Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch

Author:Lidia Yuknavitch [Yuknavitch, Lidia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Aurora’s Thrust

There was to be a Raid on my house. On the day of the factory fire, a client approaching from the back alley had seen our faces pressed against the window; to him, we must have looked like fugitives, all those faces of children like question marks. The client alerted the authorities. When we learned of the plan—you’ll not be surprised that my sources extend to the city’s official bureaus—we needed an escape, and though I did consider other options, in the end it was that otherworldly girl who won me over, by reciting to me with precision exactly everything that had happened to me and to the children in the last few weeks despite the fact that we had never met.

It was this all-knowing girl who offered the most promising plan: to escape by water.

She sealed the case in an unusual way: by showing me a coin she said she carried with her at all times, a one-cent piece from the nation’s earliest days, its central figure a woman with the hair of a lion. “When this penny first emerged,” she said, “people thought the image was a horror. They thought she was monstrous, that she looked insane. Her unruly hair, is what they said.” She turned the coin over and over in her hand. “Like mine,” she said. Her own long black hair, wrestling its way down her back, was unruly—beautifully so. I reached out to touch it, but she pulled back. My hand hung suspended just above her head. Something about the coin, the girl, something about women and children and monsters, set into my abdomen.

There exists a city within this city, made by women and children.

Cagey, sly, and ingenious girls with barely-there breasts furrowing paths beneath the ebb and flow of city life. Bellicose wives with tongues as formidable as whips and torsos the size of battleships. Hopeless-to-the-point-of-reckless house cleaners and cooks and ladies’ maids. Bands of little-girl thieves, their faces of hunger merging with their oncoming sexuality and drive to survive. Tiny ambitions in collision, or collusion, with desire. The city they inhabit inverts its own alleged social structure. Women and children first may be its cover story, but women and children creating their own society—their underground economy, below where its very sex sits—that is a deeper story.

This girl, she had an unimaginable plan for our escape. I remember feeling a little dizzy from the sheer will of her. But the story she told, in trade for my trust, won me over.

“This is a story from my father,” she said. “But it is actually the story of my mother. Aster has carried it long enough, though. I think perhaps he is dying from carrying this story,” she said, and the sorrow on her face seemed larger than a body.

“This is the Tale of the Fur Spinner,” she told me. “Sit down in that green chair and I will perform it for you.” And then she began.

“The moment my father first saw my mother, Svajonė, he had a seizure.

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