Thrust: A Novel

“You should always remember how lucky you are to be here.

“And he remembered Vera’s voice, back in her kitchen:

“Never whine for your fortune. No one likes a boy who cries.

“Now he knelt by her body, his knees grinding on concrete.

“He stared down at the little pig of a thing. It grunted.

“He could see Vera was dead, but he couldn’t think it. He placed his hands over each of her eyelids and shut them, the way people do on TV.

“Then the thing began to wail.

“Shut up, he whispered, looking around, adjusting his glasses. But it continued.

“Shut up, he said louder, and grabbed at the blanket around it, which came loose, and that’s when he finally learned that the difference between a boy and a girl lived between the legs: a soft and tiny patch of skin slit where a penis should be. He stared at it. He looked around again — where were the humans? Nothing. No one. A dog barking far away. He leaned in closer. Closer still, until his face was nearly touching the wriggling infant. He smelled the place where its skin and slit were. Its legs jerking. He winced, shivered, pulled away.

“Piss, he said.

“But then it looked right at him. Silently. Half cradled but half falling from Vera’s limp arm. It looked directly into his eyes, not crying but gasping for air or something. Then, wriggling its little fingers, it reached up to him.

“It could only have been him. Nothing else around them left alive.

“His chest felt inside out. He held his breath. His palms were wet. He felt dizzy, blurry. He closed his eyes and opened them and closed and opened them again.

“Hey!”

A voice he did not know swiveled his head around.

“You there!”

Ethnography 3

The moose here are hairless. The children blush and bloom with rashes when they eat fruit or jam. Calves are born with two heads, and there is a two-headed eagle. In the city, the permafrost is melting; in the forests, the ice is taking strange shapes. The fish in the lake are dead or mutated. Underground nuclear tests. Industrial waste from mining. Heavy metals dumped in the river. For years.

I was a factory cleaning woman for two decades. I did my work standing at the lip of the Lena River, washing out clothes. Where else would I go? I was born here. My mother and her mother and her mother. We were a house of women whose men left the moment they could. Women labor into a void — our work to raise children and husbands and animals, our work keeping home and hearth are not considered employment. My whole life’s labor lives in my hands. I stopped going to work when my hands turned red, my wrists developed lumps, and they never got better.

One day, I was washing the clothes — I remember what was in my hands at that moment, a blue flowered dress — and I looked up, and on the other side of the river, half of the shore just fell away to water. I stopped moving. I held as still as a statue, my washing suspended. Then I saw an entire house get swallowed up by the swollen river, as if the land had just given up or lost its meaning. A dog had been barking in the yard of that house. A babe had been sitting on the ground near the porch. A woman at the door was wiping her hands on her apron when the great rush came and then everything was going to water. I wept so hard.

I stepped back from the washing, from the river, and I walked back to our house. The chickens were squawking. I kept thinking about the dog. The babe. The woman. I wondered how long I would have before the river came for me too. The water comes for all of us, I think, like an answer.

Helix

Cruces 4

One night, after a week of hard work, there was a kind of bonfire, with drinking and dancing, along the river next to the boardinghouse. All different kinds of workers were there — those of us working on the statue and every other kind of worker in the city, carpenters and shoemakers, ditchdiggers burying gas pipes and digging tunnels, stonecutters, meatcutters, and barkeeps, those who labored laying cable for streetlights, child factory workers and women pieceworkers and women of the night, butchers and bakers and opium den owners, trash collection workers and street cleaners and those who kept care of horses — all the workers underneath the gleam and glow and noise of the city.

I think we were all coming to an understanding that this project was moving toward an ending, and no one wanted to talk about the ending. No one wanted to think about whatever would happen next.

I wanted to dance with David Chen, but the firelight was too bright and too many eyes surrounded us, so I danced with Endora. I don’t know, maybe everyone thought I was dancing with a man anyway, as by now Endora had taken to wearing men’s pants all the time. But no one said a thing; no one looked at us. And anyway, it’s not that anyone couldn’t dance with anyone else. It was my desire, and I knew to keep it close.