Thistle

Mary Kuryla

Mornings she wore a headscarf decorated with the bellflower of the Carpathian Mountains folded narrow and wrapped across her eyes to blindfold herself, and she had gotten so adept that she could crack eggs into a hot pan on the grill and only burn her wrist. It had been days since she slipped on egg yolk on the linoleum floor. Breakfast was done in darkness to wake up her other senses, the ears, the fingers, the nose. Even the whiskers on her chin had begun tingling with buried ancestral animal knowledge. Despite all this, she was still at risk, and what this risk, what it was, listen to this, it was the risk of thinking of herself as human again, her, Ruslana!

“Is it a big risk,” she asked during a coffee break at the animal rescue, “or is it a little risk?”

“You don’t look like an animal to me,” the new volunteer said between bites, “and, like, you just brought donuts.”

Ruslana whistled through the wide gap of her front teeth and said, “Donkeys will bring treats to a friend.” The new volunteer, a runt, downy wet as a newborn, studiously pulled apart her sugar donut and dunked it in the black coffee cooling in a red cup.

All right, sure, no getting around it, Ruslana qualified as biologically human. She had a head on a stem mounted on a body that walked in the spirit of the upright, a skeleton muffled under fat, under skin, and, it was true, she did not drink out of toilets. Her brown blinkers sat on the front of her face, not to the side, like the dear feathered ones, the hooved. Humans liked using their eyes, trusted their sight above all else, but she did not trust her eyes, or she tried not to. She would have blinded herself, would have and really, but where would that leave the creatures injured and caged in the rescue without her eyes to look out for them? Humans were the reason animal salvaging camps like Penny’s Human Helpers & Wildlife Rescue existed. Here, in a canyon wedged between the Santa Monica Mountains, Ruslana volunteered to bandage and mend the dumb things that humans did to any creature that could not be gussied up, and even those that could.

Look at how the runt wore her lips crusted with sugar crystals, a high schooler, hair shorn, a sparkling faun, the runt reached into the sack of sugar donuts and helped herself to another.

Ruslana’s other misfortune was the gray matter pushing up under her skull. Getting educated in her youth had amounted to a crime, an inferno of the soul, corrupting instincts, fouling all the senses—sugar on the runt’s cheek. Where had thinking ever got her? Thinking widened the hole around which she sat with her animal sisters.

Crystals of sugar seemed to lasso to the runt’s cheek all the sunbeams of the day. Ruslana trembled before the sugar, went blinder than a headscarf over the eyes. Now Ruslana groped, tongue out, across the plywood table to lick the sugar off the runt’s cheek.

The donut dropped from the runt’s hand, and she hopped back from the older woman with a loud “Oh,” the heel of her hand mopping her wet cheek.

“It’s one of those things,” said her boss, Penny. “The moon in klutz. Take the rest of the day off, Ruslana.”

“The weasel must to be fed,” Ruslana said. “Cage very dirty.”

Penny sighed. She was tired of shoveling feces and vacuuming feathers, weary of fur adhered to the grouting, and all because a wild animal could no longer live in the wilderness once thrown from the car of some dear rich child speeding through the canyon. Penny was tired of the debt the rescue had her in. The cost of the bill for one visit to the exotic animal veterinarian had been enough to want to chew off her own leg. And the liability insurance—not for the visitors to the rescue (their donations covered that) but to insure the volunteers, a bunch of odd balls and loose ends, and Ruslana took the trophy.

“I hear you want sell the rescue,” Ruslana said.

“Ruslana, I couldn’t throw this place away.”

“To old movie star with small apes,” Ruslana kept on.

Penny considered it a cultural tick, the way Ruslana took no part in the dust ups she caused by maneuvering the conversation to put the screws on the other person. Yeah, what of it? Maybe she would offload the rescue. She was in talks and cups of bitter green tea with an elderly Hollywood icon who had devoted her last rays of starlight to a sanctuary for gibbons and pythons, of all creatures. The icon would take in the animals at Penny’s rescue, she would settle Penny’s debts. But a done deal it was not. Trouble with the staff was the stuff of hot midnight sweats for Hollywood icons.

