Thrust: A Novel

If she could feel rage, could feel need, could feel anything like the rush of emotion her father battled daily, it might look like her face right now. Laisvė lunged at Aster, hugged him as hard as she knew how, her head driving into his gut. For a minute, it felt as if she were trying to press her head into the meat of him and beyond, to hollow out a womb in his body, but his stomach pushed back with the muscles of a laborer, their two bodies clenched tightly against each other.

Just as her small force was relaxing into him, everything crashed. Aster heard footsteps pounding up the apartment stairs. His heart a stiff apple in his chest. He put his forefinger against his lips so hard that it would leave a bruise. “Get down,” he whisper-yelled.

His daughter dropped to the floor, then crawled to the cupboard under the kitchen sink and climbed into the space behind the wall just as they’d practiced, as stealthy as an animal diving into a burrow.

Aster’s head swam. His arms went numb. His legs collapsed. He saw stars. He couldn’t say which happened next: the seizure that wracked his body, or the Raid breaking down the door.

The Water Girl and Her Story

Laisvė crawls hard and fast, drilling down like a worm into the bowels of the apartment building. The sounds she feels at her heels make her feet hot. Her knees scream.

This is not a story. This is a Raid.

The crawl space she navigates for the hundredth time behind the kitchen sink is made from old boards lodged between walls. Sixteen feet deep, she hits the dug-out hole in the crawlway. She turns and places one foot down a rough hole onto the rung of a ladder. Do not stop for anything. Do not even turn around to look back. If they are here, then your only choice is to go. If they have come for us, your only choice is life or not-life. This is the right time to have no feelings. She drops her whole body down into the eye of the hole. Rung under rung, she watches her own hands, imagining in her mind’s eye how many floors until she touches the ground. Her father a question mark, a tension, a vibration made of fear the color of a blood river, becoming more and more distant above her with each foothold. Will they take my father? Will I ever see him again? Will they shove him from the roof like the woman with the locket who dropped dead from the sky in the indigo flowered dress? Did they come for her in a Raid? Did they push her out of a window? Will Aster die or will he be taken? Her heart in her eyes.

To calm the rush of her own fear, Laisvė imagines her collection of coins — making head lists of things is the only way she knows to give a pattern to the racing colors in her head. She pictures her coin collection. The Flowing Hair cent. The Liberty Cap cent. The Draped Bust cent. The Classic Head cent. The Coronet cent. The Braided Hair cent. The Flying Eagle cent. The Indian Head cent. The Lincoln penny.

She sees a kind of glowing copper ribbon, but then her thoughts click like marbles in bright yellow sparks, so she starts to speak out loud as she descends. The collection of pennies dissipates in her mind’s eye.

She moves on in her imagination to other objects she hasn’t been able to stop collecting, still climbing the ladder ever downward. Out loud now, she names the objects she collects, to no one but her climbing self: “Rocks from every river or ocean I have been to. Pennies. Spoons. The bones of animals. The wings of insects. Maps. Feathers from different birds. Animal and bird skulls. Hair: deer hair and dog hair, the hairs of goats, cows, horses, cats, donkeys, bear hair, fox hair, beaver hair, rat and mouse hair, the hair of a reindeer, the moss from a reindeer’s antlers, my mother’s hair, my father’s, Joseph’s knife, Aurora’s hair.”

Something besides words rising in her throat. The Raid team may take her father. The Raid team may kill her father. The Raid team may follow her. This is the right time to have no feelings.

She smells the damp reality of dirt underground pluming up toward her. She says the number of ladder rungs out loud—“twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one”—and a purple color like a helmet forms around her head. She knows the ground is near because the number 1 is purple.