Among the Living and the Dead by Inara Verzemnieks

Author:Inara Verzemnieks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

IN THOSE EARLY DAYS, the story of the missing is a story they tell one another without saying a thing, the anxious transmissions of a hive mind, the entire village babbling silently to itself, as if suddenly, everyone is the old woman who can no longer remember her name, who bickers with her shadow, pitches pebbles at the sun, sucks the filth from her hands as if it’s really sweets.

A list of the things they thought they saw that they did not know whether they should admit to anyone else:

The farmer’s wife and her children, led from their own house, their fronts still dusted from making the morning’s bread. The neighbor’s cat that never crossed the threshold of the barn, that directed its wormy rump at anyone who tried to make eye contact, emerging from your peonies, jittery, dropping fleas, pleading for food. The little man well placed in the local Party, who is now sitting on a pile of pillows, driving the buggy you could swear belonged to the blacksmith.

They react like a village of strangers. Each thinking no farther than the borders of his own life. And in this way, dread becomes something both secret and shared.

It trails Ausma for an anxious week, plodding just behind her, a phantom presence that makes her uneasy in a way that can’t be put into words.

Like the moment a fish’s belly slips through the knife’s slit?

No.

Like the egg, when rapped against a bowl, that disgorges bits of unformed chick, pale dimpled skin, a streaking of beak, the suggestion of an eye?

That’s not right, either.

Best to stop there, to quit trying.

Some things don’t need to be put into words that anyone else can understand.

This is hers and hers alone, the dread of a thirteen-year-old girl.

And it follows its own logic:

Because dread is a secret thing, and the future is a secret thing, now the future becomes something to dread.

Wake to the sound of the stars. Stumble out to the cows. Place your pail so that you can lean into their warm flanks while you work, let them steam your skin when they reach back with their noses to nudge you, testing whether you are just a fly. Then close your eyes and half-sleep while you tug the milk from them. Know how much you have already done by the way the pail sings. Try not to think about how much you don’t know, such as whether today could be the day that your mother is imagining when she cries from the nest that is her bed and says she wishes your sister would come home, so that whatever is going to happen, we can at least be together when it happens, and your father says, or are you dreaming, shh, let her have her life, while she can.

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