“You licked Vick’s cheek, Ruslana.”

“It was accident.”

“It was an unwanted sexual overture. Harassment. Maybe assault.”

“Why she call Vick? She is girl. Is not Vicky? Victoria much better.”

“Vick has picked the name Vick wants to be called.”

Penny instructed Ruslana to feed the weasel and then go. The weasel had lost an eye and the weasel was of a sort not to easily absolve the world for this loss. It nipped all the volunteers, bit Penny with especial relish, but the weasel never dug a canine into the flesh of Ruslana. The animals doted on her. The gray fox raced Ruslana around the rescue and the ferret lovingly wrapped itself on her scalp like a hairdo. One whiff of Ruslana and the maimed racoon had been known to croon.

Vick, a kid living in a group home, had been patiently waiting to be with the rescued, and on her sixteenth birthday she had started lending a hand with the animals. But did swabbing Vick’s cheek with a tongue constitute a “crime”? A prickly word for a so-and-so like Ruslana, who had gotten through that war in Eastern Europe. The other volunteers had formed theories, or was it that they had heard rumors, whatever it was, there was talk of bombs and all that on the front. A husband shot. A child of hers stolen. What else could explain Ruslana acting so inexcusably around people? No one at the rescue knew for sure what had happened to her and no one trusted their knowledge of foreign invasions enough to ask.

If there was any crime, it was the crime of love. Ruslana was probably in love with Vick, or the teen had ignited some terrible tender memory in Ruslana’s head, and god knows Ruslana would be the last one to know.

Ruslana had to go, though she did not deserve to be exiled. The weasel had been in poor health until Ruslana sang an old-world ditty to the teeth-wielding criminal. Ruslana forgave the animals for their bad behavior. She understood that the injuries they sustained came with a history. Ruslana also came with a history, and Penny, a local who woke up in the canyon in the long years of the summer of love, could sadly not relate. But she could give Ruslana a second chance—after all, hadn’t she pledged to make Ruslana a permanent hire? Meantime she’d schedule Ruslana and Vick on different days, and she would be mindful to bring honey packets to tea with the movie star.

But Penny forgot about the honey and changing the schedule and did not recall until deep into her third bitter cup of tea.

Donkeys’ ears bristled. The taste of thistle, this they relished. The sticky monkey flowers and the California poppies fit nicely with the thistle’s purple radiating spikes growing wild in the vacant lot that bordered the rescue. What luck to find thistle. Ruslana snapped the brutal milky stem off another one. Maybe the donkey’s thick teeth ground up the spikes before they got in a poke. Donkeys could be stubborn about thistle, a stubborn flower, but they put up with the pricks because the blossoms were sweet. Stubbornness didn’t make you any friends, but a donkey could be as stubborn about not starting off on a journey as it could be about not giving up once it got going. Brown, brown and big and round, a donkey’s eyes stored all the lashings and kicks and punches meted out by the human people.

Ruslana tucked the last thistle into the bouquet for luck. She needed some after the donut, the sugar, the lick. Why she didn’t use a napkin to wipe off Vick’s cheek, she couldn’t say but the doing of it, the licking off sugar from the plump adorable cheek of a young someone who wasn’t your own baby, well, it wasn’t done, and she had done it, she had scared Vick to death. The other wildflowers weathered the prick of the thistles and to make sure of no further harm, Ruslana wrapped the bouquet in the headscarf that she used to practice not seeing. The bellflowers adorning the headscarf were known to turn away bad luck, and hadn’t her babusia garlanded Ruslana’s bed with bellflowers, just as she had done when the soldiers marched through their village when she was young?

Penny would need an apology, too, and the animals, the whole rescue, which had become her sanctuary—she couldn’t lose it, she had nowhere else to go. She would start with Penny.

