Shards: A Novel by Ismet Prcić Read Free Book Online Page A

choked with grasses and weeds battling for dominion. It was bordered by the woods on one side and a calamitous cloud of blackberry bushes—that looked like it was slowly rolling downhill from Drago’s house—on the other. In the middle there was a pear tree to end all pear trees, the oldest tree I’ve ever seen. It looked scarred and gnarly and even its leaves and fruit were wrinkled and acned with age spots.
    The first thing my father did was put up barbed wire all around the property to match the neighbors’. Then he got stuck. Too many people were telling him too many things: what to build, what not to build, how to build it if he was building it. Some were advocating not building at all. In his small, gray, calculating head he didn’t know what to do, so he shut down. He stopped driving up there on the weekends, opting instead for televised sports of any kind and long afternoon naps.
    Then it was up to my mother.
    Over the years we got to know the Stojkovis pretty well. They helped us dig our well. We helped them scythe, rake, and stack up the dry grass for their cows. They would bring us slivovitz and freshcottage cheese. My dad would bring them gift packages of cleaning products from the factory. If we were around they invited us to their parties, weddings, and get-togethers. We invited them when we had people over to show them the progress on the house. By all accounts we were really good neighbors.
    Mehmed and I befriended Marija and Ostojka, Drago’s two granddaughters, and spent large chunks of our summers playing in the woods with them. We gathered wild strawberries, observed adders hunting tadpoles in the gaunt creek, pretended we were stranded in the wilderness, climbed trees, fell out of them, those sorts of things. Ostojka and I played show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine in a cow barn, although neither of us showed anything because we were too busy fighting about who should go first.
    I’m not saying there were never any blemishes. There was that whole affair with my father’s scythe. He took it up to Drago, who said he was going to take it to a man in the village to have it sharpened. Weeks, then months, passed and Drago hadn’t brought back the tool, and my father, being that kind of a guy, hadn’t mentioned anything, either. Our property started to grow first a shadow, then a stubble, then a full-on scraggly Socialist beard. When my father finally— after my mother’s constant pestering that something might bite us from the grass—macheted his way out to the fence and walked up the hill to inquire about what had happened to his scythe, Drago denied that he was ever given it in the first place and started yelling as if offended by the whole thing. Father then minced the matter to calm him down and even went as far as asking to borrow Drago’s scythe for a day, which of course turned out to be his own. After my mother gave the property a once-over—she was the one doing the majority of the physical work because of my father’s supposed bad back and actual laziness—my father promptly returned his own scythe to Drago and had to borrow it intermittently from then on.
    “Why did you do that?” Mother asked him afterward. “It’s our scythe.”
    “It’s just a scythe. Fuck the scythe. Not worth starting a war over it.”
    But you could see on his face that he was chagrined. His already thin lips disappeared completely and he looked away, not saying anything for a while. Only his crow’s feet got deeper as he squinted at his swarming thoughts. Mother smoked pointedly. Mehmed and I went to throw a makeshift ninja star made of tin into the pear tree.
    That same night after a couple of shots in him, my father, of course, regretted returning the tool. He said that he shouldn’t have done it, that my mother was right, that it was our scythe, and that he would get it from Drago the next weekend.
    But the next weekend he again returned it to Drago. When he climbed back down the hill he was