ABSTRACT 
 
 
 
 

Title of Thesis:    THE OTHER LIFE 
       

Anna Cronan, Master of Fine Arts, 2024 
 
 
Thesis Directed By:     Professor Maud Casey, 

Creative Writing Program, Department of English 
 
 

The Other Life is a collection of short stories about identity in between two cultures, Polish and 

American, and the gifts, pressures, mysteries, celebrations, and challenges that sprout from this 

experience. Showcased through interconnected stories centering food, language, the natural 

world, and a child’s perspective, this collection depicts a first-generation Polish-American’s 

exploration of identity. Three children visit their grandmother’s orchard, where mysterious 

events unfold that make them realize their grandmother may be a baba yaga. Two Eastern 

European girls find solace in one another in America, until they don’t. A young woman and her 

grandmother embark on a foray in search of mushrooms. A village in Poland recounts its 

complicated history with salt mining. Throughout these stories, the yearning and longing for a 

life that could have been is explored as a way to make sense of the life that is.  



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

THE OTHER LIFE 
 
 
 

by 
 

 
Anna Cronan 

 
 
 
 
 

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the 
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 

of the requirements for the degree of  
Master of Fine Arts  

2024 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee: 

Professor Maud Casey, Chair 
Associate Professor Emily Brandchaft Mitchell 
Associate Professor Rion Scott 

  



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

©Copyright by 
Anna Cronan 

2024



ii 

Preface 
Artist’s Statement 
 

Writing, for me, is a foray. 

When I first began the MFA program at the University of Maryland, I had a general sense 

of the topics I wanted to pursue: growth and decay, the soul, the concept of time as a scientific 

and philosophical construct. It turns out that, over the course of this program, I have learned that 

the path to the abstract is through the concrete: the natural world, food, and Eastern European 

grandmothers, in my case. Ironically, this zooming in has facilitated a simplification that, in my 

writing, has materialized as indulgence, extravagance, and excess for the things that are actually 

quite ordinary: maximizing the sensory detail of a single apple, for instance. This shift in my 

attention has produced a collection of short stories inspired by my childhood summers in Poland. 

As a first-generation Polish-American, I started out writing as a way to desperately hold 

on to the Polishness that, with my parents’ title as immigrants, was in the rearview. I felt 

pressured to accurately depict Poland in my work, concerned that any native Pole would read my 

stories and dismiss them as totally un-Polish. Under the guidance of Maud Casey, I have found 

inspiration in un-categorizing myself and my work. Once I allowed myself to write about Poland, 

not from a native Pole’s perspective, but from a Polish-American’s point of view, I was free to 

experiment with the blending, tension, and amalgamation that comes from existing in between 

two cultures. 

In my work I have attempted to make sense of these at times contradictory spaces, 

leading to an intense fixation on place. Inspired by both Gabriel García Márquez’s and Bruno 

Schulz’s depiction of place as a central anchor in their work, Poland has become my main 

setting, inspiration, and character all in one. After growing up visiting my own grandmother in 

Poland each summer and seeing the life that would have been had my parents stayed, I sought to 



iii 

write about Poland as a way to lay those childhood summers, and that other life, to rest. 

Consequently, I have predominantly written from the perspective of the retrospective narrator, 

repeatedly going backwards in time for retrieval. In this process I have since come to understand 

that this project isn’t just an archive of the past, but rather a promise of continuity, and it is 

through my continual creation of fiction that I can imagine, explore, and give life to a version of 

this identity that may have existed. 

One of these promises of continuity is an expansive project I have worked on over the 

past three years centered around a salt mine in Poland. I want to carry this project forward 

beyond my time as an MFA student using the tools I have gained in this process. I am 

completing this program with the knowledge of how to utilize obsession, how to extract 

strangeness from the familiar, and how to use fiction to give consciousness to history. 

 
 
  



iv 

Dedication 
 

 

 

For my sister, my Babcia, and Zuzia and the Cupriak family  



v 

Table of Contents 
 
Preface ............................................................................................................................................. ii 

Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iv 

Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v 

The Other Life ................................................................................................................................. 1 

Pierogi ............................................................................................................................................. 9 

The Orchard .................................................................................................................................. 21 

Staying the Course ........................................................................................................................ 35 

Foray ............................................................................................................................................. 64 

Salt ................................................................................................................................................ 79 

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 91 

 

 



1 

The Other Life 

The way my Babcia slathered sunscreen onto our Georgia-tanned skin on the Baltic seashore. 

