Intimate Distance by Katerina Cosgrove Read Free Book Online Page B

rugs over us. I have no idea why Zoi’s aunt would think we need blankets, let alone so many, in the middle of July. But the mountain nights can be cold, he says. Sometimes even midsummer nights fall to ten degrees, with howling winds. These are blankets that scratch through thin polyester sheets, shaken from old chests unopened for decades. Only one hard pillow to share; I let Zoi have it. Why am I here, in this village, empty except for old women and goats? I’m drowning in the mundane, the everyday, with no time or energy to plan for the future. Zoi’s imperatives override my own more and more now that I’m in my third trimester; tired, passive, wanting to curl up in a corner and cease to think.
    Roosters crow from every direction. The village rises early and I’m glad to see the sunrise. Zoi’s still asleep on his back with his arms by his side, like some fallen knight on a catafalque. I’m jealous of his slumber and restrain an urgent desire to shake him awake. Instead I slip outside, wrapping a blanket around my shoulders and washing my face at the outside tap. Brown water splashes against my cheeks; I cup my hands and drink from them to wash the sour taste from my mouth. The blanket falls from my shoulders and is soiled by mud. I flick it off, rub it, the stain grows. I have no idea how I’d go about washing it here. I entertain vague images of running streams and women pounding on bare rock with no soap, using only the strength of the paddle and powerful forearms; then dismiss them. I sit for a while on the doorstep, drawing my knees up against my belly, feeling the resistance of the swelling, the hardness of the baby embedded beneath my skin. Kicking, floating in liquid, clear as sky.
    In the wan sun I begin to feel sleepy and as the light grows stronger, glowing on the rim of the mountains. I slump on the doorstep, rocking, closing my eyes and opening them once more against the sun’s dazzle, playing the secret, silent games of childhood. The house is perched right on the edge of the mountain, one of the highest buildings in the village. Zoi told me his grandfather built it that way on purpose. He wanted to see everything, keep an eagle eye on his ten siblings, also have the best view of the cleft between the mountains, steep cliffs plunging down into darkness. Uncharted land. He prided himself on his origins: harsh, uncompromising, brittle as rock. He boasted that the Turks never ventured into these parts, it is and always has been family territory.
    â€˜The mountains up above us,’ he would say, pushing Zoi’s chin up to look at them, ‘see their bald heads. See the hawks circling round and round. Unwritten mountains, they’re called. Unmapped. Nobody except us has been up there. Our people. And even we only dare go there in the summer. The Turks never got this far; our mountains stopped them.’ And Zoi as a little boy would gulp, overwhelmed by his glowing heritage.
    The terrace juts out from the building at a dangerous angle, teetering high over the chasm, over pines and walnut trees and away into folded mountains so far they’re shrouded even at noon. Aunts and uncles and cousins trudge up and down the rough stone steps leading from the valley to the peaks. Crunching with their shoes on fallen walnuts, stripped from the trees by summer rains, hard and still green, inedible. Slipping on dry leaves crushed into the pitted stone, a mass of dead brown and yellow and black from the husks of the walnut shells. Those steps are the only thoroughfare for the whole village and early morning is the busiest time.
    I don’t want them to notice me so I draw my legs up under my nightgown, resting my back against the door. But I can see them all clearly. They take their goats to the high pastures where the grass is tender and the sun shines way above the clouds. Their children troop to the road above the house to catch the only school bus of the day. I can hear