by SOFIA STAMBOLIEVA
Franz Marc, Playing Dogs, 1912. Oil on canvas
In our neighborhood, Hope #6, people leave decent clothes and shoes on one side of the dumpster, so poorer people can take them.
Zareto and I, we are squatting by the dumpsters behind the building. We are mesmerized by the six newborn kittens. “Sofi, Sofi, look how sweet!” I am looking. I am her aunt from America, but don’t want to be called Aunt, so she calls me by name. Kids in Bulgaria call every old-ish woman “aunt.” Aunts are the cafeteria ladies, the cleaning ladies, the neighbors sitting on benches in front of buildings. Aunt is an older, fatter version of your mother. I am no aunt to anybody. I am Sofia, a nice international name, which should be used more often. I am named after the city I left. If we want to be precise, I should be called New York now. My teenage daughter also wants to call me by my first name, this I don’t allow. I am “mom” to her and only to her and that’s that.
Hundreds of fleas jump around on the kittens. One moment it looks like one kitten has a black spot on its forehead and then the spot jumps and moves to its chin. Blue flies land on their faces, buzzing louder than the meows. Confused, the kittens lick their muzzles with tiny pink tongues. I’ve been told their tongues feel like Velcro—I’m pretty sure I’m never gonna know.
Every evening around seven we watch the thick, long, black line of crows fly from the left to the right side of the sky. We used to think it was an omen, but they’ve been passing by at seven for years. They first came when communism fell. Maybe their arrival foretold the fall, but the crows are still flying and signifying something. Crows are smart, and we suspect they are headed toward the big city dumpster in the Ilienzy neighborhood, which is refreshed with the city’s garbage every evening. If that’s not it then they’re just exercising.
After hours of kitten-watching, we go and squat in the playground with the overheated metal slides and the broken swings. There is a fruit and vegetable store there, which also sells beer. Mothers sit on the white plastic chairs around the plastic tables, sipping from dark brown bottles, taking sexy drags from their cigarettes, while squinting dramatically to avoid smoke in the eyes, and socialize. Their kids try hard to have fun hanging upside down on the rusty metal globe. The elderly “aunts” on the bench in front the building don’t approve of the mothers’ beer-drinking and cigarette-smoking and sometimes you can hear the word bitch casually dropped. A lot of the moms are single or divorced. Like in the rest of nature, fathers are hard to keep.
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