Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt

Author:Adrienne Celt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Lev

28 June 1931, later

Airmail via [Redacted]

One more thing. I’ll send these letters together, and hopefully you’ll feel the tug of time between them, how I set down my pen and folded the paper, and then was bowled over by the sense of you, present. I often get this feeling at home, when we’re separated by a wall or a few city blocks; some whiff of you walks into the room behind me, brushes its fingertips over my shoulders, reaches a hand down the top of my shirt to caress the tough nub of my breastbone. I never want you more, Vera, than in those moments. When the distance between us is but a clarion cry, a note on our closeness. Tonight you crawled up onto my knees, pushing my chair back several inches and nearly toppling both of us over. I could feel the weight of you, could almost make out your outline. Your fingers scattering themselves over my skin, as if setting spells from some private grimoire, a book of incantations built to my exact specifications. Bring in the clear and cloudless wife. Her invisibility irresistible, my brain all woolen with desire.

Were those hands my hands? The ones that pulled at me, put me in my place. Was it my hips that pitched and rolled until the inevitable cataclysm? Hull of a ship, breached. Cheek of a woman, brushed by cheek. I know what most people would say about lonely Lev in his lightless cottage at the end of the land. Lantern kicked over, fire brewing in the dirt of the floor before fizzling out. Self abuse, heavy use. But I have more faith than most people. In you, especially.

Tomorrow night I’m meeting again with the courier, Vlad, so he can secret me across the heavily patrolled border back to the home of my birth. Our births. From there I’ll have twenty-four hours, along with my own sense of momentum and the hand spade I picked up—an ingenious contraption that can be folded in two so as to look less like a knife if one’s possessions are tossed by suspicious soldiers. Today I found a small hillock and practiced shooting into it, getting used to the kick of the Italian pistol and fumbling my fingers through the process of a quick reload. I won’t write you again until I’m homeward bound, or perhaps I won’t write again at all. Whether due to hasty retreat or an untimely bullet in an unlikely place (forehead, home of dreams, kaput, et cetera), this may be the last missive you receive from my misadventure. I pray that fate not let those Marxist thugs derail me—I could not stand the sovietskii sabor on my tongue forever, flavor of a lost country. You know they’d keep me if they could, writing incompetent manifestos or moldering in an early grave. With any luck you’ll see me soon, manuscript in hand, all triumph.

But if not, at least I had one last taste of you this evening, and I wanted you to know it, that your distant body was as nourishing as any meal.

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