First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  Ignatius stopped and pulled the dog forward into the space before Nadya and Leonid.

  “Look what I found,” said Ignatius.

  “Are you showing us the leash or the dog?” asked Leonid.

  “The dog, of course. The first dog I came across after I found the leash was white.”

  “Did you come across another dog, then?” said Nadya. “Because this one is gray.”

  Leonid leaned down and held the back of his hand to the dog’s nose to sniff. It huffed in a few snotty-sounding breaths and then licked his hand, leaving a sticky strand of mucus when it pulled away. Leonid scratched the dog’s cheek, and the dog nuzzled against his hand.

  “She’s sweet, at least,” said Leonid.

  “He,” said Ignatius.

  “How would you know that?” asked Nadya.

  “Don’t be crude.”

  The dog hacked. The dark of its eyes was filmed over with white. When it licked its lips—a motion that seemed slowed down, the tongue some sort of limping mollusk—only a few blackened teeth could be seen still stubbornly rooted in discolored gums.

  “This dog must be near dead,” said Leonid.

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” asked Ignatius. “Don’t we want a dog that’s going to die soon, anyway?”

  “A greater concern,” said Nadya, “is that this dog looks nothing like Kasha.”

  “Of course he does.”

  “For one, Kasha is female.”

  “Who will be inspecting its genitals?”

  “You did, apparently.”

  “It rolled on its back!”

  “And he would never do that at Star City? But gender aside, he’s the wrong color. He’s too large by a considerable margin. His face has the wrong shape. His hair is short and stiff, and his tail does not curl the same way.”

  Ignatius looked down at the dog, appraising it. It had lain down, its flesh flowing out across the ground as if the dog were melting.

  “I don’t see the big difference,” said Ignatius.

  “I assume you didn’t have pets as a child,” said Leonid.

  “There was a war when I grew up,” she snapped. “If we had an animal we ate it.”

  The dog raised its head like a creaky, rusted machine.

  Leonid said, “I didn’t mean . . .”

  “You’re right,” said Ignatius. “This fellow looks nothing like Kasha.”

  She bent down and loosened the noose of the collar she had fashioned at the end of her makeshift leash, slipping the loop over the head of the dog. He grunted.

  “Go on,” said Ignatius, shoving the dog on the rump.

  The dog rocked in place, like a heap of the gelatinous, rehydrated food they made cosmonauts eat. Otherwise, the dog did not move at all. Ignatius sniffed the air.

  “Is that smell you or the dog?” she asked. “And where are your shoes, Leonid?”

  “They didn’t suit me.”

  Ignatius consulted her watch. It looked out of place on her wrist, clashing with the drab colors of her costume.

  “The train leaves in ninety minutes,” she said. “I suggest we head back to the hotel so you can bathe before we depart. Otherwise they’ll make us ride with the cargo.”

  Leonid glanced around as they walked, hoping to catch a white flash of fur in one of the lanes between buildings. But nothing in Georgiu-Dezh was white enough, not even the distant sobor walls, not even with the sun glaring right against them.

  Bohdan, Ukraine—1950

  The small tract of land planted with the season’s vegetables made it all the way through spring without showing a single sprig. The deep brown, almost black dirt of the valley had dried out to pale gray. Even the fir trees on the hillsides were losing their needles, layering the whole woods with a brittle, brown carpet. The two Leonids used to run barefoot through the forest, but now one wrong step and a needle would pierce the thin skin on the sides of their feet. What needles remained on the trees were clumped together and few, just a reminder of how the forest had once looked. The straight black trunks rose to an explosion of bare branches.

  The Leonids sat on the roof of Grandmother’s cottage and looked for images in the branches’ tangled shapes. The younger Leonid saw fantastical things, many-spired castles and airplanes with a dozen wings and animals that could not possibly exist. The older Leonid mainly saw hands.

  “Do you know what the branches remind me of most of all?” asked the younger Leonid.

  “What?” asked the older.

  “It’s the shape of hunger. Whenever I get very hungry, when we haven’t eaten much in a few days, I feel that my stomach looks tangled inside.”

  The older Leonid’s stomach offered a faint growl at the mention of eating. He could not usually see the same things his brother saw in the trees, or in the shape of the stars at night, but hunger he understood, and it did feel very much like a ball of sticks poking at his insides.

  “We’ll have something to eat soon enough,” said the older Leonid.

  This is what Grandmother had told them days ago. To her credit, she had not specified how soon soon would be.

  From the direction opposite the forest, the sound of voices carried from the center of the village. The Leonids crept to the peak of the roof and looked. Through the now-bare trees, they could see a dozen villagers clustered together, some of them with sacks in their hands or slung over their backs.

  The older Leonid had never realized how close Grandmother’s cottage was to the rest of the village. The slope of the hill and the trees had always hidden each location from view of the other. The path that led to the village twisted far to the left and then back, so the walk was longer than the actual distance between the two points. But now, through the naked trees, it was close enough that he could hear the sound of the villagers’ voices if not their words.

