Sleeping Roma dogs.
Logan berries ground underfoot.
Wind too hot to walk in.
My auntie had a baby and they named him Heavensent because she and my uncle tried to conceive for five years before they finally made one. I said his name would be trouble for him when he got older, but no one listened. He is four years old now. When I look at him I can see that he is definitely sent from some otherworldly place, but I wouldn't say it was heaven. One of his eyes is focused off to the left and his hair grows up from his forehead in two wide cowlicks. He throws his toys and screams when he doesn't get his way. Mama says that's just what four-year-old boys do, but I remember being four. It wasn't that long ago. I didn't throw toys and I screamed only when the situation called for it. I am sure of it. Maybe I should have been named Heavensent.
Pigeons clustered around crusts of bread.
The scent of crushed rose heads.
Lukewarm peach juice from the corner market.
School let out a month ago and I wander the streets of Blagoevgrad. I have two more months before middle school begins in the fall. Sometimes I follow my older sister, Iveta, at a distance because if she sees me she will throw rocks and yell for me to go away. I am much quicker than other boys my age. I have become very good at stepping into doorways, holding back at corners, or joining passing families. I think I would make a good detective someday. So far, I have caught Iveta shoplifting a cigarette lighter, hanging out in the park with a boy our parents have forbidden her to see, sneaking in the back entrance of our town's only movie theatre with two friends to see a horror film, and once from the side of a garbage dumpster I watched her crying alone on a bench across the street. For twenty minutes I watched my sister cry, and I noticed that not once did she take out her cell phone and text anyone. For weeks I wanted to ask about it, but then she would have known I had been watching.
Gray cat carcass in the street.
2:45 PM train whistle.
Broken paving stones on sidewalks.
On the east side of town is a dilapidated building that used to be the concession area for the old city swimming pool. The canopy overhang on the front has caved in over the concrete picnic tables now sitting among overgrown weeds. The back where they cooked hot dogs and poured sodas is still mostly intact. The burners and door of the oven have been torn out, and the counters are littered with papers and cardboard. A home now to feral cats who hunt mice in the weeds and sleep under the tables on sunny days. I like to hide with them. About four adult cats live there. Their numbers go up and down depending on how many kittens have been born or died. Inside the cooking area a mother cat gave birth inside the stripped-out oven. For weeks while they were little, the kittens slept and played inside on its cool, flat surface. Then one day in July I showed up to find them hopping in the grass around the tables: two gray and white boys, one brown and golden tabby girl, and one boy of black, white, and brown with golden tabby legs, as if he'd been made from all the fathers of the others. I went there every day for three weeks so I could watch the kittens. The golden tabby let me pet her sometimes, but the boys never did. Sometimes I sneak cans of tuna from our kitchen to feed their mother. She waits for me to dump the can's contents on the counter and walk away so she can eat while she keeps her eyes on me. Wary. I sit outside on one of the concrete benches and let her watch me while I watch her. She always looks away first.
Spilled crate of cherries.
One, long angry car horn.
Man's brown work boot, shoe string missing.
A Roma family showed up at the old swimming pool on a Thursday during the hottest part of the day. Two men, a young boy close to my age, one very young woman and another much older, and a little girl barely old enough to walk. They entered through the back gate and stopped at the trees in the rear, taking pieces of pipe and metal and something blue that I couldn't identify. It was floppy like plastic or maybe a tarp. The young boy stepped down into the deep end of the pool, ignoring the ankle-deep muddy water that soaked his sneakers. He began digging blue tiles away from the wall with his fingers. I crouched down under the concession tables and watched him pull them off one by one and slide them into his pants pocket. The tiles, about 2 ½ by 2 ½ centimeters, were held in place with cement, and he had to use a piece of broken concrete from the deck to pop them out, but he kept at it until one of the men called him away to help gather pieces of metal in the weeds. The boy lingered, trying his best to pry one last piece of tile loose from the wall. The man yelled at him and gestured angrily for him to leave the pool. The boy dropped the jagged concrete piece in the murky water and ran to join the rest of the family in the shaded weeds. It took about twenty minutes for them to fill their bags. Then they filed out the gate. The younger woman, a girl really, put the young child on her hip and lagged behind, carrying her bag over her shoulder like a burden. At the end of the street they crossed over a ditch and disappeared into the edge of the forest. I went down into the pool and stepped through the water, the filthy water soaking into my shoes. Fishing around with both hands, I located the concrete piece the boy had used. I began pushing at the tile he'd wanted. It broke free with only two strikes. Below it, two more squares came loose. Reaching above my head to the edge of the pool, I placed them along with the concrete piece in a row.
