When I got home from the brewery to the shithole basement my wife and I shared, I wanted to sleep but couldn’t.
Not with the damned chip in my head.
I cracked open the window for some air. Through the bars, a majestic view of a midwinter night’s dream in Zagreb, in the year of our lord 2033: dog shit bombing the sidewalks, garbage overflowing its cans. A haggard-looking fox crept up and sniffed around. Along came a little bald girl wearing gray pajamas and an embroidered blindfold.
Wait. Blindfold?
She sucked her thumb, tiny fingers curled into a fist. A preschooler, smaller than the wild animal that tore through the garbage with its teeth.
Fatherly instincts kicked in. I grabbed a claw hammer from the toolbox, slammed open the door, and rushed up, up, up the stone steps, envisioning myself wailing on the fox in a rain of blood.
I stopped dead in my tracks. Though I couldn’t hear the words, the girl was talking to the animal. The fox’s mouth moved. It spoke.
I hadn’t slept in days, and sleeplessness had transformed my world into a fairy tale: Little Gray Riding Hood, Big Bad Fox. What next? Would the girl say, “My, what big teeth you have”? Nope. Instead, her fingers glowing black, she closed the fox’s eyes and the beast fell and lay there with a serene look on its face. As if it no longer needed to sneak and scrounge, as if it could finally rest.
Man, I wished I could sleep like that.
The girl huffed and puffed and blew—no three little piggies in sight—and vanished behind the massive plume of her exhalation. By the time the haze cleared, she was gone. The fox, too. Clearly, I was suffering from exhaustion-invoked delirium, Brothers Grimm style. Magical.
I went indoors and set the hammer on the table, where my wife had left a plate of sarma—meat-stuffed cabbage leaves—and a handwritten poem, in English no less. She was sweet, my woman, always adding joyful flourishes to our lives. Her English was improving faster than my feeble attempts at Croatian. Respect. And here I was, the alien living in her country.
She was zonked out in front of the TV like a corpse, her pregnant belly enormous. Buried within that mountain, sheltered from life’s harsh reality, was our baby, due any day. Tick tock.
On the television, a man cowered in a wardrobe and clung to a bouquet of white chrysanthemums while an inferno consumed his home, a Czech art house movie that had worked its soporific magic on my wife, her eyes shut, her breathing slow and steady. Must be nice. No matter how tired I was these days, nothing knocked me out.
I missed California. Missed sleeping.
When I arrived in Zagreb, I was required to register at an overcrowded police station. We foreigners lined up, hoping to escape to a brave new world, and one by one, they herded us into a room. They. The man. I half expected a dose of soma to pacify me, but they said I had to submit to being chipped, said, “No signature, no chip, no visa, Meester Keene.” What could I do, turn around and spend money I didn’t have, to travel a gazillion miles home? After quitting my job? As soon as I signed, a cold injection gun pressed against the back of my skull, and ka-chunk—in went the chip.
People everywhere pay for utilities—gas, water, electricity. On top of those bills, Croatia also charges for sleep, a scheme being beta-tested in the Balkans. If you don’t pony up, every time you close your eyes, you get nonstop ads in your head, plugged into an immersive multi-sensory feed, courtesy of the chip. Everyone’s chipped, but those who pay the sleep bill enjoy ad-free slumber. I was skipping payments and squirreling away the money to move us out of this shithole basement, so whenever I dared try to doze, the chip’s sleep blockers kicked in and ads played in my head. Zero sleep for me.
I grabbed our old X-media from the coffee table to read a book, and the cracked screen frag-men-ted the words. After each page, up popped an ad. Consume consume consume.
My eyelids dropped like a guillotine. Boom! A commercial: shiny, smiling people consuming content on their shiny smart devices, undoubtedly the people in those ads bombarded by ads on their own devices, watching an ad of someone watching an ad of someone else watching ads, mirrors inside mirrors, ad infinitum.
I wolfed down the plate of sarma. Even cold, it was tasty tasty. I lay back on the couch. At least we had a roof over our heads. Really, I was a glass-half-full kind of guy, but my glass often contained piss (see: black mold on ceiling). God damn. I constantly needed to scrub that shit out. Our living space reeked of bleach and mold, which must be harmful to breathe, bad for Baby Aidan in my wife’s womb and his developing brain. We had to get out of this hell. Lord knew our jobs weren’t bringing in enough clams, but with the added money I saved from not paying my sleep bill, we’d soon be able to afford a new apartment.