“You will crisp in this heat wave” she’d say creped in a leopard print cover up, the thermometer 

pushing eighty degrees Fahrenheit. We tensed every muscle in our olive bodies to absorb her 

force while she painted us. We protested that it was July and we had lived sunscreenless in the 

Atlanta sun for months now. She flopped a hat on our heads in counterprotest, and set us free to 

collect washed up golden bits of bursztyn bałtycki. Baltic amber. 

 

The interest the housekeeper took in us as children. We were wary because she called her 

cleaning products mikstury. Potions. The imaginary mazes we formed around the house 

observing her as she floated from room to room. The smell of cigarette smoke that alerted us of 

her location. The way she would annually ask us, “How’s it over there in America?” 

 

That we shuttled around by line train all over Warsaw and its ganglion of villages before we 

were thirteen. 

 

The soft chamomile buffering the sharp barley fields on the bike path with its buttery flowers for 

miles kilometers. 

 

That Babcia made us wear latex swim caps when we went to the indoor pool. She said the filters 

at the bottom would suck in our hair and drown us. But no one else was capped when we got 

there. We invented a game that we were a family of squids to cope. 

 



2 

We freely switched from Polish to English to find the right word. The universes that that opened 

up. 

I slept in Ciocia’s dark blue sweterek last night.  

That isn’t blue. It’s granatowy. 

The new colors I was able to see once I had the words for them. 

 

The apples that hemorrhaged the ground of my great aunt Basia’s orchard. The plums that 

bruised it. 

 

That we could take a ski lift into town as a form of summer public transportation in the Tatras. 

 

The elderly neighbor who lived in the shoebox house out front painted it fluorescent orange one 

year. How it smiled on all of Ludowa Street. I can’t recall what color it was before that. His 

raspberry and red currant and tomato plots swelled and careened with heavy fruit gems through 

the slats of the wooden fence onto our side. He called us over and told us to pick as many as we 

wanted when he saw us playing outside. And once when I looked from the upstairs window I 

saw his hands threading the fullest branches through the slats. 

 

The streets named after the trees that grew on them. Kasztanowa. Brzozowa. Jawora. Sosnowa. 

 

When we hiked up to Morskie Oko one year and saw a blue lake displaced from the 

Mediterranean. 

 



3 

Months in a foreign country without my parents from the age of ten. Just me and my six-year-old 

sister exported over. The reactions of the other American parents. I wasn’t exactly homesick the 

first time but missed my American familiarities. 4500 kelvin lights in warehouse-sized grocery 

stores of all things. That I miss the foreign familiarities now. Corner markets illuminated by 

daylight. Glass jars of pickled beets. Produce brought in from local farmers that day. 

 

The delicate tissue paper petals comprising every poppy. Rendering them unpickable. 

 

The cornflowers that pooled around the poppies in those sharp barley fields. As if to protect 

them. That we picked the cornflowers to ferment their petals in glass jars of sweet water on 

sunny windowsills. That the wine took time. The closer it got to being ready, the closer our 

departure came for another year. 

 

That every cemetery was overgrown but not unkempt. 

 

The cabin in the woods positioned perfectly along the ripest constellation of bilberries. 

 

The fragrant mushrooms and pulpy logs saturated in wet moss. 

 

How my Babcia would tell me, “I gave you those blue eyes you know.” How my dad told me the 

same thing. 

 



4 

How everyone else in my family had the same amber-flecked brown eyes. Pupil 

indistinguishable from iris. The kind that don’t exactly check the box for brown on identification 

forms but have to settle for it. The kind that gleam specks of burnt caramel and spilled ink. 

 

The neighborhood streets that trickled to dirt paths in a blue-green ocean of cabbages. The 

towering Pałac Kultury standing guard in the background. How it always oriented us to the city. 

 

The dill that fell like feathers onto mounds of golden potatoes in a cobalt blue and white ceramic 

bowl. 