Necklace of blue, yellow, and white baby shirts strung up on a balcony clothesline.
The end is not near scrawled in red spray paint.
Statue of Vasil Levski.
The next day my mother told me I had to watch Heavensent for a few hours for my aunt because the two of them were going to Sofia to buy fabric for winter coats. I don't know why they were thinking of winter coats on a day when the weather was so hot it made your head hurt. From our third story balcony, I watched them both light their cigarettes on the sidewalk and then, taking their sweet time, head toward the bus station. My mother waved back at us. Heavensent and I watched them disappear around the corner, and he began crying that he was hungry. Mother had assigned Iveta the job of cleaning the kitchen where she stomped and pouted and smacked the freshly washed dishes down so hard in the cabinet I was sure she would crack one. I took a juice and half-eaten box of biscuits from the food shelf to feed Heavensent. My sister broke into a whole new tirade about us making a mess, so I took the boy by the hand with his juice and snack and led him out the door. We sat on a park bench near the American university so he could eat his fill of biscuits and finish his juice. He wanted to play on the swings, but I had another place in mind.
The scent of freshly baked gevrek.
Faded plastic streamers tied onto a black locust tree branch.
Thin tabby sleeping atop a wood pile.
The tiles on the deck edge were gone. Heavensent lagged a few feet behind, whining. When he saw that we were going down into the abandoned pool, he perked up and followed, stamping his feet in the shallow end of standing water. Along the wall another half meter line of tile had been popped out since yesterday. The concrete tool lay exactly where I had left it next to the now missing row of tiles. I pulled out a few more loose tiles with my fingers and then retrieved the concrete. Heavensent was squatting in water that reached his shins, stirring up algae and mud with a stick. I pointed at a faded blue mark on the wall indicating the water was three and a half meters, or at least it had once been, and told him not to go past that line because the water at the end of the pool was full of snakes. He believed me and took a few cautious steps backward before resuming his stick poking in the sediment around his feet. I went to work and freed up sixteen tiles. I lined them up on the edge as I had the day before. Admiring their blue brilliance, I noticed they had bits of something shiny embedded in their coating. The tile line sparkled in the sun like cool water. I pulled myself up the ladder to the deck, rearranged them in a circle, and inspected my design. Edging them neatly in a tighter circle, I formed a spiral. Still kicking around in the muck, Heavensent had splattered brown grime all the way to his neck. I figured I'd get yelled at for letting him get so dirty when my mother and aunt returned from their shopping, but they never got the chance to get angry at me. My father got home first. He announced he'd lost his job and proceeded to finish every beer in the house. Even Iveta was quiet after that.
Rusted out yellow Lada engulfed in weeds.
Plastic grocery bag caught in the thorns of a rose bush.
Street dumpsters.
Early mornings were usually quiet in our flat because my father always left for his job by 5:00 AM. This morning he sat at the kitchen table absentmindedly poking a coffee cup around in a circle while my mother made breakfast. Iveta sat with her head in one hand and her cell phone in the other. I slipped a torn slab of bread from the loaf on the kitchen counter and said I was going to the park with my friends. I don't have any friends. Or at least I have none in the summer to play with in the park. But neither of my parents knew that. No one protested or gave me any warnings about not staying out too late.