I flipped to the rental listings on the TV. At the top of our favorites was an apartment my wife had taken me to check out. It was heaven: clean, a bedroom, a bathroom. No more crashing on a fold-out couch, no more hauling my ass up the stairs to beg dear wife’s cousins—who rented us this pit—to let me crap in their toilet, no more inhaling toxic mold.
A centipede skittered across the floor and I stomped the bastard. No more creepy crawlies.
###
“Murphy,” my wife said. “Are you awake?” Her name’s Valerija, but the J in her name isn’t like the J in “Jesus.” Croatians pronounce Js like Ys. Her perfume couldn’t hide that she stank of cigarettes. Man. Bleach, mold, cigarettes. I hoped our son wasn’t born fucked up.
“I’m always awake,” I said. Well, I was half-awake, not wholly inhabiting this world but a nether realm, some crack between the planes of reality, a place from which everything sounded hollow and glassy, easily broken.
Valerija put the X-media on her belly, clicked the baby’s playlist, and out boomed an interminably long diaper ad until at last Shakira thrummed from the speaker.
“Is Baby Aidan busting a move?” I said.
“How many times I tell you?” With that smirk, Valerija looked wicked cute. “Baby is not boy. And Anika is better name.” Unfortunately, she was dressed for work—a button-up blouse and ironed skirt.
“‘Murphy Jr.?’”
“You are delirious, sleep-depraved.”
Depraved. Using incorrect pronunciation, she’d stumbled upon abject accuracy.
“I’ll sleep later on,” I said. “Just a bit longer—”
“We should pay bill. I work, so you can sleep.”
“I wish you’d stay home. The baby’s due.”
“How we pay for food if I do not go to job? How we pay bank credit for your brewery?”
Burn. Yeah, my brewery.
Poached from my lowly corporate gig in the States producing industrial lager—speaking of glass half-full of piss—I moved to Croatia for an employment opportunity at a craft brewery, lured with an offer to be head brewer and make real beer. That’s where I met Valerija, who worked there as a lab tech. Alas, the dream was not to last. The brewery’s owner crossed the wrong people. In a whiskey bar one evening, a grenade landed on his lap. Boom! Bye-bye owner. Bye-bye job. But at least my testicles and entrails weren’t painting a wall.
After that, Valerija landed a position as a cog in a Heineken-owned machine. Me, I couldn’t find work, so I did the only thing I knew and started my nano brewery.
Exclusive contracts with big breweries tied down most cafe bars—thanks for working for the enemy, Valerija—which made it tough to snag clients. No matter how proud I was of my mind-blowingly awesome beer, I hadn’t sold a keg in weeks.
“Not sleeping is bad for health,” Valerija said.
“And smoking isn’t bad?” The concern about health from a pregnant woman smoking cigarettes lit my fuse, but Croatians don’t always share the American puritanical belief that smoking is dangerous for a baby in the womb.
“It is not big deal.”
“I’m killing myself to escape these shitty living conditions, to look out for us, to look out for the baby’s health—” A headache hammered my skull. I winced.
“One cigarette a day gives no statistic risk to me or baby. Smoking is only relaxing I have.” She chewed her fingernails, cuticles red from abuse.
Maybe it wasn’t my place to dictate how she treated her body. I mean, I’d caved when she refused an abortion. But now that we were committed, what about the baby’s needs? Man, I missed the single life—nobody reliant on me, no responsibilities, unlimited sleep.
I closed my eyes. There were no ads or any overwhelming sensory clutter, just a whisper. “Say yes to my offer and I’ll gift you deeply-sleepy sleep.”
The ads slammed back into my head. I’d only been given respite so I could hallucinate a creepy voice. Great. Sleep-depraved indeed.
###
Later, I headed to work, downhill on Mesnička Ulica, Butcher’s Street. I paused at the entrance to the tunnel that cut through the hill beneath Grič, where we lived. The concrete network had been built during World War II, a bomb shelter. Lights strung along the ceiling led deep into the earth. Holding hands, a couple brushed past me and walked straight in. The thought of entering the tunnel gave me the chills.
I hoofed it down Ilica, the main drag—slap of tires against cobblestones, winter wind chapping my lips and burning my cheeks.
Church bells tolled noon.
I arrived at the garage, at Glass Hammer, my brewery. Along with the pocked brick, broken windows, and fruity smell of fermentation inside, was my repurposed dairy equipment: brew werks done cheap, though we still went into debt. I threw a switch and the hot liquor tank creaked as it heated water. Steam billowed up, tugged at webs that hung from the rafters, and exited through the open door, releasing the brewery’s warmth into a cold world.
