Apocalyptic sunsets at the дача

Apocalyptic sunsets at the дача

Бабушка always went to bed early,

the box TV graining our silhouettes

on the sunken couch. I always thought

it could devour us whole, my cousin and me,

the dark blue depths the same colour

as the night sky, speckled with white bits of lint.

Our eyes glowed with midnight rapture,

anticipating the mad dash outside

to brush our teeth over the mouldy plastic sink,

the summer day turned frigid and watchful.

Бабушка’s cats slinking somewhere in the bush

the only sounds in her yard.

The rest of the world may as well have ceased

to exist. No cars or lights or neighbourly

voices. No barking dogs or singing birds

or even the swaying of branches. Earlier,

a false alarm in the form of a storm warning;

the council had already cut our power nonetheless.

We stayed up waiting out the brownout

to catch reruns of dubbed American movies

about mermaids and figure skaters. Back here,

my parents and I are always out too late

in the woods. The ground darkens

before the sky does. Dirt cakes my tattered shoes,

the same ones I wore when I roamed

sprawling meadows behind the дача

while my mother secretly organised

my citizenship. Did she think

I’d have said no? Did she think I wasn’t

old enough at seventeen

to make my own decisions and know

what they mean? She may have been right

because I don’t feel any more like a person

now than I did then. I don’t feel more Russian

than I did on those nights laying half-awake

on Бабушка’s blue couch, a breath away

from the forest, a dark cloud of apocalypse.

In the shelter of those woods, I was

my truest self. With my cousin by my side,

laughing unbridled until my ribs ached.

I was a child, then.

[Originally published in Westerly Magazine]