On Fridays, Marya Morevna goes to the fields to cut grain. In Yaichka, the grain always sighs to be cut. Even six months along, she does not shirk, but takes up a short scythe, its handle well worn by all the hands of Yaichka, all those oils, all that skin. The sun polishes the tips of the trees and turns Marya’s black hair blue. Up she raises the scythe and down again, and the blade knocks back the golden stalks, and the solitary goat bleats ecstasy as he discovers a patch of wild onion no one will scold him for devouring; and up sings the scythe and down again, and lovely little Anastasia Nikolayevna drops a stitch in her knitting, and Volchya the dapple grey deliberately throws a shoe so that Marya will have to tend to him later, because he is that sort of beast; and the grain falls in a pile, a cairn, and six mice that Yaichka does not know it possesses wash each other’s ears with pink tongues; and up she swings her blade and down she swings it low, and without knowing why, the women of Yaichka go to the exact place where the well-tilled field whose soil forgives them all meets Nadya Konstantinovna’s radishes, and they watch Marya without understanding why it is they came to watch a pregnant woman with a belly like a bow drawn back all the way, her scythe raised like a sword, slicing down again and again, and the clean sweat dampening her hair as the sun sings a little song with four lines of five words each, and the last word of the song is death.
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verbeImperfect18 октября 2016
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