The Bone Mother

by David Demchuk

  “How did this happen?” she asked, frightened and furious. “Who has done this to you?”

  I was confused, I didn’t know what she meant. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” I insisted, now as afraid as she was.

  She slapped me across the face. “Have you let any boys touch you or kiss you?”

  My cheek was stinging, my eyes were wincing with tears. I didn’t like boys, never played with them at school or after, ran and hid and waited for them to pass whenever I could. And then I had a thought, not knowing it was the worst thought of all.

  “Mama,” I said. “Could a woman have put the fish in me?”

  She became very still. “What do you mean?” she whispered.

  “When Papa was out in the field,” I said, “and you were at the church with Mrs. Derhak, a woman I didn’t know came to the door, an old woman, and she wanted to play a game with me, and she said I shouldn’t tell you or we would all get into trouble. She said it would be a game but—all I remember was she held my hands up with one hand and tickled my belly with the other, and I laughed and I laughed until I fell asleep, and then when I woke up she was gone.”

  After a long moment, with her face turned away from me, she said, “I see.”

  I waited and waited. The little fish was whirling around inside me, as fearful as I was. But she sat and sat on the edge of my bed and then finally asked, “Have you ever seen this woman before? In the village? On someone’s farm?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Only this once?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She turned to me, and somehow her face was so dark that I could barely see it, even though the sun had yet to slip down and out of the sky. “Come then,” she said, “you must get dressed. I know how we will make you feel better.”

  She bundled me out of the house while I was still wrapping my cloth coat around me. The fish was frantic now, swimming in tight wild circles, and the sickness and weakness were like heavy hands pulling at my shoulders, my legs, my hair.

  “Please, can we go tomorrow?” I asked, but it was like shouting into the wind. She led me through the field to the path into the woods, which I knew eventually would lead to the lake. I knew there were plants you could eat, herbs and flowers and mushrooms that could take your sickness away. I had heard many stories of Baba Yaga, and the children at school often said that such witches still lived among us. Perhaps that was where she was taking me. Or perhaps she was a witch herself.

  I struggled to keep up with my mother, whose stride had become broader and more purposeful as we emerged from the woods. The large cold lake stretched out before us. Soon we were at the water’s edge. She pulled the coat from me, pushed me towards the water and said, “Go in.”

  “But it’s so cold,” I cried, and it was true—I could see my breath between us and knew the lake would be liquid ice.

  “Good,” she said. “The cold water will tighten around you and the fish will swim out, and you will feel much better. Go in.”

  Sick and cold and tired and sore, I obeyed her and stepped into the water. “Come over here where it’s deeper,” she said, “and put your hands up here on this edge.” Soon the cold clear water was up to my chest, my neck, I held on to the edge and looked up at her.

  “How long?” I asked. “How long?” I was shivering so hard I could barely hold on, my teeth were chattering.

  “Not long,” she said, kneeling down to me; then she reached out and grabbed a fistful of my hair and pushed me under the water. I tried to fight, I tried to struggle, but I could not. My final breath bubbled out of me, and soon even the little fish was quiet and still. Mama gently let go of my hair, and I sank to the lake’s dark floor.

  Then she screamed.

  “Noooooo!” she screamed. “Noooooo!” And soon some men ran from the church, which was not far away.

  “Mrs. Malyk!” they shouted. “What is it?”

  “My baby, my Krizstina—she ran in the water and threw herself in—she was too fast, I tried to catch her!”

  I looked up and saw the men peering over the edge, but I was too deep for them to see me. Suddenly, I felt the little fish quiver and curl inside me again, felt it flicker and warm me like a tiny red flame. The heat spread through me to the tips of my fingers and the ends of my toes. My body grew long and lithe, my breasts full and rounded. My hair, now long and lush and red like oxblood, eddied and swirled around me.