The rusted hinges winced when someone knocked at the door of the ancient horse trailer Penny had retrofitted to serve as an office. Ruslana stared sorely at the door, waiting, and the bouquet quivered in her fist. Penny had warned Ruslana about changes in the schedule. To do nothing until they spoke.

The door swung open, Penny rushed out, dodging Ruslana. “Make it quick, honey. Emergency meeting at the accountants.” Penny paused before the floor-to-ceiling feed storage locker to search for wayward receipts.

Ruslana gripped the flowers. Penny looked back at her and then at the bouquet. “Those for me?”

“Is Vick here?” Ruslana said. Penny’s eyes on her made her feel large and unwholesome. She knew Vick was there. They were both on the Friday schedule.

“The flowers are for Vick?” Penny said. “You really are smitten.”

“What is smitten—like, uh, word to make apology for atrocious doings?”

“Ruslana, smitten is a feeling, a human feeling.”

“What is the feeling?”

“Oh goodness, you’re, you know, in love with the girl.”

Ruslana shook her head. No.

“You better go,” Penny said. “Honestly. It’s for the best.”

Ruslana would not go. Could not go if she wanted to. She was stuck, stubborn, in her spot, disgusted at Penny’s accusation. Love? Her?

What neither of them realized was that Vick had been stalling behind the locker door, out of sight, holding a bowl of kibble for the weasel that she had been told to feed, was scared to feed, would do anything not to risk a weasel bite. True, there was a time she had longed to be with the rescued. But caged things were restless. The Cooper’s hawk sounded so morose when it screeched. Not so for Ruslana. She came out smelling like a rose with the rescue animals. If only Vick could be soothed by the musky odors that seemed to pour off the woman. Vick had a hunch that she meant something to Ruslana. She pictured herself as the plug that could stopper Ruslana’s sadness, and this made Vick even more anxious.

She swung shut the locker door, revealing herself. She said “Hi” to Penny and to Ruslana.

Ruslana did not say anything back to Vick, but Penny did. Penny said, “Don’t tell me you were here all this time, Vick.”

Vick went red to her shorn scalp. Ruslana saw, and dropped her eyes to the bouquet held gaudy at her bosom. She would have walked out of the rescue, started off on a journey, but really her boots were glued to the ground.

The runt’s hand, little like the weasel’s, fingers tattooed with skulls, with florals, snuck the bouquet out, wiggling it until Ruslana’s grip eased.

“Apology taken,” said Vick.

Ruslana’s eyes rose to the girl’s California blues.

Vick looked down at the flowers, the coronally spiked one’s dead center. “Kooky blooms. They’re totally you.”

Penny shook her head and riffled through her vast handbag for keys. “You mean a booby-trapped apology. Thistle? Ruslana, whatever are you thinking? Vick’s some kind of donkey?”

“Better to be donkey than whip.” Ruslana was rooting, stubborn brute. Her breath wheezed, a lowing, a heee and an ah.

“Penny, what?” Vick said, “Just leave Ruslana alone.”

“I’m looking out for you, kiddo,” said Penny.

To Ruslana, Penny said, “I’m sure you meant nice with the thistle.”

Ruslana pulled the feed dish out from between Vick’s fingers. The kibble sprung from the bowl to cricket across her boots. “I do not need pity from you, human people,” Ruslana huffed.

Vick rubbed her little fists into her eyes, and Penny threw an arm around the girl’s shoulder.

Ruslana’s legs belonged to her again. She used those legs to turn and march to the weasel’s hutch at the farthest corner of the rescue.

The weasel watched Ruslana, but mostly he smelled her and what he picked up was a low noisy stench. He scurried to the rear of the cage to bury his snout in hay dried harder than bones. When Ruslana opened the hutch door and set down the grub, the weasel opted to bite—yes, even his god could know his ire at occipital loss—but Ruslana did not, per usual, pat his head, and the weasel lost his chance.

