Andrea Clark Libin
from The Girl in Leningradsky Station
Here’s a secret I won’t tell you: The forgetting took nights of a raw bone stomach, bruised out eyes, lips. I tattooed the remembering on gum wrappers, matchbooks, apple crates, piss stalls, and the palm of my hand. I worked for the forgetting. Owned it in hard currency. Sealed out the flickers like windows coated in black paint, but the remembering seeped through the cracks of broken glass: paper puppets shadowing curtains, a girl on a frozen lake, cartoons in daylight, beets roasting in the ground, frost on eyelashes, freckles on a pale shoulder.
I skated on a lake once. I had a red scarf. And braids. My father, he skated backwards with his hands in the air. Even the ice laughed.
Baba and me—we searched the moon in the dawn sky, only to find its reflection in a puddle. Baba said most things in life were like that.
Waking on a train at dawn, windowing blue and birch.
When Hopscotch found me in the piss stalls, he cut off my braids with his knife. Ivan snagged me a crate. They tucked me in near the steam pipes, ran a lighter to flash their names, tagged on the wall in neon green. Hush, hush, they hummed, fed me a candy bar, took drags off a cigarette in the darkness, told me she’d be back for me in the morning, till I fell asleep to their whispers. Day glared through the station and they schooled me in their ways: filching cigarettes, donuts, candy, glue; dodging cops, pedophiles, gangbangers, all the while palms out for kopeks, food, disdain.
Afternoons we run the tracks. Daredevil each other out of boredom. Hopscotch the third rail. For the glory. Swipe beer from vendors. Ride the cars. Guzzle from glass bottles and jungle gym the handrails, beat on windows. Babushkas lament our hooligan ways, our blackened fingernails, runny noses, our lost souls. We laugh and spit drink and sing to the motherland.
Lying awake at night, she’s finding me everywhere—peering inside cupboards, baskets, under beds, down dead end alleyways. She never stops. Never gives up. Combs through classrooms, pawnshops, prostitutes’ faces. Scours hospital charts, rides in police cars, eyeballs mug shots. She looks everywhere, but here, because you forget that when you’re searching for something, you never find what you lost until you give up looking—a name on the tip of your tongue, a ring, keys, your only girl. You have to forget all about the looking.
My hair was growing fast, blond and pale. Hopscotch snatched a cap right off an old man’s knee and pulled it tight on my skull. Hopscotch said he would shrink me if he could. Spit over his shoulder. The old man called him a degenerate. Hopscotch laughed. Comrade, he said, let’s meet again in hell. The old man looked down at his unlaced shoes. Curls seeped out from the cap and Hopscotch said he had to un-girl me, said I was growing too fast, like there was a tomorrow, like there wasn’t pimps out there who’d beat his ass, cut his throat, sickos who wouldn’t trick me away with trumped up promises, like I believed there was a god damn tomorrow, that he didn’t rescue a fool. When I said it wasn’t my fault, the growing, he told me to shut-up. He clipped off tufts that fell like feathers at our feet. He told me boys were not allowed to cry and slapped my cheek. Told me if he ever caught me sniffing glue, he’d send me to hell himself. He took out his knife, flamed it with his lighter, pierced his palm with the tip, then mine, but I didn’t shed a tear. He held his palm up to the sky, then pressed hard, his hand dwarfing mine. From now on you’re my kid brother, he told me. Let no one say a goddamn word otherwise. He took a snatched bottle of vodka from his jacket, gulped a shot, and spit it back on my palm, and the sting felt like a first kiss, a promise, a tomorrow.
I dropped crumbs on the bare marble floor of the station every dawn. Crumbs trailed a path to my underground hideout. Tagged in blue paint: This Way. She would be taking a train somewhere—a job, the dentist, her new family, and the crumbs would remind her that she had forgotten something. She would check her purse, retrace her day, tap her chin, all the while following the crumbs. The remembering would come like a moon appearing in daylight. When she finds me in the tunnels, I’ve grown wings of feather and wax. She lays her hand on my shaved head and calls me her angel. But in the night, the rats scoured the grimy marble, monstering away my prayers.