At the moment, the biggest challenge for my brewery was drought. Brewing is water-intensive, and I relied on rain, which I purified with filters. But if the sky didn’t soon open up, I wouldn’t be able to brew.
A pair of rats perched on the grain mill, chewing. I grabbed a broom and wailed on the fuckers, made mincemeat of one, but the other scurried off and left a trail of blood. I gave chase.
From up ahead came a forlorn mewling. When I rounded the corner, the magical blindfolded girl I’d seen with the fox was standing there, chewing, her lips smeared red. She cradled the rat like a raggedy doll, just a bloody stump where its head should be.
She whispered, the sound grit and gravel, her voice familiar. “Say yes to my offer and I’ll gift you deeply-sleepy sleep.”
Offer? And chomping on rat heads? Dude. Check her out: bald, face and scalp adorned with henna tattoos like a filigree of roots, iodine color on her freakishly pale skin. She stank of roadkill. What a sinister little girl.
My heartbeat slowed, the pain at my temples eased, and a loamy taste filled my mouth to bursting. I choked and spat out mouthful after mouthful of dirt.
“Before you know it, I willy-will return,” she whispered, “to make my offer.”
No way was she real. I touched her cheek. Her skin felt like pumice, and so frigid it chilled my fingertips.
She shrieked and slapped my hand, then huffed and puffed and blew a massive plume, disappearing into the haze.
####
The tram brakes screamed and rousted me from insomniac zombification. On my way home after an exhausting day. I picked dirt from my teeth. If the girl was a hallucination, what the actual fuck was up with the dirt in my mouth? And her offer? Was she some weird Croatian genie? My three wishes would be sleep, sleep, sleep.
The suffocatingly hot air in the tram fried my sinuses. Reflected in the window across from me was a white dude in blue overalls and a lambswool jacket, gaunt, unshaven, stringy hair to his shoulders. I hardly recognized my reflection—just another loser with an advertising implant.
The beta testing for this chip was an absolutastical disaster, but that wouldn’t stop tech giants from rolling it out worldwide to strip mine the populace and extract wealth through trickle-up economics.
Me, I was one of the bleeders at the bottom, no different from these commuters, droplets in the sea of humanity: an old man gumming a baguette as though his teeth had been kicked in, punk girls hugging skateboards like shields, fare enforcers hassling a dark-skinned woman in a hijab. Was she an immigrant?
Same as many other immigrants, I moved here for a job. I’d never considered myself better than anyone else, never referred to myself as an “expat,” a patrician word reserved for white folks from Western society who chose to move abroad, who hadn’t fled poverty, famine, war. If you’re a POC or foreigner with an unpronounceable name, you’re an immigrant. Or worse yet, an illegal, a refugee, human garbage to block at the border and imprison in camps, garbage to expel. And me? Claiming the term “immigrant” seemed like cultural appropriation, as if I hadn’t suffered enough to earn it.
Some defeated-looking woman said something to me in Croatian. I didn’t understand, so I just nodded and smiled.
When the tram stopped on the main square, the doors sighed open, and we—the sea of humanity—flooded out. Overhead, drones hovered, swarms of buzz-saw quad-copters that no doubt recorded me picking my nose. Their blades fanned us with eddies of fog. I took my graffiti marker from my pocket and scrawled a gigantic middle finger on the tram right over an ad. Monitor this, drones.
Again came the forlorn mewling, and a mob of young children emerged from a glowing fog bank at the rear of the tram. Blindfold—check. Gray pajamas—check. Bald, white as bone, henna tats—check, check, check. The genie girl’s twins, for sure. They whistled and made popping sounds. Echolocation? Was that how they navigated despite those blindfolds? Bats loosed from the belfry.
Wiped out, barely able to maintain verticality, I sat on a bench and closed my eyes. In my head, an ad: lab-grown meat called Pravo Meso, Real Meat. My stomach growled like Pavlov’s bitch.
Firecrackers exploded in a trashcan and I about jumped out of my skin. I opened my eyes—no blindfolded kids. Had anyone seen them?
Scaffolding exoskeletoned the buildings that surrounded the square, plastered with painfully bright vid ads, even the cathedral and its towering spires. Consume consume consume.
I meandered past the brown man who roasted chestnuts, past the bustling cafes, people seated outside in the dead of winter, warmed by glowing red lamps. After I dropped into a bakery for burek—a greasy, meat-filled pastry Valerija loved—I headed toward Grič, Upper Town. Home.
