Laine Derr
Do Not Sleep
For many years now I’ve understood adults. I walk out to the barn with Dad, a Jr. The holes
in the cages are not small enough. The newly born bunnies keep falling through,
keep dying. This must be fixed, but we’re not here for solutions nor idle chatter.
“Лёша, иди сюда.” I wake. A single bed. A small room. Four large men, free from ties
and jackets, greet me with bear hugs. The father of the family vices my face, kissing me
hard on both cheeks, then lips. I will learn to consume with these men, dance dirt paved roads.
I’m given a hand-held propane torch. The men, as we are lifting a massive hog onto a
jerry-rigged platform, pantomime how it was killed. From behind, what may be mistaken
as a loving embrace, an eight-inch knife plunged into the heart.
My dad grabs the feet and waits. The rabbit slowly calms itself. It has been handled before.
As a boy, I longed for supper. For time spent at a kitchen table, ever mindful of dripping
cheese cloth. He swings, exposing its neck to force, a right hand slicing through gravity.
The heart pierced expands, plugging the wound (no mess, no blood). Nothing is wasted.
Other than hooves thrown to a German shepherd, we consume the rest as comrades.
On this day, my first in the village, I will welcome slaughter with moonshine.
Dipping into the carcass, blood slowly coagulating from elbow to fingers, I go dark. Pop
cans shot with a .22, feral cats lured by one in heat, skunks under a farmhouse, a rabbit
cut open from neck to groin—skinned with a gentle tug.
My interest fades. I long for a soft cone ice cream, vanilla. In Pyatigorsk, when cold
you should eat the coldness locals remind. I take a tram, number framed in red, punch
a tiny hole—uneventful confetti loosely attached—still part of the whole.
The streets are iced over, only to be thawed by a ruddiness of youth, of progress. “Are you
German?” Yes. “Are you Latvian?” Yes. I lie with a Yes, past babushkas scarved in Orthodoxy,
architecture of brutalism, a man face down in the snow.
He will die. The type who mocks my hands, too small, too smooth. They do not
know pain—cracked, bleeding, pulling history’s never-ending rope. Do not sleep, comrade,
my hands know the weight of a hay bale, feel of a weatherworn tractor seat.
“Wake up. Where do you live?” I ask in broken Russian.
“Are you Lithuanian?”
“Yes,” I reply.
To stumble: the frozen sweat of one who gives up, its invitation to slumber. I know the walk
of halves. We dance, climb stairs, knocking until a peephole darkens, wives never happy
to see them, nor me. I do not speak, only deliver the pain of a gentle tug.
Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming from Antithesis, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.