Ruslana closed the hutch door and drove the hook into the eyebolt. The bolt came out in her palm. She stared at the small hole left in the wood frame then looked around for Penny, she would need to be told, but Penny had ridden off in a cloud of exhaust. Ruslana screwed by hand the eyebolt into the drilled hole then pushed the hook into the eye and walked out of the rescue’s front gate to the parking lot. In the shadow of the high slatted fence that hugged the rescue fortress-like, Ruslana sat in her car, staring out the windscreen at the adjoining vacant lot of wildflowers. This was it. How it ended, her volunteer stint at Penny’s Human Helpers and Wildlife Rescue. Of all the things she had lost on coming to the States, failed at since coming to the States, this one hurt. The animals would not make it without her. But no, truth was, Ruslana would not make it if she could not help them.

The eye would not hold. The bolt would surely fall out its hole, the hutch door would open, and the weasel would flee. This Ruslana could not tolerate. She grabbed a discarded rubber band for the hutch door and got back out of her car and clodded the way she had come. She would secure the door until somebody noticed and fixed the lock proper. The temporary fix said, No harm had come to the animals under Ruslana’s watch.

A squeal from behind the fence stopped Ruslana in her tracks, and she peered between the wood slats. Vick stood before the weasel’s hutch shoving the flowers from the bouquet through the wire. It looked like stems first, but it was hard to tell between the slats and the ecstatic weasel racing back and forth, snatching and gobbling stems. The commotion jigged the hutch so much the eyebolt fell out and slipped into the soil. While Ruslana saw the eyebolt fall, Vick, it must be said, did not. The weasel’s joy had been too disturbing to the teen, and she had backed away from the purring hutch. On Vick’s face, a scare—at the weasel’s ecstasy or her own vengeful deed, who could say?

Thistle spores aloft, the panting weasel collapsed on its frazzled belly to wallow in the flowers scented with Ruslana.

Ruslana tried to be glad the flowers she had picked as apology had at least been food for the weasel. She told herself to be glad. The way the teen had shoved the wildflowers in, the look on her face, Ruslana hoped the thistles had pricked Vick’s palm and wore on the petals her blood.

She would not secure the weasel’s cage. That was Vick’s job now.

“You say me, ‘Do nothing.’ So, I do. It is for you to trust teen to be on lookout,” Ruslana said when Penny called to tell her the weasel had busted out of the hutch and run. “Did you look for weasel? He is at risk—the road so close to rescue.”

“Let me get back to you.” Penny hung up the phone with a sob.

Ruslana sat on the unforgiving cushion of a couch purchased from the nearest Russian-speaking furniture store where she had understood the language of being ripped off. The television faced her, but she could not face the Ukrainian news feed. Live reporting from the fronts she had not borne since her first day volunteering at the rescue.

Penny would not get back to her. Her taste ran in the American flavor, common sense. She would assume the weasel had busted out of the hutch because of Ruslana even if she could not piece together the particulars. But it was a good enough bad ending to her tenure at the rescue to cut ties for good. A hospital might need volunteers. Maybe she could adopt a dog and bring it to a hospital to cheer the miserable. The hospital staff may, in time, learn of Ruslana’s skill as a medic and offer her a job. That was what must happen if she wanted to stay Stateside, human or not. She would call hospitals, call a dog, call it all, now, but instead she sat on the couch.

Ruslana switched off the television. The sirens moaned at her windows, and for an instant she was home. What if she searched outside and found the weasel? Would that get her job back? She thought to wrap her head in the scarf to hold the stuff inside from pouring out her ears, to stop the thinking, stop it, but the headscarf had been given away with the bouquet of flowers, the flowers on the headscarf of the Carpathian Mountains.

The sun was lowering, and the walls of her studio apartment were growing taller and darker until all the light that remained was in the eye of the ceiling.

The downing sun made the things of the world hard to love.

