Free Shards: A Novel by Ismet Prcić

slapping at everything with their sticky little fingers, leaving smudges of grease. Everything had the feel of old Russian movies and third-world misery. I was appalled.
    Mehmed and I moved in with Cousin Zvonko and his wife and daughter in the add-on attic apartment of the first house. Zvonko was a massive man, with a light brown comb-over and blue eyes behind rectangular specs, obese to the point of not being able to cut his own toenails. He breathed with a resonant wheeze that started on the third stair up, and by the time he reached the apartment he would cough and have to sit down for half an hour, drenched. His wife, Zana, was the exact opposite of him physically, to the point where you wouldn’t be able to fathom the image of the two of them in the act of coitus even if, by some twist of fate, you happened to witness it.
    The apartment was almost all one room except for Zvonko and Zana’s bedroom and the bathroom. It was broken up by beams and chimneys and smelled of sun-bleached wood and dust. All the way in the corner, on the floor behind the TV cabinet, fenced off with low bookshelves featuring googly-eyed dolls and girlie trinkets, was our mattress. Before we got there this nook served as Zvonko’sdaughter’s secret room, which was probably why she was a total shit to us and hated our guts the whole time. I didn’t like being called a refugee, so I spent the money Father gave me for essential foods on Ramones records, Coca-Cola, and sugary cacao powder, and the hosts were, let’s say, angry.
    “Do you know there’s a war going on?” they all kept asking. I cried and ran downstairs, slalomed my way through a gaggle of raggedy refugee toddlers and ended up in an office, the door of which I locked from the inside and whose phone I abused to call home. I told my dad we were ready to be picked up.
    Mother did come a week later but not to pick us up. She was in one of the last buses that crossed the bridge into Croatia before it went, first up into the air and then down to the bottom of the Sava. Father stayed behind to keep his job, take care of the apartment, and feed the parakeet. Mother showed up in jeans with a bunch of bags and moved into the attic, as well.
    With that commenced our official exodus.
    In mid-May we saw our old apartment building on Brčanska Malta on TV. In the middle of the intersection that my mother spent nights monitoring with her tiny binoculars, an olive green ammunitions truck sat ablaze, its tires melting, its cargo crackling like a fireworks display, spraying projectiles indiscriminately. Behind it, stretching up Skojevska Street, were more trucks, some burning, some shot to shit, some stalled, some untouched but driverless. There were holes in the buildings. There were no soldiers except for the ones lying around, dead.
    A gray ashworm of about half my mother’s cigarette died, unsmoked, against the filter and fell silently onto the carpet. I scooped it up into an ad from a magazine and threw it in the trash. Comingback I saw her bring the filter to her lips, realize it was just a filter, and then look around the floor for a singed spot or a small fire, mildly amused that she could find none.
    Father called right before dinner, said he was okay, said that the Yugoslav National Army, mirroring what they had done in Sarajevo, attempted to evacuate the base and move all its artillery to the hills around town, where they would be in a perfect position to systematically shell it, and that the local group calling itself the Patriotic League ambushed them and seized . . . He got disconnected midsentence and didn’t call again. My mother served the dinner to everyone except herself and sat smoking by the open window, assuring us all that she just wasn’t hungry. I forgot and made the cardinal mistake of audibly slurping up a couple of spoonfuls of my hot hot soup and Zvonko lost it. He turned purple, smacked his napkin against the table, and gave me another lecture on how to eat with my