__________
Andrea Clark Libin’s work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Chameleon, Downtown Brooklyn, Furious Fictions, Blue Leaf Press, and Zen Monster. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA writing program, where she was a fiction editor for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She has received fellowships from SLS St. Petersburg, Columbia, and a writer-in-residency at Peskeompskut Writer’s Retreat. “The Girl in Leningradsky Station” (made up of text and drawings) is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress with multiple narrative threads that shift from St. Petersburg, Moscow, NYC, and Shanghai, to remote Zen monasteries in China. She teaches in the Honors Program and English Department at LIU Brooklyn.
from The Girl in Leningradsky Station
Here’s a secret I won’t tell you: The forgetting took nights of a raw bone stomach, bruised out eyes, lips. I tattooed the remembering on gum wrappers, matchbooks, apple crates, piss stalls, and the palm of my hand. I worked for the forgetting. Owned it in hard currency. Sealed out the flickers like windows coated in black paint, but the remembering seeped through the cracks of broken glass: paper puppets shadowing curtains, a girl on a frozen lake, cartoons in daylight, beets roasting in the ground, frost on eyelashes, freckles on a pale shoulder.
I skated on a lake once. I had a red scarf. And braids. My father, he skated backwards with his hands in the air. Even the ice laughed.
Baba and me—we searched the moon in the dawn sky, only to find its reflection in a puddle. Baba said most things in life were like that.
Waking on a train at dawn, windowing blue and birch.
When Hopscotch found me in the piss stalls, he cut off my braids with his knife. Ivan snagged me a crate. They tucked me in near the steam pipes, ran a lighter to flash their names, tagged on the wall in neon green. Hush, hush, they hummed, fed me a candy bar, took drags off a cigarette in the darkness, told me she’d be back for me in the morning, till I fell asleep to their whispers. Day glared through the station and they schooled me in their ways: filching cigarettes, donuts, candy, glue; dodging cops, pedophiles, gangbangers, all the while palms out for kopeks, food, disdain.
Afternoons we run the tracks. Daredevil each other out of boredom. Hopscotch the third rail. For the glory. Swipe beer from vendors. Ride the cars. Guzzle from glass bottles and jungle gym the handrails, beat on windows. Babushkas lament our hooligan ways, our blackened fingernails, runny noses, our lost souls. We laugh and spit drink and sing to the motherland.
Lying awake at night, she’s finding me everywhere—peering inside cupboards, baskets, under beds, down dead end alleyways. She never stops. Never gives up. Combs through classrooms, pawnshops, prostitutes’ faces. Scours hospital charts, rides in police cars, eyeballs mug shots. She looks everywhere, but here, because you forget that when you’re searching for something, you never find what you lost until you give up looking—a name on the tip of your tongue, a ring, keys, your only girl. You have to forget all about the looking.
My hair was growing fast, blond and pale. Hopscotch snatched a cap right off an old man’s knee and pulled it tight on my skull. Hopscotch said he would shrink me if he could. Spit over his shoulder. The old man called him a degenerate. Hopscotch laughed. Comrade, he said, let’s meet again in hell. The old man looked down at his unlaced shoes. Curls seeped out from the cap and Hopscotch said he had to un-girl me, said I was growing too fast, like there was a tomorrow, like there wasn’t pimps out there who’d beat his ass, cut his throat, sickos who wouldn’t trick me away with trumped up promises, like I believed there was a god damn tomorrow, that he didn’t rescue a fool. When I said it wasn’t my fault, the growing, he told me to shut-up. He clipped off tufts that fell like feathers at our feet. He told me boys were not allowed to cry and slapped my cheek. Told me if he ever caught me sniffing glue, he’d send me to hell himself. He took out his knife, flamed it with his lighter, pierced his palm with the tip, then mine, but I didn’t shed a tear. He held his palm up to the sky, then pressed hard, his hand dwarfing mine. From now on you’re my kid brother, he told me. Let no one say a goddamn word otherwise. He took a snatched bottle of vodka from his jacket, gulped a shot, and spit it back on my palm, and the sting felt like a first kiss, a promise, a tomorrow.
I dropped crumbs on the bare marble floor of the station every dawn. Crumbs trailed a path to my underground hideout. Tagged in blue paint: This Way. She would be taking a train somewhere—a job, the dentist, her new family, and the crumbs would remind her that she had forgotten something. She would check her purse, retrace her day, tap her chin, all the while following the crumbs. The remembering would come like a moon appearing in daylight. When she finds me in the tunnels, I’ve grown wings of feather and wax. She lays her hand on my shaved head and calls me her angel. But in the night, the rats scoured the grimy marble, monstering away my prayers.
__________
Andrea Clark Libin’s work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Chameleon, Downtown Brooklyn, Furious Fictions, Blue Leaf Press, and Zen Monster. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA writing program, where she was a fiction editor for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She has received fellowships from SLS St. Petersburg, Columbia, and a writer-in-residency at Peskeompskut Writer’s Retreat. “The Girl in Leningradsky Station” (made up of text and drawings) is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress with multiple narrative threads that shift from St. Petersburg, Moscow, NYC, and Shanghai, to remote Zen monasteries in China. She teaches in the Honors Program and English Department at LIU Brooklyn.