Piano music from some deceased eighteenth-century composer echoed off the shabby buildings, crumbling facades peeking out from beneath ads, a symbol of capitalism’s failure to sweep away the wreckage of Yugoslavian communism’s collapse forty-odd years ago. A sign warned of falling debris. I passed Krvavi Most, Bloody Bridge, a bridge that had long since been entombed under cobblestone streets, where centuries before, Upper Town and Lower Town had fought.
I stopped at Kamenita Vrata, Stone Gate, the medieval gateway to Grič, with a morning star spike atop the building to hook any invading witches who tried to fly over on brooms, a remnant of historical (read: hysterical) superstition. Tonight, the spike hadn’t caught a soul. Good thing I’d left my witch’s broom at the brewery.
This city’s past spoke as loud as its present.
The gateway contained a chapel with a caged Virgin Mary. Prayers covered the walls. Pay the toll and you, too, can hang a prayer. Turkish kids crowded the wooden pews, thirty or so earthquake refugees (there’s that word again) being indoctrinated into Catholicism. A shriveled prune wearing a nun’s habit led them in chants, and the kids mumbled along, knowing if they mimicked her, she’d feed them. God is great, God is good, especially when he gives you food. The kids slyly passed a cigarette among themselves. While the nun wasn’t looking, I whipped out my marker and wrote an atheist-in-a-foxhole prayer on the wall, a plea that I would give anything to sleep. Anything. Help me, Mary, Jesus, God, genie girl, whoever. Amen.
###
When I got home, the stink of the basement assaulted me. I dumped the pastry I’d gotten for Valerija on the table next to the hammer.
She always paid her bill, so she was out like a light, really breathing, deep in the realm of dreams, surrounded by pillows.
Prayers were futile. Some nonexistent god or magical girl would never rescue me. Or. Allow. Such. Bliss. But if I didn’t have Valerija and the baby to worry about, I could luxuriate in that serenity.
And sleep forever.
I picked up a pillow. It wouldn’t take long. Blink of an eye. I jammed the pillow into her face. My headache throbbed, a rushing tide of blood in my ears. I pushed down. Held firm. Clenched my teeth.
She flailed and grabbed on to my hands—her skin’s warmth against mine, her scent, bergamot and gardenia, memories of kisses, and the taste of her waxy lipstick. This was my wife.
I dropped the pillow.
She bolted upright, confused, not awake. Mumble, mumble. She buried herself under blankets, her back to me.
What a piece of crap I’d become. It wasn’t her fault I had cornered myself in this desperate situation.
I sought solace by reading on the X-media. Ads distracted me. I gave up and listened to music but ads disturbed me so I gave up and watched TV but ads distressed me so I gave up and tried to doze but ads destroyed me so I gave up and went for a walk but vid ads were everywhere, brand after brand from Germany, India, China, fluorescent greens and electric blues and strobing pinks that scorched my retinas.
Gouging out my eyeballs and stabbing my eardrums would give sweet relief.
###
Come morning, when I got to the brewery, my water filters sputter-coughed, the rain tank empty as a dying wish. I turned the tap on the sink. Nothing. I hadn’t paid the water bill. Fucking fuckosity. I couldn’t brew, so I couldn’t earn money, and we’d never escape that shithole.
###
It was night.
The genie girl would soon return to make her offer.
Ad: baby onesies and puke bibs.
Slimy black mold burbled and chortled, melting off the ceiling, a blanket that threatened to fall and smother me in poisonous comfort.
Smoldering headache.
Ad: The girl made her offer, a sacrifice, her beating heart in her palm. She drew roots on my cheeks with her blood, said she would grant my wish.
It was morning. Could tell by the lifeless gray that bled through the curtains.
Valerija rolled over and stared at me camped upright beside her. “Fancy new apartment is not important.” She caressed my cheek. “Without sleep, you will die.”
Ad: hospice care and funeral homes.
“Maybe,” I said, “tonight I’ll sleep.”
I held out my mobile for her to read the message: a cafe bar ordering kegs from my brewery. Today was delivery day. Boom! Cash on the barrelhead, a new client.
“Maybe,” I said, “it’s time we applied for the apartment.”
She gave me the widest grin, a grin that swallowed me whole. It was all worth it. Our baby would arrive and we’d make a proper nest.
Upstairs, Valerija’s cousins blasted turbo-folk—Balkan beat, Romani-influenced music that locals bellowed along to while pounding cola mixed with red wine and roasting a pig on a spit.