  Those voices were raised, the villagers with the sacks appearing to lecture those without. Or maybe the other way around. One man clung to a sack-laden woman by her arm until she shrugged him off and walked away, climbing the hill toward the train station. About half the villagers followed her.

  The Leonids scrambled to the back of the roof, sliding on their rear ends to the edge so their feet dangled. They pushed off the roof, launching their bodies to berm. The older Leonid landed on his feet, stumbled forward, and fell to one knee. His brother landed directly into a somersault, springing to his feet at the end of one revolution. They sprinted straight through the trees and down the steep hill. At the village proper, they darted behind the row of cottages and followed the dry creek bed to the road on the other side.

  With the brush shriveled to almost nothing, it was hard to stay hidden as the Leonids followed the villagers. The ruts in the dirt road, once carved as if into stone, had crumbled in on themselves. The villagers’ shoes stirred up plumes of dust, each footfall emitting a low, gray shock wave. None of them spoke. On days the train would come, the banter would not stop even as the villagers loaded carts and hauled them back to the village. But the train had not visited in so long that Leonid barely remembered its sound, the rumble it sent through the mountain and the greeting hoot of its horn. He wondered if maybe one silence caused the other.

  Near the train station, the Leonids hid behind a tall kalyna, the only shrub in the valley still showing green. The white flowers had just recently given way to red berries. The boys ate two or three from time to time, a tart flavor that puckered the whole mouth, but any more than that made one sick. Kasha had once eaten a whole branch-full and spent two days vomiting and shitting herself. The berries were a food that would leave one hungrier in the end than before they were eaten.

  The villagers went to the other side of the small building beside the tracks, what everyone in the village called a station, though it was no more than a closet where a few unidentifiable items were kept for use by the train’s enginee
r. The building, neglected by the village even before the train stopped coming, now teetered to the left, the bottom of the right wall pulled up and away from the platform. Rusty, bent nails filled the gap like fangs.

  The Leonids left the shade of the kalyna and ran to the building and sneaked around its side. The villagers were not there. There was no sign of them within the deep forest opposite the station. The door to the building was still locked shut. The younger Leonid stepped all the way onto the platform, looked right, then left, and then jumped back.

  “They’re moving up the tracks,” he said, pointing in the direction of the pass.

  The older Leonid peeked around the building. The villagers were already a few dozen meters away, walking in a line. They moved strangely, measuring their strides to the crossties. He had done the same many times, but the gaps fit the legs of a boy better than they did an adult. The villagers’ steps seemed too short, as if they did not actually want to get to where they were going.

  The Leonids emerged from behind the building, crossed the platform and then the tracks, and jumped down on the other side, where the ground was several feet lower. If the villagers had looked back, they would have seen the twin domes of the Leonids’ heads hovering just above the level of the tracks, but no one turned.

  Even at their plodding pace, the villagers pulled farther and farther away from the Leonids, who with every step had to contend with dry brush and loose soil, twigs clawing at their arms and stones grinding at their palms as they braced themselves against the embankment. The younger Leonid pushed a long branch out of his way, and when he released it, it snapped back, the tip gashing the older Leonid across the arm. The older Leonid let out a yelp before he could clamp his mouth shut. Hot tears welled up in his eyes in response to the sting. Blood dripped from the wound, marking three long streaks down his forearm.

  The younger Leonid stood on his toes to raise his eyes above the level of the embankment.

  “I don’t think they heard you,” he said.

  “How about I hear you apologize?”

  “You know I’m sorry.” He pulled himself up the embankment and onto the tracks. “They’re far enough away not to notice us.”

  He reached down and offered a hand to his brother. The older Leonid went to raise his injured arm, but winced, and raised the other instead. He dug his toes into shallow pits in the pebbly soil of the embankment and hoisted himself over the edge. Ahead, the villagers were barely dashes rising above the convergence of the rails.

  “We’ll lose them if we don’t hurry,” said the older Leonid.

  “All we have to do is follow the same path that they’re following.” The younger Leonid walked on the rail, arms spread for balance.

  “Where do you think they’re going?”

  “The tracks only go one place. Outside the valley. Maybe they’re leaving.”

  “If they’re leaving, then they plan to return. Their sacks are empty.”

  “Maybe they’re going to bring back food?”

  The older Leonid did not answer, quickening his pace, taking the crossties two at a time. His brother struggled to keep up while still balancing on the rail. For all they had explored the forest of the valley, they had never followed the tracks this far. The angle grew steeper as the tracks approached the pass, a dimple in the even rim of the valley’s trees.

  The pass was the only way into the valley that did not require difficult, dangerous climbing. In all other directions, the forest gave out to sheer rock. The Leonids often wondered to each other who had discovered the valley in the first place, and once discovered, why they chose to stay. Were they hiding from the rest of the world? If so, why had they allowed the railroad to be built? Did they just stay for the good soil, so fertile it always produced many times more than the villagers needed for themselves? Not anymore, though. The soldiers came and took away the last decent crops. Now the only things to come from the ground were a few pathetic root vegetables that reminded Leonid of scrawny muscles.