 

The dinner plate that spun. The only one that did and we never knew why. How each night we 

circled around the table rotating our identical plates to see whose continued revolving after 

giving it a whirl. The person with the spinning plate got to choose dessert the next day. Uncle 

Paweł picked up fresh dessert daily from a local bakery on his way home from the law office. 

My sister always chose something chocolate. I always chose the fruit tart. 

 

How I began each school year. Talking about my summer in Poland. My classmates who talked 

about theirs in Bosnia and Ghana and Vietnam. 

 

The summer we were acrobats. We were coached by the same man who coached my mother. I 

wondered whether the curve in my backbended spine made him remember 1979. That she was a 

world traveling acrobat. Leaping in Egypt and Syria and Jordan, and landing eventually in 

America. 



5 

The sun that rose at 3 AM and set at 10 PM. How we were geographically displaced by six hours 

so we stayed up and witnessed the five-hour summer night. A sunset, moonrise, sunrise, moonset 

all in the time difference between here and there. 

 

The time we saw the shortest night of our lives because we flew far north over the ocean while 

the sun slung past us the opposite way. We watched the sun rise and fall through small ice 

crystals on the window. The same flight where the attendant responsible for unaccompanied 

minors clapped our window shade shut while we watched the short night and commanded we 

śpi! Sleep. How we stifled laughter at her sternness under clasped hands over our mouths 

because we were awakening to cultural nuances. 

 

The fact that the winter night in Poland is sixteen hours. That the summer’s is five. That I think 

about that now when I am going through darkness. 

 

The day I dropped a glass bottle of pomegranate juice in a corner market. The way it splattered 

and shimmered and mosaiced at my feet. The woman dressed in a blue and white checkered 

apron who said, “You will have to pay for that you know.” And I lied and said, “I know.” 

 

How eventually I stopped rolling my ‘r’s and learned how to pronounce ‘th’ and outgrew my 

accent. How everyone in America would say “You don’t have an accent at all” when I told them 

English is my second language. The fact that that was a good thing. It still stung to hear. How I 

yearn now for even the vestiges of an accent. The fact that I don’t have one is probably for the 

best. That I don’t understand the downsides of speaking with one. 



6 

The countdown we kept on multicolored pastel sticky notes. The pungence of dryer sheets in 

orange boxes saturating our bags. Because Babcia couldn’t get those in Poland. The fact that I 

don’t use dryer sheets but keep a box of them anyway. I only open and smell them occasionally 

so that I don’t lose the association. They still position me in her laundry hall today. 

 

The morning I awoke to the enthusiastic shrieks of my stony grandfather. That the kitchen radio 

announced the meager Polish złoty surpassed the American dollar in value. The summer of 2008. 

The way I tried to pull strings of zeal from deep within myself to match his but couldn’t find any. 

 

The year Eyjafjallajökull erupted. How the ash made itself a rainy winter over Poland that 

summer. The only summer I longed to be back in America. For a June that didn’t feel like a 

January. 

 

How I’ve always had to explain that Ania is my name in Polish but so is Anna. That they’re the 

same name but English fails to provide an equivalence. That I discovered those universes can’t 

be opened with only one language. That everyone in Poland has two names. A formal one and a 

soft one. How I wish my parents enrolled me as Ania instead of Anna when I started school. That 

I was seventeen and didn’t know which name was on my birth certificate. The amount of time I 

spend thinking about that i. 

 

The day we visited Auschwitz and I kept finding my birthday on placards. That the delicate third 

digit in my birth year made a difference. 

 



7 

The way I still hear Maliń się nie myje when I wash my raspberries. The hesitation I have every 

time that they might turn to mush. 

 

That Warsaw still houses its majority in Communist blocks. 

 

That the word kapcie comes to mind before slippers. 

 

That pomegranates and tomatoes and hearts all have chambers. 

 

Babcia’s voice I still hear that says “you’ll catch a cold” when strings of wet hair dangle from 

my pillow. 

 

The upstairs rooms filled with sweeping fabrics and sewing templates and dresses and tables 

with built-in meter sticks. Coils of colorful satins and silks and linens stacked like firewood. 

How my aunt and my Babcia and their team worked long hours during the day to come up with 

the next trend. I came back one year and they were designing clothes for the Prime Minister’s 

wife. I came back another year and the upstairs rooms were barren and vacant.  

