The Life and Times of the Curious Cockroach

Last time on “The Infinite Possibilities of O”: Alyona Andreevna Volkova’s nineteenth birthday. Dreadful event in a dreadful city. Examination of hands to assess the effects of ageing. Decision to get married as soon as possible, to avert spinsterhood and future assaults by grandmother’s sand timers. A plan. Two cockroaches scorched by tea kettle.

 

As Alyona unscrewed the mirror off her bathroom wall, she thought of the day Ukraine’s soon-to-be swimming champion plucked out both eyebrows. His lady fans had been petrified with indignation. They wrote angry letters to the press, calling back the signature brows that had once filled television screens with irresistible, mysterious expression.

“I just needed an edge,” he had told the Kiev Gazette, “or to at least to believe I had one.”

As Alyona slid the mirror underneath her pillow, she felt she truly understood the man. Living in a city where crazed single women were plenty and eligible bachelors were few, Alyona needed an edge just as badly. That’s why she had decided to dabble in superstition, just for a moment or two.

“Of course!” thought Alyona as she slipped into bed that evening, “if a maiden wants to see her future husband’s face in her dreams, she is to fall asleep with a mirror under her pillow. May Fortune wink at me tonight, and show me who to chase!”

With a smile still stretched across her cheeks, Alyona fell fast asleep. But that night Fortune did not wink at Alyona. In fact, Fortune was nowhere in sight. There were so many women in Arkash demanding its services (in ways that were less and less orthodox by the day), that Fortune had long packed its bags and fled the city in search of better working conditions.

So that night, instead of dreaming of her future husband, Alyona woke up at 5:00 a.m. with a terrible itch on her scalp. The girl let out an ear-piercing shriek when she untangled a piece of broken mirror from her hair. She leaped out of bed and looked at the sight before her: the shards on her sheets broke the sun’s rays into a thousand pieces and threw them against the walls and ceiling, where they stayed, quivering like tiny white spiders.

Alyona knew of nothing more frightening than a broken mirror. Even her daily eye-lash curling ceremony did not come close. A lost eye could always be exchanged for a glass one, but seven years of life lost to lonely misery? No, that could never be returned. Such was the curse of the broken mirror.

“Where would I be after seven years of unhappiness?” Alyona asked the tiny white spiders, “I’d be aged 26, good grief! I’d be unsightly and senile, planting potatoes at my grandparents’ dacha, spitting out my teeth at all the little nephews running around my legs…”

The white spiders stayed silent, but through their quivering now seemed to nod.

“Never!” exclaimed Alyona, and all of her innermost terror rose up through her limps and culminated into one, tiny twitch of her eye.

But the girl did not give up. She simply had to avert misfortune. By the time she untangled all the shards from her long locks, she came up with another idea. She remembered reading in a relationship advice column that the only way to shake off seven years of unhappiness was to dump the broken mirror into a river.

So Alyona began gathering all the glittering pieces into a sac, and one by one, the white spiders disappeared from the walls and ceiling. Twenty minutes later, Alyona stood by the Dnieper, watching the sac sink to the river’s murky depths. How light she felt! How relieved she was! She had won back seven years of life and felt like a child again.

Alyona skipped along the riverbanks, dainty as the buttercups blooming around her. Even the reappearance of the spiders underneath bridges didn’t frighten her, for they weren’t spiders at all — just the sun split into pieces by the river’s gurgles and churns.

Then someone cleared their throat. A bored, monotone voice sounded at Alyona’s ear:

My dear little girl,
Try one of my apples.
They’re juicy and crisp,
Crisp and delicious.
50 cents and a kilo you’ll get,
And here there’s nothing fictitious.

Alyona perceived that the voice came from a woman — if the term “woman” is used loosely and generously. When she spoke, each syllable sent ripples from her mouth to the rest of her neckless, toad-like body. The tiny stool beneath her blubbery bottom squeaked along to her drones, lamenting its fate as Atlas did when he heaved and signed beneath the universe.

There was something about the old woman, the stool, and the two mounds of bruised apples by her sides, that evoked sympathy from Alyona. The girl told the toad-woman all about her troubles. She recounted her nineteen years of singledom, and trembled in fear as she spoke of her approaching spinsterhood. Her voice rose higher and higher in apocalyptic tones; even the birds were stunned mid-song, and now, with beaks hanging open stupidly, watched the scene unfolding below. But the toad-woman herself seemed unmoved. She nodded along distractedly, all the while picking at something under her fingernails. When Alyona gave her last sob, the toad-woman cleared her throat again and resumed her expressionless rhymes:

My poor little girl,
You’re the tenth one today
To tell me your sorrows
In such theatrical way.
All that you fair maidens need,
Is an apple to fill you with sunshine,
And ease your heart’s petty greed.

But why stop at one apple,
When a kilo costs 50 cents,
Look how they’re juicy and crisp,
Crisp and –

The toad-woman stopped abruptly, and fixed Alyona with an intense stare. Suddenly looking very suspicious, she seemed to squint at something between Alyona’s brows. The girl was taken aback by the toad-woman’s awakening. She wondered how it was possible for her features to shift so sharply from one expression to the next, when, just moments ago, they hung from her face like gelatinous flaps, barely supported by bone or cartilage. Now she stared at Alyona with amusement, now with pity, now with mounting horror. The poor girl was convinced she had just sprouted a wart, or possibly a third eye.

Dear reader, if only things were that simple.

The toad-woman inflated herself to greater proportions, quickly checked something on the inside of her palm, and said:

Ay! What’s that I see?
Where those furrowed brows meet,
Something stares back at me?
How it disgraces that pretty face!
That vile, contemptuous wrinkle,
Which spreads in such haste!

(Alyona gasped,
the toad-woman’s stool gave a loud squeak)

Now I see your beauty is meek,
Your troubles are real,
And your future bleak.
Listen closely and follow my counsel,
Or suffer a long, bitter decline,
And die lonely and haggard,
With a figure no better than mine.

Step One: buy my apples,
(A kilo for 99 cents, what a fine price!)
Step Two: throw their peals
Over your shoulder, and don’t think twice!
Step Three: skip off to bed,
You’ll dream of the lad you’ll wed.
If you don’t see his face,
Worry not, you’ll see his name.
If you don’t see his name,
Go back to Step One, have no shame!
Step Four: wake up and chase the lad,
And quick, with a ring bind him,
Before you grow old, gray, and mad!

No sooner had the toad-woman pronounced her last words, than the distressed maiden began searching her pockets for coins. With each coin she produced, the toad-woman added apples onto her scale. Her smile stretched wider and wider, and by the time the scale read twenty kilograms, her mouth looked as though it began at one ear and ended at the other. But Alyona took no notice of this monstrous transformation, so preoccupied she was by her own wrinkling brows.

Alyona gave her last coin to the toad-woman and asked, “In case I need to find you again, can you tell me your name?”

“Fortune, sweet pea, just call me Fortune,” said the toad-woman. Then she produced a snuff pack from her crocodile purse and seemed to forget Alyona’s presence.

*

Dragging the sacs of apples back home, Alyona smiled triumphantly. Her body ached, each step was slow and laborious.

“I just needed an edge,” she pictured herself saying to envious bridesmaids, “that’s how you win any race.”

To be continued.

 

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