The Volga

[sean66 272]

The Volga

    I was born into a small family with a mute Papa and an ill Mama, we lived meagerly upon the graces of the Volga River. I kept a blissful ignorance throughout my childhood, the roaming of the great forests hunting the Tsar’s foxes with magical boom canes, the sweet smell of sugar and bread emitted from my Papa’s ungroomed beard as he sat me upon his lap, and the joyous howls of the mangy dogs I plumped with my greens. Truly a bliss that seems like a life passed by.

 

    I stained my father’s coarse pant legs with tears more rigid than that of the snow fallen outside our small wooden hut. I wailed for him not leave Mama and I, who would pat the warm rag upon Mama’s head, whom would sit me upon their lap and tell me the legends of the brave Cossacks, and who would teach me to be a Papa one day? My pleas seemingly meant nothing, a small amount of rain drizzled from the cloud formed about my Papa’s face. Like oh so many clouds after rainfall, he departed never to be seen once again in our lifetime. Mama read his sloppy drawings scribbled upon a greasy discarded packaging for meat that had come to us by courier every few months. They filled me with so much wonder, magical boom canes in the quadrillions, the Tsar’s marching soldiers clashing with the smelly ‘Huns’, and the forts made in the forest from which to play soldier in.

 

    It's been eight years since Papa had sent his last lamb scented note. He wrote of curses upon the Huns and the Tsar, Mama would not tell me what they meant. She would tell me to hush my interest, or threaten a wooden spoon to sting upon my knee. I celebrate Papa by attempting to grow my own curly whiskers, one which will once again fill our cold home with warm smells of sugar and bread. North of our village, more and more news spread about of a Lenin character and this ‘Red Army’. These seemed nothing more than another fantasy spawned from the Huns, how can a color be an Army? Until the curious and disheveled group of men holding ‘rifles’, a much less memorable and apt term than boom canes, marched upon the small manor of our village’s wealthiest farmer, Mr. Kuznetsov. Mama attempted to clamp her hands over my eyes as I watched them, but I forced them away. I wish I hadn’t for I had learned why they were labeled ‘Red Army’. My ears ringed more than the time the foul smelling Bogomolov’s youngest cur rang a cow’s bell to my ear. The kind Mr. Kuznetsov was gripped upon his legs and arms and thrown into the blue Volga. A sickly dark red stained the waters as the limp form flowed and settled upon a small outcropping of rocks thirty meters upwards the flow of the Volga. The once magnificent brick and mortar manor of the Kuznetsov’s found itself gripped with flames by nightfall. 

 

    I felt sick as I departed from my Family’s hut and followed behind so many other children and Fathers. Our village’s crops were sickly, and our foods in low supply. Surely Kuznetsov would want to feed us after his departure from the Motherland which had birthed both his and I’s flesh. I rummaged through a charred pile of wooden decay and ash. There was no food, but there was a curiously formed craft of metal. It matched the look of the longer ‘rifles’ but seemed to of had a saw ran across it and a curious looking strutting structure attached to its side. I shoved it down my tattered coarse linen, draped with patches of burlap sewed on, pants. Ten day later hunger consumed Mama, she passed in a coughing fit in the middle of the night. Buried the next morning near to the beautiful wispy and chilled waters of the Volga. Then the afternoon following was one of a mysterious blur, I consumed the small cabinet of Papa’s discarded liquors and wandered the path of the fisherman leading up the Northern banks of the Volga. 

 

    I awoke to bitter breezes robbing the breath from my burning throat, frost formed near my reddened and irritated eyes, acidic globules of bile littered across my beard, a pile of similar icy yellowed expulsions stained the snowy Earth below me, my ears ringing violently, and black soot painting my right hand. My mind spun about like a soup with a ladle swirling across its surface. I was placed upon my ass once more once my mind focused upon the black soot laced throughout my right hand. Bile escaped out my throat, erupting in sloppy chunks. My gaze slowly drifted to the rigor mortis ridden pea colored carcass. A deep stain next to a cardinal star resting above its right breast. I crawled to the banks of the Volga and I slowly waded into its bitterly icy waters, it reclaimed me like it had reclaimed Mama and Papa.

 

Spoiler

This was a small little 10 minute writing exercise I did forever ago, I saw no point letting it sit around and be forgotten in a folder. So I cleaned it up a bit and am posting it here. :^)

 

[Pav33 101]

I like it. +1

[Elad™ 560]

Moved to the Archive. It shall be sorted into the appropriate category shortly.