MOTHER KNOWS BEST
Black widow
Noun
1.
A highly venomous American spider which has a black body with red markings.
I like spiders; there's just something about them. Last Summer I captured a Karakurt spider in a Tupperware container, and I would've kept it, but mother had me take the thing back to the ravine. Mother has always ruined all of the fun things – it's what she does best.
Sometimes I think that I might like spiders more than I like people, because at least arachnids can't stick their noses in where they aren't wanted or tell you that you're a disappointment if you haven't found a man by age fourteen. If a spider's mother hassled her to find a mate, she could simply bite her and liquefy her from the inside. I think something like that would come in handy in this world. I really do.
I'm sitting at the kitchen table with her, eating chicken soup, when she brings it up for what I believe must have been the fifteenth time since I aged. She mentions it so casually that I almost don't hear her and, would you believe, she has the absolute gall to sigh about it, as though I have so inconvenienced her with my disinterest in seeking. She sighs, and she hunches over a number of degrees onto her elbows with pursed lips. I think that she is trying to give me a fond, motherly expression, but I can't really tell. She isn't good at looking motherly. Anyway; she sighs, and she says as nonchalantly as anything, "Авдотья, выранитьменя.Почемубывамнеестьчеловек?"
I'm no stranger to this prying. Every girl gets it at my age; "the younger the better", they say to us, though I'm not exactly sure what it is that makes young seekers anything but awkward and messy. I place down the handle of my spoon and my let it slide almost wholly into the still full bowl, soup collecting on the warmed metal. I open my mouth to tell her – again – that I really couldn't be less interested in my woman's duty, but she sits up very abruptly with an expression akin to he who had found the Holy Grail under his nose, and I know that whatever it is she's about to say, it will annoy me. Without any shadow of a doubt, I know that it will annoy me. "Уменяон!"
I groan.
"Существуетмальчик, чтояэнаюсфермы-"
"Мать-" I try to interject, but her mouth has begun flapping like a flag in the wind in no particularly important direction.
"Онимеетсветлыеволосы, и-"
"Акси́ния."
She stopped, then, and I think about how the last person who called mother by name was found several months later, headless, at the very bottom of a ditch. By this point, I think that fate would be relatively favourable to the one she's forcing upon me. I watch the veins in her forehead contract and thicken, and the wrinkles at the corner of her eyes deepen as she squeezes them. Her shoulders rise, and then fall, and she re-opens her eyes with a content smile.
"Найтиего."
The farm is only a short walk away, and I'm taking it to placate her if nothing else. I'm not interested in this boy with blonde hair, and I'm not sure I'd even be interested in him if it was brown or bright pink, but I suppose that anything is preferable to her grating words. I consider not returning in the hopes she will simply assume that I have taken him, but mother is an unfortunately clever woman and it occurs to me that she would know better than anybody if I had withheld from her – from Astrakhan. Approaching the burnt oak fence, I manage to spy a mop of flaxen ducked behind a heavyset cow that I presume is his mother, and though my chest is spitting with reluctance, I am drawn to him like a moth to a spark and hover, peering with numb fingers over the surface of the wood. He stands and catches sight of me, but it is not until he smiles that the protest ceases. There is a light dusting of mocha powder across his cheeks, and I realise that I like boys with blonde hair and freckles. He bites the corner of his lip, and that's when I know I have finally found him. Him; the first boy that I am going to kill.
Авдотья - Avdotya; the name of our narrator. Russian form of Latin "Eudocia", meaning "good-seeming".
Выранитьменя – You hurt me.
Почемубывамнеестьчеловек? – Why do you not have a man?
Уменяон! – I have it!
Существуетмальчик,чтояэнаюсфермы – There is a boy that I know from the farm
Мать – Mother
Онимеетсветлыеволосы,и – He has blonde hair, and
Акси́ния –Aksinya; the name of our narrator's mother. Variant spelling of the Russian Ksenija, meaning "stranger, foreigner".
Найтиего – Find him.