There is clementine sticky on her fingers. False girl. See, there is a chicken on the stove, a breast that is not unlike her own, and the edges of her are fuzzed alloy like the brass samovar across the room. And there is clementine outlining her fingers.
One-two-three-four-five, her pinky lops down. Since the beginning of her after-life she has retained most of her senses. Her touch is intact, buffeted by sticky citrus. Her body does not pass through walls; if other ghosts were here, they would deride her for being so terrible at this. The only thing she lost is taste, and that might be a lie.
Chicken on the stove — she’s a vegetarian. If there was anyone here to scold she would tell them about the damage factory farms do to local communities, wastewater, whatever. She’s not drinking water anymore but when she opens her false mouth it’s parched, desert as she saw in picture books as a child, as the air when she flew into Tbilisi before making it up to Moscow.
This dacha she has not been in, in the before-life, but she had a photo of it hanging above her desk in New Haven. Overexposed Shostakovich hovered over his desk, pencil in hand, while the genuine girl wrote herself in a corner about repression and the Zhdanov Doctrine. She hadn’t taken the composer for a citrus fan, but her fingers are stained clementine with something, and it must be the essence of what this room was, will be, should be. Citrus wasn’t available in the USSR at this point, but perhaps it was for Shostakovich, with his worldwide fame.
She majored in Slavic Studies. Beyond that, she was a doctoral candidate, ABD, All Before Death. She never went up to Russia but she heard about it, all the time, from her professors. The sun goes down early, then you get the best chicken you’ve ever had. Herbed and creamy, though she was never a fan of Russian cuisine.
She bought the chicken in an alley off Leninsky Prospekt, brought it back to this dacha which also seems to be an apartment eight stories up. On the way out she’d bought a handful of clementines and ate one on the street like she was smoking a cigarette, orange pith and all. This is in/correct. Ghosts can touch but they cannot leave. She did/not boil the water, nor cut the breast into filets. She isn’t quite sure she is a ghost. She is not alive; this is not a true room. Doesn’t mean she is haunting a reality.
Russia is not like this, a false memory, created from what she believed a Soviet apartment was. She knows, although she never saw it beyond posters. There was a war, then a pandemic, then another war. If she had gone, anyhow, she would’ve spat out the meat. She would’ve gotten the same grimaces that her mother gave her when she admitted she’d gone herbivoral. She wouldn’t appreciate the country; the country had already clotted her arteries. Her autopsy would see her cut in half, capillaries dissected, veins filled with kvass and wine and whatever other stereotypes she used, to pretend to know a country not her own. She pressed into her arm’s veins and felt no liquid but blood.
Once she almost peeked over the mountains at Stepantsminda but she couldn’t see the Georgian Military Highway running into the country. It became an idol for her. Visit Russia — do not — please — go. When she would have job interviews, eventually, she would need to justify it. Literary connections, fascination, objectification, a draw she would not explain.
In the after-life she should be in a fantasy-reality-whatever is beyond her career. The eternity of academic purgatory is such that her freakish association into this sphere, forever, clots her veins. She spent her life in time-wasted nights for Routledge and Oxford University Press.
The chicken is done. Light enters: good morning good morning good morning. Citrus orange. As Russian suns go, this is in/accurate. She presses her thumb in her mouth, sucks the nothingness of the fruit juice away.
Writer | Merrick Lawson ‘25 | mlawson25@amherst.edu
Editor | Jacob Young ‘25 | jyoung25@amherst.edu