Riding the tram back to Avtovskaya Street, he could hardly keep his eyes open, nearly missed his stop. Halfway up the stairs, he had to sit, head pounding, all his muscles aching by the time, at last, he opened the apartment door. The rugs were rolled, clamped, the morning brightness streaming in as the mirror-light must have done all night. His mother was slumped over her sewing machine, the thread pulled out and strung from the needle to her lap like a strand of spiderweb catching the sun. He watched it. It did not move. Mama, he tried to say, but his throat wouldn’t, and he was crossing the room, and the string still didn’t move, and he was about to reach out, shake her, when her head lolled a little farther onto her outstretched arm. She sighed, went back to her slow sleep breath. At first, he couldn’t tell what she’d been sewing—a bunched-up ball with a cuff sticking out—and then he saw the pile of unsewn gloves, all the mismatched pairs she’d stored since he and Yarik had been young, saw beside them the pile of ones she’d stitched shut finger by finger into fists.In the flesh of his palm, he could still feel a faint bruise: the pistol’s kick.
