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A military truck speeds through the intersection, children

                                     shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

          through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

                     lies panting in the road. Its hind legs

                                                                         crushed into the shine

                                            of a white Christmas.

On the bedstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

                                                                   for the first time.

He tried to swerve around her but, instead, went into a slide. The reds and yellows in the road stretched out. Cottonwood leaves roared in his head. His bowels shuddered. Even before he struck the girl and hurled her into the creek bed, he felt all the familiar habits of the world begin to recede.

                    MOSES

yo ass gon rise up to yo full potential too

gon git up off dis block

man

you remember

dat sunday school

ol reverend Missus be like

                    (as reverend missus)

sed uh

do you wanna cross dat river now chillun

sed uh

do you wanna cross dat river now chillum

                    KITCH

                    (gasping)

pass ovuh

                    MOSES

yeah nigga damn

i feel like we cud do dis shit

you feel me

git up off dis block

                    KITCH

amen!

                    MOSES

be all we cud be

                    KITCH

yes lawd!

She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.

Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.

I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my

smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut

might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad

muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took

me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the

willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of

course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.

And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.