Maja
You are my sestra, my only sister. When my mother left Belgrade and yours stayed behind, we were split in half, like a zygote of identical twins. Ti si mrak, and I am light; the two faces of a country torn apart. Each time I came back I deposited Serbian words inside you for safekeeping. I was scared to lose them when I went back across the sea, where saopština and stvaralački and stradalništvu slipped through cracks between the seats and disappeared from my memory.
On a Normal Day
I liked her right away. She was qualified of course, and smart, with her beautiful portfolio filled with campaigns she’d successfully managed, her resume peppered with famous brands and successes annotated with percentage metrics. But it was her confidence that drew me to her, the way she laughed deeply from her belly, neck back, revealing the gap between her front teeth. When she moved her arm a tiny tattoo peeked out from under her shirt sleeve and then disappeared again. She was interesting, and I wanted more of her, to hear her opinions, to wade into her mind and sift my fingers through her neurons, absorbing her.
The Divide
I stared down at the six Barbie dolls lined up neatly on our plush orange carpet, their hair combed back, their dresses smoothed down flat against their legs, their eyes looking back up at me, unblinking. I was seven years old and my mother had asked me to pick one to include in her care package to Yugoslavia. The shampoos, soaps, and clothes would go to my aunt’s house in Belgrade, and the Barbie would go to my cousin Maja. I’d like to say I picked the most beautiful doll to send, but instead I chose the Barbie that I thought I could live best without.
Pigeon Girl
A white pigeon sat in the gutter, waiting. Her wings were folded up like sails of a ship at anchor, her head bobbing in a sea of cobblestones. Slobodanka stopped, crouched down and peered into the bird’s brown almost red eyes. They blinked at each other. She reached out her hand slowly towards the bird, expecting it to fly away, but it didn’t move. The pigeon was like silk, smooth and shiny, her body firm and substantial under the girl’s fingers, weighted with warmth.
Spotted
Moles. Spots, dots, freckles, and beauty marks. I’m covered in constellations of them, enough to trace out a few copies of the entire Roman pantheon. Instead of the spotted camouflage of a leopard whose fur can mimic the fall of dappled sunlight, my spots only draw attention to me through the thicket of evenly stained bodies at a beach in New Zealand.
Letter to a Stranger: Easter Island
I hope you’re still angry. You were smiling when you agreed to drive me around Easter Island and show me the sights, but you boiled over as soon as we started talking, driving too fast through the small streets of Hanga Roa and out to the parched fields in the shadow of the volcano.
On a Train Platform in Siberia
Switchback
It didn’t seem odd that a heavily armed police officer was leading a German Shepherd through the train, looking in at my open cabin as he passed. It was Russia – they didn’t take terrorism lightly. They had locked down Sochi and brought in hundreds of thousands of armed guards to protect civilians, and I could still remember what had happened to the Chechen militants that had taken hostages in 2002. All forty of them had been gassed and killed while still unconscious.
The Iron Gates
The Tishman Review
My spit came back as a brightly-colored spot over a map of the Balkans. After his grandmother had told us she had bought a DNA kit to find out about her ancestry, Dave and I had bought them too, matching his and hers saliva vials that we filled while standing in the living room.
The Iso Room
Only the worst cases ended up in the isolation room. Birds with contagious growths in their mouths forever gaped as if waiting to say something, birds with neurological conditions that left them unable to stand, their necks twisted under their bodies so that they looked at you upside down, and birds so sick that they didn’t react to your touch, just puffed up their feathers and closed their eyes, fighting back nausea.
Ten Years in Belgrade
It had been ten years since I’d been to Belgrade and the first things I noticed were the billboards. The blasted-out skeletons of iron had been rebuilt, painted, and were skinned in colorful faces smiling down on the grey skyline. They seemed so oddly out of place, as if they had landed straight out from the sky.
Over the Mountains
Serbia. For me: baklava, sarma, palacinke, family, roots, the old country. For the uninitiated: a small landlocked country in southeastern Europe separated from the rest of the continent by the Danube river in the north, and from the Mediterranean by the Alps in the west.