The park was already full of people on benches taking advantage of the coolness before the afternoon heat drove them back indoors. Outside the fence of the dog run, I spied a silver charm pushed into the dry dirt. I rubbed the grit away with the hem of my t-shirt. The size of my thumb, it was a lady's head with a veil over her hair like Princess Nadezhda. Further out was a circle of feathers in the grass where a bird had met its end, probably from one of the dogs. I pocketed the silver head and six of the prettiest feathers and headed for the pool. In the usual place on the deck, I arranged the feathers in a triangle with a single blue tile weighing down each one and placed the silver Princess Nadezhda head at the top. Lit up by the rising morning sun, the feathers' soft edges billowed with the slightest push of air, and the tiles glimmered bright blue. Princess Nadezhda's tiny, glum face absorbed the heat and held her position like the Christmas star at the top. The weedy trail leading from the back gate to the trees had been beaten down with footprints.
Bright green beer bottle cap.
Lizard on a chipped roof tile.
Snowless Pirin mountains.
By Thursday of that week we no longer had meat. At the taverna across the street, my father sat for hours each day on one of the upholstered outdoor chairs at a plywood table. The place had no sign but was known in our neighborhood as Ivan's Bar. When I ventured out each morning, my father would already be there with a Schumensko in front of him, and when I returned hours later, he would still be there. Sometimes other men stopped by and they sat down to talk and drink with my father. From our balcony, I could hear some of my father's angry words about stupid things men do. I was pretty sure the stupid men he referred to were the ones who fired him. Sometimes he punched at the air with wild fists. One of the other drinkers reached out to calm him, but my dad knocked his hand away. At the pool park, I left a few tiles each day, sometimes along with a beer bottle cap or anything bright I found on the ground. The next Friday, for the first time, the boy left something for me. There on the deck weighted down with the concrete piece was a torn piece of blue paper with a single word written on it: лепило. Glue.
Fuzzy brown Pomeranians on leashes.
Rushing water of the Bistritsa River.
Popsicle wrapper rolling across the traffic circle.
The weekend was one long screaming match between my sister and mother. My father yelled because Saturday's lunch was nothing but potatoes and cucumbers. He said my mother was just being a stingy bitch with her cooking because there was no way we had run out of food already. Iveta went crying to Dad that I stole a bunch of her stuff, but that was a lie. I stole only one thing, a bottle of glue from her stupid art kit under her bed. She hadn't touched it since elementary school, so I didn't see why she should care. My father smacked me on the back of my head and told me to give it back, but I'd already hid it in the bathroom trash can underneath the liner where I knew nobody would ever look. He disappeared Sunday morning and didn't come home until after midnight. Nobody knew where he'd gone. I didn't care because he slept all day Monday and the house was finally quiet. On Tuesday morning my father, freshly shaven and in a clean black shirt, entered the kitchen as if nothing had happened. He drank his coffee, kissed my mother, and said he was going to work. Mama, Iveta, and I froze. He went out the door with no explanation. For once, my sister's pouting stopped, and my mother just stood staring at the closed door with her hands on her hips. Don't try your father, she said to us both. Times are hard. With the glue, three pieces of broken blue glass and a dried-out snail shell all carefully folded up inside a dingy handkerchief my mother had tossed in the trash, I left for the pool wondering how long it would take for meat to show up once more on our table.
Toddlers on scooters in the park.
High school boys laughing and cursing.
Chalk drawing of a boat on the sidewalk.
