Free Shards: A Novel by Ismet Prcić Page A

mouth closed like a civilized human being. During the rest of the dinner nobody said anything.
    I read late into the night, something inappropriate for my age, something about rich couples lounging in Jacuzzis filled with champagne, rubbing cocaine on their gums and the tips of their pink penises and rubbery, swollen clitorises, and fucking, fucking, fucking all night long. When I finally turned off the lamp I noticed an orange dot of fire across the attic room in the darkness above where my mother’s mattress was, silently turning brighter for a moment or two and then dimming down again.
    Whispers:
    “Mom?”
    “Yeah?”
    “You still up?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Are you okay?”
    Silence. Then:
    “Yeah.”
    I didn’t know what else to ask, so I let the silence win. It gloated there in the dark, humming. I closed my eyes and pressed my cheek against the cool side of the pillow.
    “What are we gonna do?” she whispered, and my eyes shot open. Her voice was so quiet and out of nowhere that it sounded like thoughts in my own head. “I can’t . . . I just . . . I can’t stand it here. I’ll break down. The way they’re treating . . .”
    She stopped herself. The orange dot did its lighthouse imitation.
    “We have to be thankful to them for letting us stay here.”
    “What did you say?” I asked, though I heard it well enough.
    “Nothing. Go to sleep.”
    The last straw came the very next day in the form of a field mouse.
    For more than a month while we were in Zagreb, Mother felt so bad about burdening Zvonko’s family that she took it upon herself to work like a maniac and earn our keep. She provided and made all the food, paying for it with our meager and rapidly dwindling savings. She scrubbed every square inch of tile, polished every wooden surface, every chimney brick and window. She vacuumed all the rugs and did all the laundry. She did all the dishes and then she did some more. She had become, pretty much, a live-in maid, this voiceless creature in yellow rubber gloves, kneeling on the floor and scouring, stopping only to stare and smoke. The problem of course was that Zvonko and Zana, and even their daughter, got used to food just appearing on their plates and dirty clothes vanishing off their floors only to reappear washed, ironed, and folded in their drawers the next day. They started to complain if their socks weren’t folded the way they wanted, or if there wasno beer in the fridge, or if the vacuum cleaner was fucking up the TV reception. On top of all that, they were my father’s cousins and, like his immediate family, thought my mom of inferior birth.
    Our last day in Zagreb, Zvonko was watching TV, Zana was in their bedroom with a migraine, and Mother was looking for a pot when a little mouse ran out from the pantry and stopped, shivering, in the corner of two cabinets. Being grossed out by a thing like that, Mother asked Zvonko if he could take care of it. Annoyed, he called for Zana to do it, who in turn called him an idiot and told him that her head was about to split open and what the hell was he thinking. Puffing and swearing, he wrestled his ass out of an armchair, which perked up and grew like dough, thundered into the kitchen, and stomped on the little creature with his heel. Blood spurted on the cabinets, over the tile. He picked up the minuscule remains, threw them in the trash, and walked back to his armchair, leaving bloody heel prints on the tile, on the hardwood floor, and on the carpet. Mother suppressed a gag and asked him if he could please take out the garbage, and he said that it was not Friday yet and turned the TV on really loud.
    That was it.
    Mother first smoked a cigarette, looking out the window, her back hunched, her elbows on the sill, and then took the garbage out herself. It took her a long time. When she came back she went straight for our stuff and started packing. Zvonko was outraged. My brother cried. I sat there with a book in my lap, dreading the fact that I,