  I swam out into the centre of the lake, then spiralled up to the surface—looked across to where the cluster of men now poked at the water with long sticks and hooks. Even though it was impossibly far, I saw Mama, saw her face, and I fancied she saw me.

  And then I turned and I dove down

  down and

  down

  Lorincz

  The first time Luda came to visit, I was four years old, and so was she. I woke in the middle of the night to find her sitting at the foot of my bed.

  There was something odd about her, misshapen. She was tiny and naked, more like a baby bird, a hatchling, than a girl. She held her knees up under her chin, one arm around her thin frail legs, and she was staring at me. I didn’t know who she was, or how she had gotten into our house, into my little room off from where my mother and father slept.

  Suddenly, she looked up at the window next to the bed, startled, as if something just outside was about to reach in for her—and then she vanished. From where I lay, I could only see moonlight streaming through the gently rustling leaves. I decided I wouldn’t say anything to my parents, as they had no patience for stories or imaginings.

  I woke up late, which was unusual. I was often the first out of bed. My mother wondered if I was ill. I felt a bit warm, and oddly sore. She lifted off my nightshirt and asked, “What have you done to your shoulder? Did you fall while you were playing? Did somebody hit you?”

  I shook my head. She turned me so my father could see. “It could be a spider bite. Check the sheets to see.” Then with a slight smile he added: “I hope he didn’t swallow it.”

  “Don’t put thoughts into the boy’s head,” my mother said sharply. It was too late. The thoughts were already there.

  She prepared to corner Dr. Pavel at church the next day, but the welt faded over the course of the afternoon and by bedtime it was all but gone. Still she found him after the service and he took me to his office at her insistence, my shirt and jacket half off under the bright light over his metal table while he poked and prodded. Nothing. He shrugged, and I pulled my shirt back up. She frowned, and my father sighed in a what-did-I-tell-you way, or in a now-we-are-late-for-lunch way. I reached up under my collar, placed my fingers over the spot. Something deep under it curled on itself.I hope he didn’t swallow it.

  Three years later, the welt returned, and so did Luda. This time there was blood, a spot of blood on the inside of my undershirt, as if I had scraped a wart or a mole. Not enough to soak through to the bedsheets, but enough that my mother’s eye caught it while I was dressing for school.

  “What have you done there?” she asked. She pushed at it, and a droplet of blood welled up. She wiped at it with an old cleaning cloth that smelled of alcohol. She pushed again—something was under the surface, something hard like a sliver, a stone. She pushed and wiped, pushed and wiped, and up came something white and smooth, and out it popped, onto the red of the blood on the cloth. A chip of bone.

  “I can’t say for certain what it is,” said Dr. Pavel, “or how long it’s been there.” He looked at my shoulder, which was pink and sore from all my mother’s efforts. The wound, however, had begun to heal. He brushed on some mercurochrome, taped a square of gauze over it.

  “Lorincz, you get dressed and wait here. I’m just going to talk to your mother outside.” Her brow furrowed as he led her out the door, and it was still furrowed when Dr. Pavel returned and told me I could go. In the meantime, I had taken the tiny fleck and pocketed it in my handkerchief. It went into the little tin of treasures on my bookshelf.

&nb
sp; My mother said little as we walked the three streets over to our house, and said even less at the dinner table. My father’s various questions were answered with a single word: “After.” Once I was in my room, and my father had closed the door behind me, I could hear my mother unleash all the other words she had been holding in. I struggled in vain to hear what she said, but her emotions were all too apparent: anger, and sadness, and fear.

  That night, I awoke to find Luda once again at the foot of my bed. She seemed older now, though not much bigger. Once again naked and clutching herself, once again staring at me. This time, however, a thin trickle of blood flowed over the edge of her lip and down to her chin.

  A tooth, I realized. The tiny fleck was a tooth. Just then, she looked up at the window, startled as she had been before, and once again she disappeared. I realized I had heard one word from my mother’s diatribe, and that word was “twin.”