It was in the mountains, it was among their walled shade that she had found solace. The mountains had given her cover and wasn’t Penny’s rescue wedged in a canyon between mountains? But Ruslana had not put this together until now. The Santa Monica Mountains had probably been what drew her to the rescue in the first place.

The canyon road snaked around curves, and at the next bend Ruslana saw on the verge roadkill smoked with flies. At every turn, Ruslana imagined she saw roadkill that got bigger and bigger until it swelled to the size of a large, hoofed beast then dissolved back into the dusky shadows cast by the low scrub and broom.

Ruslana’s brake lights struck the slatted fence of the rescue as if to knock it down. At risk she was not, not since she had stopped all thought and allowed her senses to take over the task of being Ruslana. She humped through the front gate decorated with wooden cutouts of happy sheep a broke-back burden she had not known for over a year. It was murderous of feeling. The animals in the rescue had tenderized the hard hurts that she had tried to keep stuffed down inside. Every nuzzle of a furred head had coaxed her back to life—how was she to come human again without making one hell of a mess?

The hutch was untenanted, the wires haunted with the thistle spines of the weasel’s last snack. Ruslana smelled tears, the scent reddening the air, someone was crying in big heaping dollops of salt. Out of the tail of her eye, the blue of the Carpathian Mountain bellflower. The door to the locker storage hung open, and Ruslana stepped up and rapped her knuckles at it, flushing Vick out from behind. The runt was using the headscarf to wipe an eye swollen shut from crying, the tears forming crystals on the down of her cheeks.

“Yes, is sad,” Ruslana said.

“I’ve looked and looked for him.” Vick blew into the headscarf.

“You, human people, will not find a weasel using the eyes.”

Vick blinked at her with a ghostly rhythmic flicker. “You’re not supposed to be here, Ruslana.” She spoke slow as one does to the at risk.

“Weasel got away,” said Ruslana, “but not you.” She pinched the headscarf from between Vick’s pale index and ring fingers.

Vick looked past Ruslana for a way out. Ruslana swung a leg, planting herself sawhorse-wise between Vick and the exit. With both fists, Vick socked Ruslana in the shoulder. Surprise more than force knocked her off her feet. Vick dodged Ruslana and ran through the gate.

Ruslana rolled onto her belly and pushed to her hands and knees in time to glimpse Vick’s dark form pass behind the slats of the wood fence.

She held the headscarf and stood in the vacant lot beside the rescue. A shuffle and shudder, the snap of a stem, creatures of all persuasions lurked in the dusk. But the eyes distracted from what was there. The runt was there, somewhere among the wildflowers. Ruslana folded the headscarf to a narrow bloom and brought it over her eyes to tie at the back of her head then she tripped and flailed through the landmines of wildflowers. This was the way, the best way, the only way she could let the girl not get away.

Stowed away behind the high walls of a crumbling cinderblock apartment in Dnipro, she had been unable to stop hearing the laughter that echoed off the narrow courtyard constructed in the Soviet days. The girls’ cocky hahaha’s echoing as if from the bottom of a well. She could not stop hearing the racketing brays of the donkey that the girls had rounded up and in their drunkenness were now beating with a broken chair, a stick, chunked concrete, whatever came to hand, they must have taken turns holding the reins, and Ruslana had not been able to help the donkey, and she had waited for someone in the building to do it, the donkey gone silently stoic, but no one could risk being human to come out and stop the girls, or so said the corpse sprawled hoof-torn in the courtyard the morning she got away.

The leaden heat of the wind settled around Ruslana with a flammable scent of wildflowers. What it was, this down on the runt’s cheek, it was a scent, the scent of something that she had lost. Trembling, knees buckling, she collapsed on the ground—only to land on a nest of thistle. She howled at the shock of its spines and rolled onto her knees to pull up fistfuls of thistle and bring the purple blooms to her lips. She might have shoved the stems through the wide gap of her front teeth if not for the sweet sugary aroma of a newborn’s cheek wafting up.