Promised Virgins by Jeffrey Fleishman

Author:Jeffrey Fleishman [Jeffrey Fleishman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628722734
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The night stays still. Morning is a rough affair. My body feels like a fist that’s been clenched for days. The sky is a miserable blue, and there’s an orange sheen across the snow. I stand in the broken window and face the sun. I’m glad there’s no mirror. Alija shimmies out of her bag and stands beside me. We hear the clink of metal and the murmur of men below.

“Maybe you’ll find out about your brother today.”

“I didn’t sleep all night.”

“Be calm. It may take a few days to find him, even if he’s up here. There’s a lot of mountain he could be in.”

“When we were kids my father brought us to this mountain. Not this high up, though. This was our summer mountain. Villagers would come to cool in the heat, and you’d hear all these voices along the streams and the sound of splashing water. It was one of the few places you could go and not see the MUP. My father said it was heaven.”

“Did your brother like it?”

“He would run through the stream until he was soaking, and I’d follow. I’d jump on him, and his clothes and his skin were so cool. Our father would build a fire on the bank, and we’d sit until dark and sometimes through the night until morning. My father knew a lot of stories back then. He told them slowly. The flame stayed on his face. Ardian’s favorite was one about a mountain lion and a shepherd. The lion sneaked down every night and ate one of the shepherd’s sheep. The shepherd tried everything to stop the lion. To trick. To kill him. Nothing worked. Then one night there was only one sheep left. When the lion came, the shepherd hid in the dark. He pleaded with the lion, ‘Stop eating my sheep.’ The lion said, ‘I cannot. I am a lion.’ The lion circled and lunged toward the sheep. But the sheep did something very unsheeplike. He spun like a dancer and dodged the lion, who went flying over a cliff and died on the rocks below. The shepherd said to the sheep, ‘How did you do that?’ The sheep answered: ‘I am a sheep, but I watched that lion for many nights. He always pounced the same way. So tonight I stood near the cliff. In thinking only about his hunger, the lion never considered where he might land.’”

Alija pulls tight her coat and leans on me, the sun rising in pieces through the broken window, warming us.

“Ardian speaks English as well as you, right?”

“Better. He had, and I don’t know where he got it, a movie almanac. Written in English. He’d walk around blurting out condensed bubbles of English, like the way those little passages are written in the comics. He knows the plot, director, and actors in every movie through 1980. That’s the year the almanac stopped. We’d sit around for hours testing him. No one could trip him up.”

“What’s his favorite movie?”

She doesn’t answer.

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