No Stopping Train by Les Plesko

Author:Les Plesko
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619024182
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

She counted the barbs on the fence hedging Tarnya’s south side, sixty-nine barbs between posts. She used them to count up the days she’d been sidling up to that wire, one side to the other, and then she’d start over again. It had been several times.

The fence was not electrified.

Afternoon snow in her hair, on her shoulders and back. Tuesday laundry day, Wednesdays they hauled stones from a pit, one pile to the next in the yard. Harder to carry each day with the turnip and coal rations cut.

Hey, seamstress girl, but she didn’t care to be called or called that.

A mouthful of pins, buttons in her chapped palms. Her shoulders were damp with wet snow or provisional sun. Always some dress like a slippery doll, a dead doll in her arms.

Cold and hungry, she thought: on Thursday, the man who brought coal, how she wouldn’t have to say much, just brush by his legs, brush his legs, let her wrist graze that boy’s coal-blacked arm. She told herself it was all right because she was frozen and starved, he’d bring her some food or warm clothes from outside, that they’d find some small darkened place with just enough room to lie down. From the war Margit knew about tight wedgy darkness like that.

Wednesday she took off her ring, slipped it under her tongue.

Thursday came, she brushed his arm.

He said, “So, seamstress girl,” so her name was of use after all, it set her apart to remember her by.

“Excuse me,” she said, then, scared, she brushed past him and ran to the yard, biting her palm by the place where her dresses froze on the clothesline. She gathered them all, the faithful familiar squirm of each one, shouting “Safe,” like the child’s game she’d played in the space between buildings when she was a child.

Next week he followed her out in the yard, threw her down on the ground.

Not here, not now!

But if not here, where? If not now, when? This was camp, everything was right now, his cold hand up underneath on the pants she wore under her dress, on her thigh.

Guards watched from the tower in the field with its brown wizened range weed and rocks. Fifty-two girls took their turns on tiptoes on the chair until the barrack’s windows fogged up.

They hurried behind the outhouse. She let him lead her by the hand, as if they were off to a dance. He pressed against her, covered her face with both palms.

“Goddamn it,” she said. “How many shovels of coal is this worth to you now?”

Was she talking to him or herself?

His pants down, her face dark from his hands, all those clothes that were still not enough against cold to be wrestled aside, their coats and his knees tangled up, her fists on his shoulders, she wanted to cry but the wind would have carried it off.

“Ah, seamstress girl,” the man said, breathless, done, while she crouched on her heels in the snow by the planks of the leaning shack.

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