Pen Pal

[Quincunx]

(Author's note: More of an outline than a story, but I will be offline for an indeterminate time after tonight, and rushed to get this posted.)

 

"We are NOT here to play GOD! We are here as WOMEN! Every man and woman a MOTHER! Every child WANTED!"

 

For two years I'd been living with Raina, but she still surprised me. Last month, she'd been lecturing international women's lobbyists about the evils of bride kidnapping; now we were in downtown Jalalabad, defending the Kyrgyz government. They had looked the other way while oil money built a cloning clinic. Raina switched to Russian and repeated the chants, beating time with the fist that did not hold the bullhorn. The crowd was mostly foreign: Raina and her New Suffragette supporters, clutches of missionaries quoting Genesis, gap year students, bored sons, hungry refugees yelling slogans for whoever fed them.

 

She turned away from the horn, laughing, and her lips moved. I heard nothing, however; the crowd muttered and shouted and drowned her out. Raina reached for my coat and started to pull me down, but then shoved the cloth away from her. "You. . .Janna. . ." she shouted up at me, "you made another one!"

 

I reached into the inner pocket and pulled out what she'd found--a Rubix cube with one broken corner--and spoke carefully, "This is not America; the police might come. All it will do is make smoke, Raina. You remember."

 

Raina forgot she was holding the bullhorn; she just shrieked and swung her fist at me. I put my hands up to shield my face and the cone of the bullhorn cut my wrist to the bone. I lost my grip on the toy when she jerked the horn free and threw it away. She wanted to hit me again.

 

*****

 

Last time, Raina forgot to duck. I had to clasp my hands on top of her head, wrestle her behind the berm, and duck myself; it wasn't easy while she was swearing like that. She pushed one hand up to give me two fingers and got splinters in the back of her hand. So did I, holding her down. I hadn't heard the explosion. My hands ached when they flexed, but I had to get my earplugs out.

 

"--ing pig chauvinist gun range, but I took you there anyway. But that was a BOMB! What are you, a terrorist?--" I pointed at my ears and picked plastic out of the back of my left hand. She kept ranting while she yanked her earplugs out and threw them on the ground. "--you do to it?--"

 

"I pried off one of the corners and filled it with firecrackers."

 

"Janna! You idiot! We could be arrested, you stupid nihilist!"

 

What was a nihilist? "I don't think so. You've been watching too many crime drama reruns."

 

She flung out more words I didn't know. "God's bouncing bazongas! My fingerprints were all over that! You know I spent all weekend fooling with that thing, trying to get at least get one side the same color, and you LET me! Could you maybe be a little MORE imprudent???"

 

*****

 

I had needed to change planes twice, ride one bus to the end of its line, and walk over two miles before I had found her bookstore. The house had been built just over a century ago, white clapboard with wooden trim painted pink, and she had liked to call it "historic". After I had entered, I had taken out one picture from the envelope in my purse and climbed to the second floor: Religions, Foreign Languages, Earth Sciences, History.

 

She had rested her shoulderblades on a bookshelf while paging through a Cyrillic text; the pages had been laid out like poetry, and her lips had moved as she read a few lines. I had laid my finger on her shoulder. She had looked at my finger first, then followed it back to my face. Her face was flat behind one thick bullring in her nose, but her eyes were still full of poems. Then I had slipped the photograph over the text she had been reading; it dragged her back to the present. "Hello, Raina."

 

"JANNA!"

 

Bookstore cats and bookstore mice darted under the shelves. She squeezed the breath out of me, hugging low on my ribs. I looked around; the other patrons gawked, the cashier stared with his jaw half-open. When Raina let me go, she looked around too, then bellowed, "She's my penpal and we never met before, so quit damn staring!" They scurried away also, and Raina looked up at me. I hadn't realized she was so short. "So. . . .Welcome to America. Let's get out of this mausoleum and go do something American, maybe pick up some hamburgers and Pepsi on the way."

 

*****

 

Police blame the twenty-nine people still in Kyrgyz jails, their families blame the police; both are wrong. Once the flashbomb exploded, people near us tried to flee from the splinters and smoke. While I could wrap my arm around a lamp pole, Raina was already off-balance from punching me and ducking afterwards. Panicky people pushed her further from me; I saw her leg rise into the air before the crowd carried her away.

 

The Kyrgyz government returned Raina's body to her family, just as they found it. I had an undertaker mend her body and buried her in my family's gravesite. Also, I sold the bookstore to her uncle for very little money, just enough to travel with, and to buy some supplies.

 

I will not forgive Raina for dying. Nor will I forgive the foreigners who killed her.