  The angle of the tracks had become steep enough that the Leonids were using the ties like a staircase. They were gaining on the villagers, who could have looked back and seen them at any time. The villagers’ shoulders hunched forward, their steps barely rising high enough to reach the next foothold, as if the empty sacks were actually filled to the top with buckwheat.

  Ahead of them, the gap in the trees grew, revealing the crest of the pass. The villagers quickened their pace, as if hurrying to the top would somehow make the descent easier. For a moment, each of them stood on the apex before disappearing by inches on the other side, as if they were sinking into the ground. When the last villager was out of sight, the Leonids hurried to the crest.

  Shouts stabbed through the quiet. It was the first noise they had heard beyond the breeze and their own whispers. The older Leonid realized that not even birdsong had accompanied their climb. Where were the birds? And how long had they been absent? The shouts were clear, but Leonid could not understand them. There were softer voices, too, and from these he could make out a few words, but then the shouting came louder and faster and from several mouths all at once. None of it made any sense, just random phrases, familiar syllables that should have connected with others but wound up misarranged instead.

  “It’s Russian,” said the younger Leonid.

  The older Leonid listened and managed to pick out a few words he knew. The Russians were shouting for the villagers to turn back, but now the villagers were shouting in response. Their families were starving, they said, there was no food. If they did not find food, everyone in the valley would die. The villagers shouted in Ukrainian, and the Russians in Russian. Leonid knew that neither side understood the other.

  As the twins reached the top of the pass, one final shout in Russian, louder than those before it, and then a series of pops like wood being chopped, at first one and then a cluster and then tapering back out. The older Leonid crawled to the crest, peeking over when one of the villagers bounded up and almost stepped right on top of him. The man jumped back when he saw the twins. One final pop from the other side of the pass and the man lurched forward, falling halfway back into the valley.

  He squeezed the older Leonid by the shoulder. “Run,” he said.

  “Mr. Yevtushenko?” asked the younger Leonid.

  Mr. Yevtushenko, like his father before him, made small wooden toys for the children in the village. His hands had thick knuckles and the fingers curled in on themselves.

  “Just run,” said Mr. Yevtushenko. He winced, then vomited on the older Leonid’s hand. Leonid jumped to his feet and backed away, wiping the milky pink sputum on his pants. The younger Leonid pulled him by his other hand, and then they were bounding down the mountain, taking steps like giants, almost out of control.

  The climb had seemed to take forever, but the descent happened out of time. The older Leonid leaned on the building at the train station, wondering what had happened to the mountain and how he had gotten here and why his lungs burned and his heart felt ready to burst. His brother still stood on the tracks, looking up at where they had been, but it was too far away, too high to see from where they were.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE LEONIDS RETURNED to the village slick with sweat and gasping for breath. They doubled over in the small square, beneath the bare tree planted in the center. The younger Leonid sucked up a lungful of air and forced out a shout, “Everyone!” No one stirred in the cottages. He shouted again. This time Mrs. Tarasenko opened her door and came out.

  “What is it, boys?” she asked.

  The younger Leonid shouted again.

  Another door and another villager, but no more.

  The younger Leonid shoved his brother. “Go, go.”

  The older Leonid loped to the opposite side of the square and knocked on doors, calling for everyone to come out. His calls were weak and the effort left hi
m light-headed.

  “Come to the square!” The younger Leonid seemed to have found a new wellspring of energy. He sprinted down the row of cottages and shouted full from his throat.

  The villagers emerged one by one and crept toward the square. They all moved as if awoken from naps. One of the women carried a rifle. Kasha poked her head from around the Tarasenko cottage. Her fur looked like snow against the gray rocks of the mountain and the black trunks of the bare forest.

  “What is it, boys?” repeated Mrs. Tarasenko.

  The older Leonid leaned against the tree, still trying to gather a full breath, and the villagers looked to him. He did not know what to say. Among the faces, he saw Mr. Yevtushenko’s family, and the families of the other villagers who had trekked to the pass. They bore an expression of curiosity. They had no idea the news to come. Leonid had memories from during the war. Then, when such news was delivered, the families already knew it before a single word was spoken. The sight of a soldier at the door contained the full content of the message. How did it work now, when they were dumb with peace?

  Leonid stammered out a few syllables that failed to form into words. His younger brother stepped in front of him.

  “We followed the villagers to the pass,” said the younger Leonid. “There were Russian soldiers on the other side. Everyone from the village was shot.”

  The older Leonid saw Mrs. Yevtushenko staring at the bloodstain on his pants, her face shifting through a series of emotions he could not name. He brushed at the stain with his fingers. The spot was still damp, or was it the same sweat that soaked his clothes everywhere else?

  “Surely you’re mistaken,” she said.

  “We heard the guns,” said the younger Leonid, “and then we saw Mr. . . . we saw one of the villagers fall right before us. As he died he told us to run, and we ran.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Yevtushenko. The word echoed through a dozen other mouths.

  “We have to go to the pass,” said someone.

  The nos were replaced with yeses.