Early mornings at the pool, I would find the deck empty of everything I'd left the day before. Only the broken piece of concrete remained. The boy always left it with the tip pointing up, like a message to me that he wanted more. Before going down into the pool, I took everything from my pocket and knelt down to arrange it on the deck. The handkerchief out flat with a piece of glass on each corner. The shell near the top and the bottle of glue in the center. I leaned back to admire my design and decided to angle the glue bottle pointing at the northeast corner. I moved the shell above the glue spout like the whole thing was a compass. From the far end of the property voices sounded from one of the storage buildings. A man's voice, and then laughter. I ran to the tree shaded area where I'd first seen the family and crouched behind the biggest trunk. In a few minutes, a man exited the building, the boy's father, and then the young woman with the baby. She put the baby in the grass close to the door and the two of them went back inside. The baby's head bobbed like an overgrown onion, and then it crawled a short distance to one side. The boy emerged to gently drag the baby back to its position in front of the open door. He stood up full and craned his neck to see the deck edge of the pool. Skinny with shaggy hair that touched the base of his neck, he looked to be at least two years younger than me. He must have spied the handkerchief because he smiled and stretched his head up even further trying to see what treasures I'd put there. He checked over his shoulder and then bolted toward the deck. Without stopping to appreciate my careful arrangement, he shoved the glue in his pocket. Lifting the snail shell, he eased it into his front shirt pocket and folded the glass bits in the handkerchief. With another quick look at the building, he pushed the handkerchief into his pants pocket and ran back. His father was waiting at the door. He gave the boy one slap across the face and grabbed him by the shirt, pulling him inside the building with the rest of the family. I was sure the snail shell was crushed.
Broken leather dog collar.
Old men drinking coffee.
Scent of linden trees.
The Friday after my father started his new job I was hoping we'd have meat at dinner, but we never got a chance to see what my mother would cook. Heavensent fell on the stairs behind their flat and gashed his forehead, so Mama, Iveta, and I went with my aunt to hospital. She kept wailing about brain damage, so naturally Heavensent started bawling along with his mom. My uncle and father showed up about an hour later and they both smelled of gasoline. My father's new job was connected to my uncle's job. Once when I was much younger I asked my uncle what he did. He shrugged said a little of this and a little of that. Later my dad pointed a finger in my face and told me never to ask my uncle about his work. For years Heavensent's dad was a kind of mystery figure who showed up at odd times and with odd stuff like a car trunk filled with bags of fertilizer or boxes of new batteries or sixty bottles of rakia. Sometimes, like today, he smelled of fuel, or smoke, or chemicals. And he had cash all the time. Lots of cash. I hoped soon my dad would have cash, too. The doctor came out and said she wanted to keep Heavensent overnight for observation. She was concerned because his left eye was focused off to one side. My aunt set her straight on that being normal for Heavensent, and we all went home.
Spent white lily blossoms.
Chalga music at Delchevo Plaza.
Babas on park benches.
The next day I waited until the afternoon, the hottest part of the day, to return to the pool. Before I made it to the door my mother did something she hadn't done since I was a kid. Putting out her cigarette first, she reached her hand around the back of my head to pull me to her chest. She kissed my forehead, not really gentle, but full with her lips puckered hard as if she'd given a lot of thought to kissing me that day. She then motioned that I could go, so I hurried out. I figured the boy and his family would be at the pool property when I arrived but the place was empty. I pried a few pieces of tile loose and put them on the deck along with a bright green pencil I'd picked out of my sister's notebook. I waited inside the concession area for nearly an hour playing with the half-grown kittens, but the family never showed up. Using a piece of the cardboard on the floor and the green pencil, I wrote a note: Здравейте. Hello. I thought about putting my name too but I didn't. I don't know why. I put the note on the deck and arranged the tiles under the word in a smile shape. The day was unbearably hot, and I wanted to go back home. At the front gate, I looked back and spotted them. The family was entering the property on the far side at the tree line. The younger woman sat on a high embankment, her baby on her lap. At the tree line, the parents were working with their backs turned. They were picking something from the ground, filling a bag together. And about ten meters to the left, sitting alone in partial shade under an evergreen tree was the boy. His face was turned downward and his arms were drawn up close to his chest. He was crying. I knew that position. That face. I'd done it plenty of times. Punishment for something. A million things.
Taxis lined up along the river road.
Olive trees for sale in front of a plant shop.
