body, she realised she was already dancing, like a muscular helix.

“You got sexy, Jana!” Zorka shouted at her.

Jana could feel her phone buzzing in her pocket. She took it out and tried to focus on the screen, squinting as she read the name on her caller ID, Milena . Her fingers fumbled over the button to silence the call, then she put the phone back into her pocket.

Some bodies next to her started raising their hands, thrusting their fingers as if pinching the electronics in the music. The bass was getting heavier, and the synthetic rhythms prickled through the room. Jana started to feel like she was a digital tree growing branches. When she looked back at Zorka, she was kissing Claire, both of them grinding into each other, Claire trying to rub herself into Zorka’s baggy trousers.

“Hey!” Jana shouted at Zorka. “Be honest, are you out there, jumping all the girls like a horny doe in the woods or what?”

But Zorka didn’t hear her, she continued grinding into Claire.

“Hey!” Jana shouted again, pulling on Zorka’s bicep. Zorka took her face off Claire’s and looked over.

“What’s up?” she said.

“I’m not a frigid bitch, by the way,” Jana said.

“Yeah, I know,” Zorka nodded, “I get you.”

Just as Jana was forming her lips to reply, Claire popped up between them, twisting over to Zorka.

“Hi Zebra! Why’d you leave?”

Zorka let herself be pulled away by Claire. She gave Jana a sloppy shrug, then stuck out her pelvis and began jutting it on Claire’s body.

As Jana turned away from them, she felt a hand on her shoulder. The man’s balding head was flashing in the lights, as the rest of his body stood awkwardly within his suit. He held out a phone in his palm.

“You dropped this, Miss,” he said.

Jana squinted at the man then lowered her eyes towards the phone in his hand. She took it from his palm and began sliding it back into her trouser pocket. When Jana looked up, there were dancing bodies overlapping to the music like trees in a hurricane and the man was gone.

Yeah so, Janka, in the States they made me see a therapist, and those people got some magic powers for real, I went in, soldier style, like “Fuck you, lady,” but she had me in the palm of her hands, I was coiling around myself like a baby snake, telling her all about you actually, my friend Jana, my friend Jana… She eventually said, “Where is your friend Jana now?” I said, “I dunno, she’s probably the President of some country by now.” She said, “It sounds like your friend Jana was very important to you.” I said, “No shit, lady.”

Later on, she asked me if I loved you. Damn, I was thinking. What kind of a fucking question is that? She told me to take a moment and think about it. I was like, okay, you know what, I will think about it, lady. I mean, fuck, who asks questions like that to someone they don’t even fucking know, you don’t know me at all lady, seriously, so let me just think about it, shit. So, yeah, I really did think about it. Like, I went into my heart and everything and looked around for you.