Tears and Saints.
Just as she was coming back from her memory, a weight vaulted her from behind. Her body was on the ground. Her eyes closed and inside of them, all black water.
Jana had been jumped and pinned down by the kids. There were four of them.
“Baba,” one of the kids said to the lump. Jana turned her head and saw it was a boyish-girl, dark stringy hair, a big purple and red striped sweatshirt with Mickey Mouse patch at the centre ballooning over her thin torso. She was sitting on Jana’s legs. Jana squirmed at the sight, trying to get the girl off, but she couldn’t budge her in the slightest.
Jana flipped her head to the side. A flower-clip, hanging off another child’s cropped hair. The grip that was holding down Jana’s arm had scraped knuckles and on its meagre wrist, a clunky white and pink plastic Hello Kitty watch, sliding down against her hand, too big for the child. Jana tried to pull her arm out from beneath the girl’s hold, but her shoulder muscle rolled back and stuck – it was like her whole body was beneath a layer of cement.
“Baba,” a third child with greasy, curling hair said over to the lump.
This child’s huge blue and white striped overalls bunched over her short body. At the chest pocket, Bugs Bunny was giving a thumb’s up and smiling with his two front teeth pushed out. The girl looked down at Jana with a teething concentration. From her dirt-streaked neck hung a necklace she had most likely strung up herself from a leftover cable and a clear plastic key chain with “TOYOTA” written in red. The girl itched her collarbone with her free hand. At the top, Jana saw a temporary Spiderman tattoo, blue and red, already partly worn off.
“Baba…?” said the last child.
Jana’s eyes darted to the voice. She looked the oldest or maybe it was the way her Spice Girls T-shirt hugged her chest. Across the shirt, all five Spice Girls were jutting their colourful outfits one way or another, the girl’s prepubescent breasts pushed out against their heads. A candy ring stuck out on her index finger, lint and hairs covered the partly licked cherry-red candy diamond.
“Babička, can we?” she asked.
“Can we??” the others repeated.
The lump shifted with a deeper groan.
And so, together, the children worked like a harmonious team as they held Jana’s shoulders and wrists and thighs and waist and rolled her over onto her stomach with impersonal ease, unaffected by her squirming and twisting. The belt of her coat was untied, her blouse pulled out, her trousers unhooked and unzipped. The Toyota necklace girl clasped her Spiderman-hand over Jana’s mouth, as Jana muttered and spit and tried to bite her flesh. Two of the other children helped push Jana’s face against the cement, until her teeth dug into her cheeks.
Spice Girls Tee pulled out a worn beach towel from beneath the layers of blankets on Baba’s sewer grid, a whirl of purple and magenta, ragged with threads and small holes at the corners. Across the towel was Aladdin on his magic carpet, holding Princess Jasmine to him at her waist, and in big teal letters it said A Whole New World. The girl took the corner of the towel and shoved it into Jana’s mouth, until the tattered fabric stuffed against her tonsil, and absorbed her scream.
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.
Home
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…
PART TWO
Gejza and Tammie
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.