Brass by Xhenet Aliu

Author:Xhenet Aliu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Elsie

It looked like I was the only person on the East End who didn’t get an invitation to the party happening in our apartment when I walked in after my double shift at the Ross. Bashkim and Gjonni were sitting at the heads of the kitchen table, the other chairs filled with guys I’d never met, all of them leather-brown, all of them with scars across their brows or cheeks or necks, like factory seconds from a set of dishware. A few others improvised seats, like an Igloo cooler that wasn’t ours, a stack of telephone books stolen off of every front step in the neighborhood, a case of industrial-size stewed tomatoes stood upright, obviously borrowed from dry storage at the Ross and almost certainly going back there afterward.

“Beautiful, beautiful!” the men called out, so I turned behind me to see what they were looking at before I realized they meant me. When I turned back to face the room, I was surrounded by wet lips searching for my cheeks. They grabbed my hands and shoved wrinkled dollars into my palms, which I wasn’t ready for, so the bills floated to the floor.

“Look at her, just like a woman, throwing away money,” Gjonni said. He gathered the bills in his hand and pressed the pile into my arms, and I cradled it tight like a child against my chest. “But see, a good woman, a natural mother,” he said, pressing his hand into my belly, which was as puffy from Pepsi bloat as it was from the future human living in there. The men laughed, and then somebody said something I couldn’t understand, which made them laugh harder, and made me want to run.

I looked at Bashkim and did my best to smile.

“I didn’t know people were coming over,” I said.

“It’s friends,” he said. His smile was distorted behind a bottle of Heineken, so many empties scattered on the table that the light in the room was tinted green, the way it looks when a storm is coming. “I wanted them to meet the mother of my child.”

One of the men held a bottle to the ceiling. Cameras were pulled from nowhere. Pictures were snapped.

“Të lindtënjëdjalë,” he said, and the others followed. Të lindtënjëdjalë, they said, not really in unison, so it circled the room like some weird school chorus round.

“It means, ‘May a son be born,’ ” Yllka said. She was standing beside me, and I noticed then for the first time the women seated in the living room, presumably the wives of the men in the kitchen, a bowl of potato chips towering untouched in the center of the coffee table. They stared at me with eyes that were bored and vicious at once.

“Go introduce yourself to the girls. Yllka, go introduce Elsie,” Gjonni said.

It was a den of lions in there. Except for an old lady in a babushka, they had thick manes hairsprayed around their hungry faces, and their noses twitched as I got closer. I stared at Bashkim, but he wouldn’t even look over.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.