 

A new location had opened up on the next street over. A beautiful three-level stone building 

deluged in fabrics and dresses. And a professional photography wall and a coffee and tea station. 

And a downstairs storefront stuffed with exuberant shoppers. 

 



8 

The tension I felt changing my last name. It’s a lot simpler now. Moved twenty spaces up in the 

alphabet. But no one asks me where it’s from when they hear it anymore. I used to smile at the 

pause people would take before attempting to pronounce it, a name that commanded a sort of 

slow attention. No one pauses anymore, so I don’t smile anymore. A closed universe. The way it 

feels ever since like something has been cut out of me. I still feel a flutter when I meet someone 

whose last name ends in –ski. 

 

How I can eyeball any recipe for pierogi. But still can’t convert Fahrenheit to Celsius. The way 

that reminds me of where I didn’t grow up. 

 

How I forget another Polish word every day. How it feels like catching every leaf that falls in a 

forest in mid-November. 

 

The way I romanticize the life I could have had if my parents had never left. The fact that I don’t 

know I’d do the same the other way around.  



9 

Pierogi 

Spotted yellow leaves litter the ground like overly ripe banana peels. They don’t typically 

showcase themselves until early October, but the Augusts here possess the unique flexibility of 

playing summer or autumn. The bitter breath of the Tatra mountains signals winter is looming, 

that the muted evergreens will soon stand out vibrantly on crunchy monochrome snowfall, wispy 

smoke emanating from stone chimney tops the sole sign of life for months. Along the mountain 

towns, thick forests of astonishing spires of spruce and mountain pine carpet craggy outcrops, 

triangular wooden roofs fleck from above like crowns. Timeworn wooden structures, family 

farmsteads that have raised generations within their oaken walls, stand firmly on meadowy 

landscapes. The lush valleys dappled with white specks of sheep, the streets peopled with cheese 

vendors, woodworkers, and thickly wrapped children on school holiday. With much of the year 

claimed by bitter winter, babcias everywhere prepare for the bunkering. 

I ask my Babcia what meal our hands will prepare today, anticipating the weeks-long 

chore of winter food preparation. 

“Pierogi, of course,” she swings a burgundy dish towel over her shoulder. “Get the bowl 

out from under the cupboard.” 

We all know which bowl is the bowl. 

 

The kitchen is sanity’s saving grace from November to April. When indoors is the only 

livable place, it functions as production line and dining room, cannery and movie theater, art 

studio and therapy office; feeding, entertaining, sustaining. On today’s menu in this holy place is 

a staple, pierogi. These fat little versatile pouches have nourished the people of Poland through 



10 

communism and holocaust, and they are as inseparably entwined with the culture as the 

language. 

Like most Polish grandmothers, my Babcia takes the business of pierogi making 

seriously. She recruits the household, cousins Małgosia, Michał, and Lena, Uncle Józef— 

grandfather is excused because his stage IV colon cancer is treated daily with whole green 

walnut spirits. We join the assembly line whether we want to or not, and the half-day-long 

procedure begins with the inaugural mixing of the dough. Powdery white pastry flour and warm 

water are the only components. Babcia lowers a deep purple glass beneath the running faucet. 

“Water temperature is tested with the sensory skin on the back of the hand, never a 

thermometer,” she begins, “because what happens if pierogi need to be made and there is no 

thermometer?” 

We eyeball and massage the pastry flour and lukewarm water until an elastic dough 

manifests. Babcia reminds us it takes accepting the humble role of apprentice to know exactly 

the right texture. We roll the pillowy, forgiving dough onto the marble countertop and flatten it 

beneath a wooden rolling pin, one that dually provides utility and decorates the wall with its 

colorfully etched folk art display. 

“You must learn the correct thinness of the dough through experience,” the only teacher 

in Babcia’s eyes. “Now mix.” I get to work kneading until I see her glaring stare subside. 

Mixing pierogi dough can only sustain our minds so much during weeks of winter food 

preparation. We have ample conversation rehearsed. “Have you ever thought about how every 

person in existence has seen the same moon?” 

Babcia winces. “What, as if there is a new one every night?” 



