The Taste of Penny by Jeff Parker

Author:Jeff Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2010-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

Itchy, this guy in a pickup says to Hryushka.

I don’t know what you mean, Hryushka says from the sidewalk, unsure what language the guy is speaking.

Hey, chief, he says. Where’s the library?

Oh, Hryushka says. You’re right in front of it. It’s here.

Then he walks into the library and sits down with the ESL pamphlets. He is trying to rid himself of reflexive particles. He knows he should not feel himself bad. He should feel bad. He should not feel himself like his bones are exploding in the night. He should feel like his bones are exploding in the night. His father never spoke Russian to him, only self-taught English with his thick accent, the same accent that home-schooled him, and now he’s the only kid around who doesn’t really speak English or Russian, no native language, just a thick accent all his own.

Hryushka heard somewhere that his name means piglet. He feels it but can’t directly translate. He feels the pigletness in the sound of his name. He hears things all the time around him, in The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady, from the luggage compartment of the Greyhound, he hears them.

Once some grandma, one of the émigrés who used to shop in The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady, gave him a Russian language textbook. She felt sorry for him because he couldn’t speak what he could understand. His father caught him reading and burnt it in the wood stove.

We not emigrate so you beet Russian, he said. Want that we go anywhere.

When Hryushka hears a word in either language, it’s not like he hears the word. It kind of bypasses his ears and an image pops into his head. When he hears his own name a piglet pops into his head.

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