Tag: moamiswriting

The ground won’t get warmer even if you keep lying on it. You’re in the middle of your own path. Get out of the damn way. Move. Your muscles will heat up on their own. They remember how to burn, and so do you.

“Mr Plisetsky,” the journalist yells, “one last question, please. Would you ever date a fan? And, indulge us a bit, are you the romantic kind of man?”

Yuri stills.

“Come on,” Yakov urges. He’s holding the car door open, motioning for Yuri to get inside. “Let’s go.”

He really shouldn’t. “One second,” Yuri tells him in Russian. Yakov lifts a brow.

Yuri turns to the journalist and takes a slow breath. Notepads come out of pockets, the crowd pushing closer. A microphone almost touches his cheek.

“What do you mean by romantic?”

The journalist from before seems to be vibrating in his place. “Well, love at first sight, the one and only love, staying together forever. That sort of thing!”

Oh. Well. “Absolutely. Good night.”

It is silent for barely a heart beat. Then, the crowd bursts into a myriad of questions, only a few of which reach Yuri’s ear: “How come? Would you date a fan? Why does the ice tiger of Russia believe in true love?”

Annoying, Yuri thinks. His cheeks feel hot when he juts his chin forward and stares back at them.

“I don’t believe in it, you idiots. I’ve seen it. And,” he whirls around, letting Yakov guide him into the car, grinning a little bit to himself when his phone chimes with another skype call from one of those two accounts. 

“If something seems impossible, and still happens with all of the world against it, then there’s definitely some truth to it.”

Don’t fear the winter, little one, her mother whispers, because spring will come back to us one day.

But the girl’s eyes are wide and black as the night above, and her muscles thrum with heat under the fingers that push open the door.

I’m not afraid, she tells her mother, teeth white and tongue wet with crimson hunger. There is no season, she speaks against the howling wind, without something to hunt for.

“Mama,” Viktor whispers, tugging at her soft skirt. “Why is that man kissing her hand?” He points at the television, an old movie with a prince and a girl that has ash on her face and glittering shoes on her feet.

His mother pulls him closer. As she tucks the blanket around him, she says, with eyes soft and bright in memory: “It’s what you do when someone is precious to you.”

“I thought that’s what kisses on the mouth are for.”

“That’s different.” His mother runs a hand through his hair until he’s all warm and the snow outside fades. “You only do that when you really mean something, when you want to be with them forever. When they’re worth more to you than all the gold that there is in the world.”

Twenty-four years later, a bouquet of white daffodils rests on a gravestone. In its centre, defying a thin layer of snow just so, lays a red camellia. It takes four days until the gardener removes the flower, and finds the card.

Mama, it says, I understand now. You don’t have to worry about me. He didn’t kiss my hand back, but he put the only gold I ever wanted on my finger, so that’s fine with me. 

There will always be something left to discover. So don’t worry. It’s terrible and breathtaking and sometimes it shatters me into pieces, the knowledge that we’ll never know it all. We struggle and ask and build theory after theory, but no ancestry of human lives is enough to learn the secrets of our world.

But then again:

There is always something more.

Because there will always be something left.

“How can I be a real lion without a mane,” the lioness sighed.

“Who needs a mane when you have claws and fangs and a roar,” the jaguar said.

no warrior is the same.