  When I was twelve, just a few days after my birthday, I fell ill with a terrible fever. I was drenched with sweat, yet chilled to the bone. Overnight, the welt had returned, as large and round as a boil. Dr. Pavel had retired from his practice the year before, but he came at my mother’s urging and he brought a woman from the next village, a mudri materi. While my mother cried in the other room, Dr. Pavel turned me on my chest, took out a scalpel and sliced into the boil. With a pair of forceps he carefully nudged around and pulled out four, five, six tiny bones and a little skull. After that, the mudri stopped him.

  “Enough,” she said. “She is not an infection. She is not a parasite. The boy holds the blood and flesh of two people in one body. She is changing him, and we must not fight that change.” She took my hand, and held it. “She will not let him die. He is her way into the world.” The mudri watched as Dr. Pavel cleaned the wound and sewed it shut. And then he left so she could speak to me alone.

  “You are very brave, and very strong,” she said. “And so, too, is your sister. She is with us now. She is hurt and afraid. But she means you no harm. Do you see her sometimes?” I nodded. “Does she frighten you?” I shook my head. “Good. When you see her, you must welcome her, even if her appearance disturbs you. You will come to love her in time.” And then she placed her hand on my forehead, and I felt the fever melt away.

  I am twenty now, at school in Kolomyya, far away from home. Luda is with me always, like a deeply held secret, as close as my breath. Freed from her bones, she is soft and round, her arms and legs coiled around her head, a wreath of flesh framing and cradling her face. Her mouth open, her eyes wide, her tongue, her toes, her fingers, her breasts, her belly, her kiska, her eyes, her beautiful eyes. I feel her in every part of me. I look in the mirror and she is all I see.

  Claudiu

  It’s not much, this little gift I have. I used it mostly in school when I was younger, just a lad, to scare the girls and sometimes the teacher, who would get angry and make me stand by the outhouse as punishment. Everyone in the school could see me from the window. She only had to do that twice and I never played my pranks again. Also, she spoke to my mother and I caught hell from her. That did the trick.

  The gift is this: I can picture a small thing—a mouse, a snake, a frog—and I can send that picture with my mind so that everyone can see it. I can look along the floor and everyone will see the mouse running and then they’ll jump up and scream. Not for long, my magic mouse, and not very far, just for a few moments and only for a metre or two. Or I can picture a frog, and make it hop from desk to desk. Or a snake on teacher’s chair. That was the last time. I nearly got sent home for good. But my father was from one of the first families, so there was not much they could do. Still, I had to be careful, and so I stopped using the gift and after a time forgot it. Until one day, when I was older. I wondered if I could project a person. And it turned out I could. Not for long, and not moving at all. Just standing and staring, for a few seconds. And then it would vanish.

  As I say, not much of a gift, not compared to some others. Not compared to my father, and some of his brothers. So I let it fall away into the past and become a distant memory.

  When I was sixteen, my father died, at the factory, as was known to happen from time to time. The owner sent a car to us, sleek and black, with a crisp young man in a black suit bearing a letter.

  Father had been forty-five, with only three months left in his requirement there. Management was very kind and waived the remainder of his contract. While I was technically old enough to fulfill it, I was not physically capable, nor was my mother. Another worker from our village had volunteered to substitute. We would receive my father’s full pension. However, as was the custom, the funeral and burial would be held at the factory. We were to pack a change of clothing and then join the young man in the car for the drive back. We would be assigned special rooms that were reserved for bereaved relatives, then we would dine with my father’s supervisor and his closest friends, and in the morning we would attend the ceremony.

  We only had one black tin trunk between us, but that was enough. My mother brought out a somber blue dress and a sheer grey scarf printed with wine-coloured roses. I packed the suit that Mr. Koltusky, the village tailor, had made for me just six months before. It came with a white shirt, new black shoes and a grey silk tie. The tie was the most beautiful thing I owned, and there were nights when I would get up and go to the closet to run my thumb over it. I couldn’t imagine a time when I would wear it, and now such a time had arrived.