11 

“When I’m in America, Babcia, and you’re here, we can both look at the moon at the 

same time, and our eyes share the same sight in the same moment. That makes me feel connected 

to you when we are five thousand miles apart, that triangle we form.” 

“The moon isn’t always visible in these gray skies.” She dismissively hands me the 

rolling pin. “Now roll.” 

“It’s good practice to acknowledge interconnectedness across space and time,” Uncle 

Józef chimes in from behind a flour sack. 

“You acknowledge the dough with that rolling pin and nothing else.” We all have a 

healthy fear of Babcia. A healthy fear paired with a fierce love. 

 

I always felt uncategorized being first-generation Polish-American. That’s what made me 

unique and different at school, being not entirely American. I kind of formed my identity out of 

that, being the Polish girl in America. But when I came to Poland, I was always the American 

girl. I didn’t exactly fit into either place fully, the way someone who has deep history in one 

location does. It turned me into a background person, but it also made me adaptable, open-

minded. And I think Babcia was happy with that outcome. 

 

Małgosia and I cut palm-sized circles with a drinking glass from a flattened mix of 

powdery flour and lukewarm water, each one perfectly formed, like a butter cookie. The stretchy 

dough showcases our fingerprints, patterned contours that run topographically across the dough. 

A whole world mapped on a single dumpling. 

“You see those finger presses, ah? A mark from its creator, a stamp of pride, each one 

representing a uniquely distinct history. Don’t you ever forget your history,” Babcia lectures. 



12 

“Yes, Babcia.” I smile. 

“I wonder if our fingerprints are more similar to each other than other people’s. Since 

we’re all related,” Michał inquires. 

“Ah, a fantastic query!” Uncle Józef is a staunch encourager of questioning. We get our 

healthy skepticism from him. Their fingerprint exchange fades into the mass of industrious 

conversation, as my ear zeroes in on other conversations filling the kitchen contributing to a 

cacophonous bustle. I melt into its whirring comfort. 

 

Uncle Józef teetered between lawyer and contractor throughout much of my life. He had 

an intrinsic need to heal Poland’s wounded politics in an overly ambitious way, which is why he 

was also a contractor. When an issue was inevitably too colossal for him to fix single handedly, 

he could always restore the cinder in an old country home, repair the gray brick that composed 

the communist flats in downtown Warsaw. When he couldn’t successfully execute a civil case, 

he worked on a Jewish synagogue, the oldest one in Warsaw that survived the war’s destruction, 

and refreshed the peeling peach interior with a crisp mint green paint. Uncle Józef brought us to 

his job sites when we were younger and Babcia needed a break. Sometimes she came with us, 

especially when there was a chance to visit a cemetery. Babcia somehow had a relative buried in 

every cemetery in Poland, and she never missed out on a chance to pay her respects, to light 

those green and red glass candles and recite a prayer, to discipline us when we inevitably treated 

the rows of gravestones like a playground. 

Babcia accompanied us one day to the synagogue. She is a staunchly devout Catholic, but 

dead family is still family, Catholic or Jewish. Małgosia, Michał, Lena, and I scurried off to a 

closet with emerald green carpet, ceremonial wafers, glasses of burgundy liquid, and discovered 



13 

a treasure trove: a box of yamakas. They were an army of colors. We riffled through the box, 

overturned it, placed a couple on our heads and over our faces like sunglasses and on our chests 

and shoulders like gladiators. We discovered they could fly like frisbees when tossed, and they 

flew like saucers out of that dusty green carpeted room and into the main sanctuary, where 

Babcia was quietly sitting. A bright red yamaka hit her square on the nose. I still have never felt 

a fear so primal as I did in the moment her eyes met mine, and she scorched me without uttering 

a word or lifting a finger. 

 

Pierogi possess an extraordinary versatility. Their filling can encapsulate a spectrum of 

flavors: feathery potatoes and crumbly peppered mountain cheeses are a good marriage, as are 

fresh corner market meats and herbaceous spices, forest blueberries and cane sugar for dessert 

pierogi, earthy mushrooms and vinegary cabbage shreds following a successful foray. Boletes, 

chanterelles, porcinis, saffron milkcaps litter the mountainsides in autumn, their generative 

decomposition foreboding winter’s season of death. 

