Minimalist Gossip Magazine Cover (49).pdf (23) - Flipbook - Page 77
VIRGIN SLAVIC BLONDE
by Anne Dorrian
He spins into the village, the tyres of his BMW trailing dust in the shape of unfurling banners,
the crunch of his wheels a fanfare of grinding teeth. Dance music blares from the wound
down windows. When he passes her, Verinka sees a wolf.
She's been picking blackberries, enough to fill the rusty can, her hands now purple and
scratched; hands like old baseball gloves, the skin speckled and tough as cork. She shields her
eyes from the afternoon sun and watches the dust settle behind the car. Everyone's watching,
rakes resting, laundry baskets down, even Laslo's donkey - tied to a rotting tractor - turns, its
ears throwing long shadows against the low sun. It's the end of summer, the days still
scorching and the plains crannied. The nights see spiders creeping inside the house, looking
for warmth.
Dirty children surround the car, yelling. Sweets! Cigarettes! A spin! He waves them away and
walks to the tavern, disappearing behind its beaded curtain, entering an unenchanted
kingdom of stale smoke and old men drunk on moonshine. The children are left adrift outside
and begin shoving and pinching each other until they eventually move on in one sudden
motion like a school of startled guppy fish. Laslo's donkey shakes its head, as if disgusted. The
sound of raking starts up aging, a freshly hung shirt flaps gently in the breeze. But there´s no
chatter. The last of the dust particles dance in the afternoon light, weightless and languid, like
astronauts running out of oxygen. The village is muted, an astonished hush blanketing it like
fog on the first autumn morning. Verinka finds that she has squashed blackberry on her hands.
Sometimes they contract involuntarily now. It's the arthritis that has turned her joints into tree
knots. The pain it comes with is a constant. Verinka wipes the purple mush off her hand with a
rag and gathers her things to walk home, the full can rubbing against her hip. The house is
empty, the sooty kitchen dark and quiet, the bedroom cold and still. Her granddaughter Ania is
gone.
Verinka swears under her breath. She tips the blackberries into a bowl and covers them with
a cloth to keep the wasps away. She checks for signs of Ania from the kitchen window. She
fires up the oven, sticking wood into the burner, lighting it with old newspaper. She prods the
bread dough on the window sill to see if it is rising. She walks out into the garden to get
beetroot for soup and to prune some bushes, but really, she's going to see if she can spot Ania
returning. She's so distracted that she cuts her finger and has to suck the cut. She watches the
road while the sun sets behind the abandoned steelworks in the distance.
When night falls and the soup has gone cold Ania is still not there. Verinka takes her shawl
from the hook behind the door and walks to the tavern, the sound of her slippers on the dirt
path a soft crunch like the breaking of crusty bread.
Nikolai passes her on his bike. A few years ago, Nikolai's glasses broke so he carved a crude
new frame out of wood. He glued the glasses in with a thick, yellow, snot-like adhesive. The
contraption is large, and incongruous, his face an afterthought, as if his bicycle were riding
him.
‘Hey Verinka!’ he says, raising one hand, while his rusty bike wobbles beneath him ‘Hey
there!’
70