  My mother snapped the trunk shut and I lifted it off of the bed. We pulled on our thick woollen coats, stepped out and into the waiting car. The young man looked at my bare head, took his hat from the seat next to him, placed it on me. It was a smart fit, and he gave an approving nod. We were on our way.

  The dinner was largely silent. It turned out that my father’s supervisor and closest friends barely knew him at all. We learned that he had been an underglaze painter, a true artist, and not the labourer that I had envisioned. It was solitary work, and that solitude had extended beyond the factory floor. The meal itself was a mild meat stew—pork, I supposed—with white beans, root vegetables and potatoes. The men barely touched it. One shed tears throughout. After dinner we were shown to our rooms, which were modest in size but well-appointed. I undressed and slipped into bed, and soon fell into a sound and dreamless sleep.

  Shortly after dawn, a tap at the door roused us and we were called to breakfast. We dined alone on eggs and fried cabbage, and then were led through a courtyard where all of the factory’s workers stood. Most stared down at the ground but a few stray eyes followed as we walked to a little chapel at the corner of the compound. Inside was my father’s coffin, oak with simple mouldings but still more expensive than we could have purchased ourselves.

  After a moment, the same men from the night before came in to join us in prayer and act as pallbearers. They carried the coffin out to a snug square graveyard just outside the gate, and lowered it into its freshly dug plot. As the men shovelled behind us, we were handed our black tin trunk, a certificate of my father’s service and a box of his belongings. We stepped back into the sleek black car and were driven back to our home. As I looked out the window at the passing countryside, I wondered why the casket had been closed, and why it had seemed several inches shorter than it should have been. But I said nothing.

  A few nights later, while we ate our supper, my mother looked at me and said: “I want to see him again. Please. You can still do that—can’t you?” I nodded, then turned towards a chair in the corner, After a moment, there he was, sitting with us, watching us. I held him there as long as I could.

  Andreas

  When I was very small, just two or three years old, I remember my older brother Jerzs being scolded for daring to go with his friends near the old Borowycz house, which was down a winding lane on the way from our farm to the village school. Elderly Mrs. Borowycz was still alive back then, but whatever else lived there was no longer under her control. She would not be able to help anyone who fell prey to it,
in the house or on the grounds. My brother pretended to laugh off his childish trespassing but it was clear to me that he had seen something that had frightened him. He did not need a warning not to return.

  When I turned seven, it fell on him to walk with me to school. I told him I wanted to see the house. He of course refused, but I insisted, and said that I would tell our parents that he had taken me. He hated me in that moment, and said he would only walk me to the top of the lane and wait as I hurried down, saw the house, and came back. He would wait just ten minutes, as measured by our father’s old military wristwatch, and then would leave without me. Ten minutes seemed like very little time, but I agreed.

  “Go on, then,” he said, and gave me a little push. Even in bright sunlight the path seemed dark and dire, lined on either side with frail withered trees whose life seemed to be leaching away even as the fields and forests surrounding were lush and teeming. “Ten minutes.” He showed me the watch, the second hand click-click-clicking. I took a breath, pulled my right foot back to launch myself forward, and raced away.

  The shadowed lane had unexpected dips and curves and a few times narrowed till it was barely a path, overgrown at the edges with tall scraping weeds that clung as I raced by. It felt like the full ten minutes had passed and my sides were beginning to ache when the house reared up as if out of nowhere, and I stopped and gasped and stared at it.

  It was, in truth, a small and quite ordinary structure, with its steep roof, shingled walls and small dark windows. Mrs. Borowycz had died the year before, but it was as if the house had been abandoned for decades. I stood a moment more and then turned, prepared to rush back, when a slight movement caught the corner of my eye, as if a curtain in a window had stirred in the cool morning breeze.