On ffriday, I was at the aunts farm and accidentally saw Huh, just call me, if you really want to join inserting hand up the horses butt, til elbow.
Hey, have you ever seen something like that?
Just take a close look at that pic:
http://… (etc.)
Tell me please, if you, pervert, want to join me next time I travel to the country side.
The man’s spine is curled like a question mark, not from an accident of birth, but from years of hunching before monitors. He leans away from the screen now, his back as close to straight as it will go, and regards his work. He is proud of the commas before and after pervert, something only an expert in English would know to do.
He smokes, still poring over his oeuvre, checking it for errors. He catches the double-effed friday, balances his cigarette on the table ledge, types jerkily, puffs and exhales. Soon he will sell “passage” on this spam to various clients, some in Ukraine, some in China, a few in Africa, who will pay him to insert their toxic URLs and launch them at Americans and Canadians by name. Like spells, but in the millions upon millions. Sperm, his sperm, racing for the ova of personal information. Credit cards will be stolen, e-mail addresses hijacked, spyware implanted, oh the lovely chaos! More importantly, oh the lovely dollars! Hard currency will appear in his several dozen false-front PayPal accounts; he will shunt this money to accounts he holds in Trinidad, St. Martin, and the Bahamas; and his retirement will grow.
He is thirty-four, means to retire at fifty.
He has been earning his own money since he was fifteen.
He will live until eighty-five, with the help of Western medicine and his retirement, thus spending thirty-five years working and thirty-five years doing whatever the fuck he wants. When he visualizes his savings, he sees a cartoon snowball of dollars growing as it rolls downhill, hitting a valley, then shrinking as it rolls uphill until it is gone, and a tiny pop is heard.
The pop of a .22 against his temple; he means to be so poor at the top of that second hill he has no choice but to shoot himself.
It must be a .22.
Small-caliber so the bullet goes in, but cannot exit, ricocheting around inside, making cabbage of his brains, destroying all feeling, all memory. Leaving just a small, bleeding hole. People who shoot themselves with powerful guns are selfish, vulgar.
Bourgeois.
Someone must clean their brains from the wall.
Cursing them and scrubbing.
The gun will be his first purchase upon retiring.
Until then, he cannot bring himself to spend any more than necessary. He is a miser of the first house, wearing everything out until it simply cannot be used, only buying things that cost so close to nothing they might as well be free.
But when he turns fifty…
… the next time I travel the countryside.
“Perfect, pervert,” he says in thickly accented English.
The cat yawns, showing fangs that are perhaps the only truly white things in the apartment, and stretches, walking the crooked back of the sofa before sitting imperiously on the arm.
Now the night breeze, cool for June even here, fingers its way beneath the window, blowing the fly-specked curtains up. The view en face consists of yet more ugly block apartments, the lights on in only a few windows, but now these rectangles of light shiver slightly, as though from heat fumes.
No heat here, though.
The room gets colder.
The cat almost hisses, remembers what happened to it the last time it did, and curls itself around its master’s feet, its tail flicking between those heels-up feet and the sooty footprints on the pink flip-flops beneath them.
Now the man turns in his chair and looks at the window.
She’s here.
He looks away quickly.
His palms grow moist.
He anticipates the sound just before he hears it.
The sound of an iron pot scraping against the cheap stucco below the sill, scraping like a rowboat against a pier.
Baba Yaga riding through the night skies of Kiev, sitting in an iron pot, pushing it with a broom.
Just like in bedtime fables.
But she really is outside.
Some part of her, anyway.
I’m nine stories up.
Yuri…
“Yes, little mother,” he manages, smoking again.
He is careful not to show his teeth when he speaks.
Put on your kerchief.
The cat shivers violently.
He pulls the sticking drawer out, pulls out a blue terry cloth hand towel. Is repulsed thinking about putting this over his eyes but does so anyway, tilting his head back, holding it in place because God help him if it falls off and he sees her.
The crunching sound as the iron pot crumbles stucco.
Is there really a pot, or do I hear one because I expect to?
A bare foot on his gritty linoleum floor.
She is in the apartment now, he knows.
Yuri, you bought the ticket?
“Yes. One ticket for Marina Yaganishna, first class. Nizhny to Moscow, Moscow to JFK, JFK to Syracuse.”
She will not want to sit next to anyone fat.
“I already looked. The seat next to her on the long flight remained unsold, so I moved a skinny man there.”
Good.
A long moment passes.
There’s something you’re not telling me.
I don’t like that.
An acrid smell as the cat pisses on the floor.
“Sorry, little mother. I… There was someone poking around my curtain. In America. Chicago, I think. Magic.”
Find out who.
Find out why.
She comes closer.
The cat jerks from below the table, sprints for the bedroom, something else moves faster than the cat, which shrieks.
Yuri dares not look.
“I… I was working on this. I wanted to have the answer before I told you.”
And this is why you spend your time on filth?
A bony finger ticks on the screen of his computer.
Hands in horses? You think this is what happens in the country? I can show you what happens in the country, but I think you will not like it.
He doesn’t know if she is reading the English on the screen or just peering into his head. He isn’t sure she can do this, but neither is he sure she cannot.
He doesn’t know what she is.
Nobody does.
He smells her scent of iron and cookfat and pepper, undercut with dried blood, mold, fear.
She smells like fear.
He presses hard on the towel over his eyes, frightened his shaking hand might betray him, that it might fall away. His urine fingers at its gateway, wants to leak out. He controls it.
He breathes through his mouth, awkwardly shielding his teeth with his lips.
She lets him stew for a moment.
Yuri…
“Yes, little mother?”
You have needle and thread in this shithole?
“Yes, little mother.”
Use it to sew the cat’s tail back on.
“Thank you, Baba.”
Somewhere in his head, she grunts.
Now the sound of a twig broom, sweeping away her footprints.
She mounts the pot, which scrapes noisily against the bricks.
The woman in the apartment next door calls through the wall.