My aunt’s mouth twisted into a shape we knew well. A stream of shrill abuse would surely have followed had she not been interrupted by another voice crying out.

“Holy dick!” It was our ancient neighbor toddling toward the kitchen, his bones wading through his saggy eighty-year-old flesh like a child through lake water. His bald head shone white from the light inside your mind when you dream many years of snow. Somewhere behind him his wife hobbled, crippled by arthritis, shrunken and insignificant. Entirely lacking an appetite she posed little threat. Not so with our neighbor as he opened his mouth wide. “Holy dick!” It bore repeating.

“The little idiot!” my mother snapped, in reference to my aunt’s son. By now it was clear that instead of going to close our door, he had passed through and continued on to close another door in another room. My mother, who hadn’t raised her voice in many months, was buckling under the strain, a sign that the scene was about to turn nasty.

As for me, I’d already made up my mind. They would keep coming and coming, shouting till they were all blue in the face. Maybe Pasha, our resident mathematician, would devise a method for dividing our salami evenly among the entire building. But probably not.


After scrubbing my mouth out with an old toothbrush to extirpate the stink of fish, I didn’t eat for three days. Nor did I work. My cousin drove a bus between the town next to ours and the town of Arshan at the base of the mountains and for three days I rode with him for free, just staring out the windows, falling in and out of sleep. Twice I saw a drunk pissing into his shoes. Once three women forcibly removed a man for foul language, leaving him there in the rain by the side of the road, beaten and broken. Usually, though, nothing happened at all. People watched the rain clouds rushing over the barren foothills. Our thoughts sloshed around gently as the bloated vessel zigzagged like a drunk up towards another village. Time came and went like drops of rain. Once something whole, black and eternal, it kept falling apart all around us until the sun cut through the gray on the third afternoon and I got out at the end of the line and walked to the Buddhist temple at the edge of Arshan. Red birds jumped along purple cedar branches and I lay down in the green grass and waited for visions of long complex fatty acids. I stared and stared at the blue sky, but even my visions were warped by exhaustion. Tiny fish emerged in the sky, swimming lazily toward the east, while the creature giving chase was tired and pathetic, devoid of the true hunger. Soon enough I was back on the bus, barreling back toward my town, starving not for meat, but for a substance far worse, and in the evening of the third day I got off the bus and headed over to the old railway station. I would prove myself a man, or so I thought, when I came upon the meat seller’s daughter with her friends. Her eyes were bloodshot and her breath reeked of homemade spirits. I must have drunk a few bottles myself because the nightmare of darkness that followed seemed to last for several days. When I finally woke up, a bit of jaundiced discharge on the tip of my shriveled member told me I had made something at last.