Inhumed, Her Star-Staked Body Bloodless Lies
I: Orsolya in the Sun, Standing on One Foot Locust-trees spit grey-spined shadows at her leg; leaf-saliva drips into the hollow behind her knee. Black hair, rough and bristling, flagellates her bent and naked back. There is stiff brown bread and milk in a bowl by the mirror. There is frost at the window-seam. Snow hunkers blue-toothed behind the bright slats of sunlight that slash the room into shards. Outside, a hawk lands in a shorn field, stabs the frozen ground for mice. She balances her foot against a little stool, the inside of her thigh shows dull and pale: book-open, wheat-fed, butter-soft. I will keep very quiet, she thinks, it will hurt, but I will stay quiet as a house. There are five-petaled blue buds embroidered on her curtains, though she has never been sure if they were meant to be violets or lettuce-flowers. Her little rug is green with black yarn-flecks; she used to pretend they were ants in the grass, she chased them with her fingers. The room is very quiet, but she has heard-- who has not heard?--the wind out of Budapest is full of iron and oil. By the green banks of the Volga, there is snow freezing over in the hollows of her brothers' ears. She has heard buckled boots flattening wheat not far off, not far, now. There are not even any locks on her house. She is a good girl. She has decided. She has been around their dun-flanked cows enough to know where best to open a vein. Ludovic, she thinks, you promised me a maidenhead of beef-blood dribbled over white linen. We laughed about it, how we would steal the heifer's heart and mark the bed as though, after you, I remembered what a hymen was. Her wrists are so thin the light comes through them like glass. The hawk has found a brindled buck-mouse. A long, curly slab of hair sloughs over her shoulder, the light between the locust-branches ladders down from her scalp. Quiet as a house. She cuts open her thigh like a hen's neck. II: Orsolya by Moonlight, Recumbent Inhumed, her star-staked body bloodless lies, breathes frozen dirt, chews ice-riddled loam. Her eyes are squeezed shut as an infant cat's, unused to light, suckling at the root-systems of a ragged, bark-bare poplar and an slumped, whip-limbed peach tree. There is wind-- dry, moon-striped. Her palms itch--locust-switches pin her asplay. Arms point like clock-hands, legs tied open, obscene, clay-spackled. A sparrow skeleton nestles against the cold, clotted wound, its hollow eyes receive flakes of dried blood drifting through its lidless bone like wood-ash. It is no trouble to pull herself off of the burly stakes-- she doesn't even feel her palms tear. Blind as a grandmother, she eats her way up through leaves and old peach-meat and frost-rigid mud. Her stomach shows through first: the moon draws up its own image from the earth. Orsolya stands at the crossroads, shivering, naked, trying to hide her breasts with mire-smeared arms. Gooseflesh prickles through the melting reek that clings to her belly, shoulders, throat. Her hair is slick with frog-skin and worm-trails; her teeth chatter like a child caught in snow. She turns north, south. She can smell the flattened wheat, now burning. She peers through the wind and moon and long ice-dusted roads. That way is, perhaps, the Lackzó chicken farm, and this way, maybe, is the gabled Szabó house with its four daughters endlessly embroidering-- but she cannot be sure, she cannot be sure. Papa! I'm lost! She calls out; the poplar clatters hesitantly. I'm ready to come home now! It's cold out here! The peach tree spits fat, wrinkled seeds after her. Papa! I'll catch my death of cold! Come get me, put a red wool blanket around my shoulders. Tell me it's going to be alright, that my brothers are coming home safe. Papa, I'm so hungry. Just call out my name-- I can follow your voice. The sparrow skull gapes, its little teeth full of dirt. Her peeled-egg eyes raw and new, she stumbles, arms groping the shadows for purchase. Down the west road she can smell cows: warm, dun-gold flanks soft, wet, snorting noses, and she can hear a heifer's heart beating, huge and dark as a fist.