Green grape vines lining trellises.
Don't try your father. I spent the rest of the week with that thought foremost in my head. He came home in a good mood each day, but on Thursday when I sneaked in the kitchen door he was sitting at the table with a black eye. Saying nothing, I headed back out again. But on Friday, as if nothing had happened, he came home at the end of the day and fanned out a handful of cash on the kitchen table. Iveta squealed and pleaded for money to go to the movies with her friends. He pulled two five lev bills from the stack and presented them to her. Then he gave my mother a few bills and told her to buy some fresh trout for dinner. That black eye must have hurt a little when he smiled widely. He pushed a ten across the table toward me and told me to go have some fun, too. I put my hands in my pockets, took a step back, and my father's face changed. Don't try your father. My mother's eyes landed on the ten lev, then on me, and her eyebrows shot up. I took the bill, said thank you, and left.
Road workers in yellow vests.
Six fat goats grazing underneath the river bridge.
Customers lined up at the bakery.
My father was gone for three days after this. He walked in the door early on the third morning with mud encrusting his best black shoes. One hand was bandaged and he smelled of alcohol. He brought no money this time. I instinctively stayed in my room until I was sure he was asleep, and then I walked to the door with my sneakers in my hand. I had no plans to go to the pool, but my feet had found that path almost every day for two months. So there I was again at the front of the property looking in. On the deck lay something flat the size of a car window. Most of it was blue, and objects lay all over it. The boy was nowhere to be seen and neither was the family, so I ran to the deck edge to see what he'd left. It was breath-taking. Bizarre. Horrifically ugly. Magical. A strange bright dream. Every tile was glued along the bottom half of a thin square of plywood in the shape of ocean waves. Fish formed from bits of paper, colored string, and broken plastic leapt from the water and dove down in the sea. A ship made of dozens of bits of wood, some crudely carved and some splintered, broke upwards out of the water at the prow pointing at a sun in the corner, one-quarter of a circle just the way I drew them as a little boy. The sun was formed of dozens of bits of torn gold edges from popsicle wrappers. He must have torn up ten wrappers to make that sun. Loose bits of gold paper curled up in the heat of the real sun above. The figurehead on the front of the ship had the silver charm head of the woman, and the crushed shell of the snail made a thumb-sized sailor's body standing aboard the ship. At the top, above three seagulls sculpted from paper clips, were tiny black seeds smaller than grains of rice laid out in thick lines like sand forming one word: Toska.
Dried out weeds.
Theatre playbills plastered on buildings.
Cigarette butts under a park bench.
I dragged myself home with the thing under my arm, careful not to break any pieces. No one was home, so I leaned it against my bedroom wall on the floor and sat down to study it. The tiles lost their sparkle in the dimness of the room, but I could see other details that I'd missed in the glaring light of the pool. In the opposite corner of the sun, the boy had tried to pencil a tiny airplane, but the wings were badly smudged. It was the only part of the picture that looked as if he'd given up. I read the word formed in seeds across the top again. Toska. It wasn't a Bulgarian name. His family was Roma, so I thought maybe it was his name. Maybe he was named after some relative. Or maybe it meant something foreign. This thing had been his final message. I laid it flat on the floor and pushed it under my bed, and then typed the word into my cell phone translator. Toska. It was Russian. A melancholic, undirected, and deep longing without a reason. It can be a wistful sadness. A dull ache of the soul. This boy, younger than me, knew Russian, or at least he knew this one Russian word that took us both far away with his strange and wonderful and ugly picture hidden under my bed. I went back to the pool for days after, but he never returned. I still had the ten lev bill in my pocket and thought again about leaving it for him. Like a gift or maybe even a lure for him to come back, but it felt wrong. I never did. Months went by, and nothing much in my life changed. I look for the boy everywhere I go, but I haven't seen him. I imagine this nameless boy sitting in his home just like I sit in mine. His dull ache of the soul and my dull ache of the soul. Toska.