Valerija launched from the couch and pulled me up. Giddy about the prospect of moving into an actual apartment, we danced to that obnoxious music as if it were the best god damned music ever.
I had lied to Valerija, though. Sleep wasn’t in the cards. The money we’d saved was scarcely enough to cover expenses. The future remained a looming threat.
###
That night on my way home, the city was silent—all calm, all bright. No drones observed me, no cars to dodge as I crossed the street, a quiet so thick it hummed, as though the city’s noise no longer masked the murmur of distant galaxies being born.
Snow fell. I trudged ahead, and the accumulating powder crunched beneath my boots. Lit by vid ads on the buildings, the plummeting snow looked like a rainbow meteor shower.
My rainwater collectors would fill up. I could brew! Cash from delivering kegs, and now, water. I howled thanks to the weather gods and opened wide my maw to catch snowflakes. A tram sped past, and disrupted this wonderland as if it had shaken the snow globe I’d been inhabiting, a swirl of flurries trailing the last carriage. Inside, the passengers lay sprawled out, spilling off seats, the driver hunched over, seemingly unconscious. WTF?
Arctic wind pushed me onward to the night market on Britanski Trg, British Square. There wasn’t a soul out and about. At a fast-food stand, rotisserie kebab broiled under a heat lamp. Lab grown? The kebab meister was zonked out. At the kiosk next to him, a woman slept, deathly still. The wind blew her scarf across her face and veiled her.
The entire city was asleep. I scanned the headlines on my mobile but saw no news about what was going on.
A blindfolded boy led maybe a dozen bright-eyed children past, a mix of ethnicities, black, white, brown, each of them shoeless and without jackets, hand in hand, a daisy chain gang, singing in some unknown language. They must be freezing. Were the blindfolded kids snatching children?
More singing approached, a lullaby. Another happy gang, this time led by the genie girl, who whistled and made popping sounds. I surfed the wake of their joy and followed. At Butcher’s Street, they turned and romped into the bomb shelter tunnel beneath Grič.
I halted at the entrance.
With a hiss, the vid ads cut to static, went black. Streetlights, too, which left only the full moon to illuminate an empty city.
The only people awake in Zagreb were these blindfolded kids pied-pipering the city’s children into the hill. In the dark tunnel, the singing echoed, a diaphanous melody. Divine.
I activated my mobile’s flashlight and entered the tunnel. Farther and farther in I went, until I reached a wide-open area. I held up the light and turned in a circle. Painted all over the walls, brown like dried blood, were the same roots tattooed on the blindfolded kids. Maybe they weren’t genies but pagan plant worshippers.
The singing had faded. Sleep-depraved fuzz sizzled inside my skull, then the air vibrated as though the earth were attuning to my mind. I sat on the ground. Warm. Musty.
Again came the forlorn mewling.
“Say yes to my offer and I’ll gift you deeply-sleepy sleep.” The blindfolded girl. She put her fist to her mouth and sucked her thumb.
“What do you want from me?”
“You are a member of this city’s lively-hive,” she said, “a hive whose suffering awoke us.”
“Am I in the land of nod?” Woozy. As if I’d huffed turpentine fumes.
“You desire sleep?”
Sleep? God damn right. “Yes.”
Fingers aglow, she lowered my eyelids. Darkness. No ads, no sound but the earth’s vibration. She eased me into her lap.
Sleep.
###
A shock woke me. My slumber had been all-consuming, concentrated like syrup sucked off Mother Coma’s teat. But it wasn’t enough. A mere hint.
See: my mobile uplighting the girl—a henna-webbed angel sculpted of alabaster.
“When the moment comes,” she whispered, “I will gift you more of this deeply-sleepy sleep.”
Smell her: freshly turned earth, truffles, linden blossoms. All else blurred, only the girl remained in focus. She lifted her blindfold and stared at me, her pearlescent eyes glowing black with savage beauty. Gaze into her depths and know her love. This heavenly creature shared with me; now I needed to share with her.
Listen to her speak. “I’ll claim from you such an eensy-weensy thing.”
“Yes.” My voice was far away, the splash of a stone dropped down a well.
She took my hand, her skin silky. “Once my brethren and I end your city’s misery, once we rescue your children from life’s unruly-cruelly mean reality, we’ll depart.”
