winter kids

Overground slowly the winter in Moscow settled, felt like home, introspective eyes dropped inward to stone and footsteps. Clarity came above a torrent of movement filling streets, a wide river of crossing diagonal lights in red and white, cut suddenly in coats moving listlessly, looking down and forward up to the splitting sky, a river, shifting focus low drifting on currents of visible breath, a city under snow, something clean in the cold that keeps sweeping awareness up from filthy sidewalks into something pale, chiseled, sharp.

Winter kids crept out.

For their kaleidoscopic run, outdoors in the winter in the blistering cold.

On an empty roof, Ziv watched Ina’s mismatched gloves handle a paint can, shaking it hard with a faint smile and eyes wrapped on her work, the blank canvas of a plain brick wall for graffiti, poetry, art, eigenface, abstract, any color you like. He admired her, the red of her cheeks and the clear 3 pm evening sky; started to shake his own as she pressed down and waited for the hiss.

Nyx stuffed old rags in the doorknob of the squat, under the windows, in the cracks—the cards she showed him on the table, hexagons, lines and breaks. She read the chemistry like a fortune as he played.

As Nil played and drank the cheapest vodka around chapped hands, looking up as wind cut the membrane of watery eyes. Winters cruel and sterile as the towers in Moscow shot up like needles, seven sisters, seven syringes to count over and over.

No sweat as his brain turned with plans and preachings, Ziv wrote all over his arms and legs enthusiastically like a giddy fourteen-year-old, like he used to, clothes pulled up over limbs until he got hands on something of substance. At the library, warming his hands over tea.

Ina’s hands wrapped around a cup of rich black tea with jam as she drank in the steam with her nose, looked out the window in the crushed nook of a café and waited for snow, just because.

They met again and cold crept into the creases of her face but she couldn’t help smiling as he put a hand to her face imagining noir and spun earlier tales helplessly eloquent.

She still cut her hair short to fit under hats and scarves and hijab and whatever else discarded, cut it by herself with the hypnotized eyes of a cloudy mirror. Dark hair fell to the hair smelling like cloves she smoked earlier with Ellie on a fire escape after a show earlier that night.

And Ziv curled up in his cloak dreaming of darkwood.

Nyx blew on the right window and brought letters to life with the steam of her throat—message from a connect. Secrets in the city of glass. She rode the subway whispering to herself: quiet, quiet, quiet as it seemed dirtier this time of year, that substance of slush swishing across floors where it’s warm, putting your feet on heaters, scraping to get by, clients are low and prices are high, no stay, stay we’ll get by she said to Nil, not a lot of new faces but we’ll cross the cold.

Nil’s hands slid around her waist as the blood rushed from his ears to his groin.

Nyx’s white hair mixed with snow as she lay back later in a fresh drift, alone, gloves by her head, fresh snow inhaled through bloody sinuses and a white pill dissolved under her tongue. She looked up.

Nil’s images and words slow, slow around her slender body he couldn’t describe, the figure in his door leaning seductively, eyes on him, arm propped up holding a beer bottle, feet bare on the cold floor. I don’t feel cold, she said. We’ll hide until cocaine weather, she says before sleeping, don’t worry baby.

And Ziv pays homage to those places of the past now deserted, the dumpster and back alleys and rooftops, pulling his semi-automatic in darkness to shoot, practice, pop pop pop not like summer sounds but so crisp, like tapping glass with a fingernail, no one would care if he spaced the shots right. It’s that specific. Afterwards he could rest and count scars like knots on a prayer rope.

Scars like the ones on Ina’s knuckles left from every story she’d ever heard, from gangs and love and running and food frozen solid in the alley, from the plaster cast on the city by the time it’s over, signed by every car’s exhaust, by the water in tunnels melting and freezing over and over, by new Russians wrapped in lipstick and fur and junkies keeping warm around flaming trash bins, from graffiti uncovered by brown paint, from new throw-ups patching the city in white and colors.

The sharpness of lights, no matter what the cold feels clean, barren, assuring, cold iron burns under her fingers, ice glistens like broken glass, frozen water reaches out unevenly in finger strings retracting across the river, ice on trees, ice on wires, ice on rails, the low slinking posture of sympathy in everyone’s step and frosty breath mixing.

And the words said

“i love the frosty breath,

and the confession of wintry steam

ah. i am i. reality is reality.” --

osip mandelshtam, 1936