The city is covered in bronze metallurgic slag.
It settles on my tongue like a copper coin. The air tastes of old iron and quiet decay.
I walk toward the metallurgical plant with the Curator. She moves with practical energy, keeping the air filled, asking questions the way she always does. She is looking for the Man with the Casting Ladle.
To her, he is a landmark.
To me, he is something I don’t want to wake.
The factory windows are blinded with plywood eyes. I look at the administrative wing.
My parents used to withdraw cash here, in a suffocating room with three ATMs.
The plant administration.
The cafeteria.
I wonder if it still works.
If I stand still, I can hear the wet clatter of a thousand forks. The coarse, cracker-crusted schnitzels. A loud, greasy memory of a world that used to be full.
The Curator asks, politely curious, the way she asks everything:
“And what was here?”
I point. I list. I give her the city in fragments.
I am not calling my father. I want to remember the way on my own.
Below us, the Curator gets stuck in traffic. Her car is trapped in the gridlock. She leans out the window, half-laughing.
“Ogo.”
I climb the high orange rafters. The rust stains my palms.
Up here, the war feels further away. The city is just a skeleton waiting to be reclothed.
One step on the iron, and then I am in my bedroom.
The view from the window.
The maples.
The Witness is there. We bicker over nothing. We scratch at each other just to feel something solid while the city evaporates outside.
We go downstairs. We step into the yard.
A car parks by the gazebo.
The man who steps out of it – the Profiteer – is loud and shiny. He flashes stacks of bills and brags about tires. He talks like the air is his.
He irritates me so much that I dismantle him. I strip away his confidence until he is just a small, bare thing in the dust.
The Witness evaporates into the haze.
The Profiteer pours us drinks. He keeps talking. He keeps explaining.
Our collision isn’t about desire. It is just friction. A violent way to sweat out the metallic taste in my throat.
After, the dust feels thicker.
Then the Curator and I are walking the tram tracks again.
They are impossibly wide. An iron sea. People watch us from the sidewalks. Are we holy fools, or just lost?
We arrive where I remember the Man with the Casting Ladle standing.
But they tell us no. He is somewhere else now.
Go there.
We go.
The Street of Beautiful Balconies. The ornate facades are still there, but everything else is hollowed out.
The cafeteria is gone.
The stationery shop is gone.
I try to remember its name, but it slips away.
The Curator stops walking. She gives up on the map and looks at me.
It isn’t a glance. It is an assessment.
I thought dismantling the loud man was just friction. A way to scrape myself clean.
But I hadn’t left him in the yard.
I hadn’t left him in the bed.
His shine didn’t stay outside.
I had swallowed the coin.
Deep inside my own architecture, something foreign takes hold. A slow, heavy hum spins behind my ribs. It smells of fresh rubber and cold currency.
The city took my paper and ink; it refuses to let me write its history.
We never found the Man with the Casting Ladle. The city doesn’t keep its saints.
Orange dust keeps falling.
Iryna Somkina’s work has appeared in Do Not Submit, The Gorko Gazette, Citywide Lunch, and Hawkeye Magazine.