Wait. She would rescue our baby? Me and Valerija, it was our role to take care of our family. Whatever. After sleep, I’d figure it out. All I knew was that this mesmerificent girl would grant my wish.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’d be an unbearably-terribly bad parent. Neverly-everly wanted to be a daddy. Stop un-wanting, stop worrying, and say yes to deeply-sleepy sleep.”
I uttered yes a third time—no more responsibilities, free to rest—and a look of satisphoria overtook her face.
We exited the tunnel. A rush of cold air. Empty streets. Snow kept blanketing the city. Purification. Bach’s “Air” chimed on my mobile—a bunch of missed calls. Valerija. The tunnel must not have a signal. Up popped a message:
My water broke. Hurry home!
“Do not fret.” The girl squeezed my hand. I felt a crunch. Heat shot up my arm and my facial muscles spasmed, my broken knuckles grinding, distant, someone else’s body, someone else’s life.
We strolled onward, the city dark, electricity mercifully dead. No vid ads. I closed my eyes. Magnificent black—no ads in my noggin either. We neared home. No barking dog or turbo-folk to wreak havoc on my eardrums, nothing but a glorious emptiness.
The girl led me down the stairs. We tracked in snow. Candlelight flooded the warm basement, a scent of melted wax and a coppery, sour aroma. Valerija lay on the couch, breastfeeding a plum-colored baby covered in goo.
“Murphy, where you been? I do all work myself.” She smiled. “We have little lady, our Baby Anika.”
Me? Dumbstruck. I’d missed our daughter’s birth. How the hell had Valerija pulled this off on her own? Such strength. My amazing woman. My family. I kissed beautiful Valerija on the brow, kissed beautiful Anika on the cheek. I was a father.
On the table, candles guttered, wax rivering onto the wood and toward the claw hammer—where I had left it.
Tired. Hot in here. I took off my jacket.
Valerija frowned at the girl. “Who is this?”
The girl lunged, tried to steal the baby, but Valerija refused to let go. They fought. A headache cleaved my skull, half yearning to sleep, half instinct to protect. Unable to breathe, paralyzed. Nausea bile.
Fingers aglow, the girl lashed out, raked her nails across my wife’s face, and shredded her eyelids. Valerija drained of color and stopped moving. The girl yanked the umbilical cord from Valerija’s belly. Cradled the baby. “Such an eensy-weensy thing. She’ll be everly-foreverly safe amongst my kind.”
No!
I exploded, regained control of my body, and grabbed the hammer. My broken hand burned like a fistful of razors as I hit the girl with the claw. Cracked flesh, a fissure in stone. The hammer lodged in her eye socket and out oozed black teardrops. I jerked the hammer and a chunk of her face broke away—craggy lava rock. She dropped the baby and raised her arms in defense. I hammered her. Ebony blood spattered. Her shrieks rose to a gale. Sulfur odor. I hammered again, again, again, until her head crumbled and she collapsed in a landslide of dirt and stone.
I howled. Victory? Anguish.
The TV crackled, sparked to life, a journalist reporting the death wave that hit Zagreb—kidnappings? terrorists?—then, flicker, flicker, the ceiling bulb kindled and illuminated the basement horror in grisly detail. The girl, a rock pile, eyes visible amid the debris, the ebony glow dying. Valerija, splattered with the scarlet and mucus of birth, staring at me through her bloody, flayed eyelids. On the couch beside her, our daughter, slick with black, wailing.
I checked Valerija’s breathing, her pulse. Nothing.
How do you do CPR? Throw the pillows aside, tilt back Valerija’s head. Pinch her nose, breathe into her mouth. Memories of kisses, taste of waxy lipstick. Push chest to revive heart, one, two, three—is this how to resuscitate someone? Broken knuckles grinding, sweaty agony. Drones buzzing outside, dog barking, city waking, alive. Breathe into mouth, push chest, one, two, three. Stench of mold. No pulse—breathe, Valerija! Centipede skittering past, baby wailing. Push push push, one, two, three—pump, heart! Reporter’s voice on TV: death death death.
Snap.
I broke Valerija’s ribs.
The stone girl hadn’t been a hallucination. My wife was dead. My fault for not protecting her.
I rocked the baby, sang to her, but she wouldn’t stop crying.
I nestled beside Valerija and held Anika to her. Our daughter latched on to her momma’s lifeless breast. Went quiet. Buried beneath the city’s noise—the sound of her suckling and my hyperventilating sobs.
So tired I could die, I squeezed my eyes shut against the flow of tears. Up popped a BMW ad, the tail lights a smear of tracer fire.
