Great. Grows on you. Russia, from Stalin to now. Corrector. Paintings. Family. Not exactly mise en abyme but closely connected stories. Wonderful language and quotes.
The dancer's left hand still dangles in the air. My decision isn't decided so much as felt. I set down the airbrush as one might set down a fork when nauseous. I will leave the disgraced dancer's ahdn where it is, where it should be, right there, a single hand waving for help, waving good-bye, applauding no one, a single hand that may have once held my neck while a voice in my ear asked for help.
Who could have imagined a beast as strange and melancholy as a giraffe?
"The work of socialism doesn't pause for secretaries of any eye color," I say. Poor Maxim. His misery is among the few indulgences I allow myself.
We traded old ryobra - rib records, bone music, skeleton songs - banned fifties and sixties rock and roll inscribed by phonograph onto exposes X-rays that could be played on gramophones at hushed volumes.
She still looked at Kolya as if back through time, which of course is the only way to look at a photograph, and we've done so with photographs of our teenage boyfriends killed in Chechnya or at home. [...] Their deaths have aged us, as if their unlived years have been added to our lived years and we bear the disapointments of both the lives we have and haven't lived, so that even when we are alone, brushing our teeth in our quiet bathrooms, lying awake in our empty beds, even when our little ones are tucked in, when our friends are brushing their teeth in their quiet bathrooms, lying awake in their empty beds, even when the door is shut and no one can see or hear us, we are not alone, we still think in the plural voice.
The dance floor awash in steel-tipped heels, leather boots gripping sweat-slick calves, skirts small enough to seal inside an envelope. Fake lashes, nails, and breasts that collectively enlarged reality to normalize their obscene dimensions. Coin-thick cosmetics. Flesh coruscating in strobe light when the depilated iridescence of deep-sea invertebrates. Our flat-faced Virgil led us through the swelling sea of bodies, but I wanted to drown, die, live forever, there is no difference, within the sequined sound.
They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can't trade atoms no matter how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed.
The calcium in the collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long, dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.