“Poles are born with an intuitive knowledge of edible and toxic, so we don’t worry about 

the children,” Babcia frequently says about mushrooms. 

It’s a half-truth; we always spent weeks on the Polish mountainsides in late summer. We 

were each assigned our own mountain, and dropped off in the morning with baskets in hand. By 

late afternoon, we were to return our baskets brimming with edible mushrooms. Uncle Józef 

filtered through them to ensure none turned red or blue when sliced or pressed before dropping 

them in a soup or on a flatbread, and that was our rite to dinner. 

 



14 

Babcia lumbers into her cellar to fetch a two-year-old jam. Black currant and gooseberry. 

A time capsule. 

 

Forestfruit abounds. Along the wooded footpaths deep within the piny forest, wild 

blueberries robustly cluster green sprigs like jewels; collecting them is mining for sapphire. 

Sauerkraut is recycled from last season’s cabbage soup remains, vinegar preserving both the 

vegetables and the memory of what we wore, what we smelled, what we talked about on canning 

day. 

 

Babcia inserts a doughy hand into the refrigerator and extracts a wet block wrapped in 

blue film. 

 

Pierogi cheese is always white, mild, crumbly, saltless. Its purpose is texture, the canvas 

on which stronger, richer flavors are showcased, an accompanying backdrop. We gather fresh 

herbs from Babcia’s sunny kitchen windowsill, the same place where the whole green walnuts, 

collected with shells intact from the shadowy walnut tree in the yard, marinate in strong spirits, 

sometimes sprinkled with minerals gathered from the Baltic seashore. These minerals and 

walnuts and spirits combine to create a healing infusion, and it can treat anything, from a scraped 

knee to stage IV cancer. 

 

Babcia reaches to her wired produce basket suspended from the ceiling and removes a 

paper sack. 

 



15 

Most prestigious is the ziemniak, the Polish potato. We shear the papery yellow skin so 

only the golden buttery starch remains, the nourishment that proves the land has never betrayed 

its people. One will never find a ziemniak wearing its skin; that, Babcia says, is what 

distinguishes ziemniak from potato. That and its veneration of a dill weed dusting. We tuck these 

decadent fillings tightly in their doughy cocoons, press each one shut with the teeth of a fork, an 

artistic edge. 

I press my fork too firmly, and a hole bleeds purple wild blueberry juice onto the 

pristinely white shell. My shoulders tighten awaiting Babcia’s scrutiny. 

“Pierogi are never beyond repair.” She demonstrates how to fold the flat seam delicately 

on itself in a scalloped coil. In its crevices imperfections can be masked. I am grateful she 

chooses empathy. 

My mind fades once more into the white noise of the clamoring kitchen, the clattering of 

metal utensils on marble, the various pitches and tones in conversation. I turn to my cousin 

Małgosia. We talk about this unique symphony, how every time we cook, there is a new melody, 

each one uniquely different. No two instances of cooking have exactly the same sounds. Once 

the cooking is done, that sound series is over forever, and it can never be replicated. 

Babcia, chopping kiełbasa and shredding young green cabbage, directs her voice to us 

while keeping her gaze on the food. “All the sound you need to worry about now is the tines of 

your fork pressing dough. Fret not about noise.” She peels ziemniaki between a paring knife and 

her thumb, the spiraling skins careening over a small compost capsule. 

Małgosia and I smile silently at one another, feeling a physical triangulation in that 

moment with our shared Babcia, who has always kept a close eye on us and who always will. 

 



16 

We had this fascination with toilets when we were children, Małgosia, Lena, and I. They 

were humorous and amusing to us, but you could also tell a lot about a person or a place by their 

toilet. We visited extended family a lot in the summers. One of our great aunts or someone 

(anyone who couldn’t be immediately genealogically identified was lumped into the aunt or 

uncle category) lived deep in the woods in a cabin-like house, and to our disbelief, she had a 

purple and yellow plastic glittering toilet. The looks on our faces when we discovered it. We 

spent the entire family function locked up in that stuffy bathroom admiring the toilet while 

everyone ate dinner and smoked cigarettes outside. We flushed it and stood mesmerized by its 

cyclonic swirl, the way the glitter reflected in the whirlpool, closed the lid and stood on it to test 

its durability (a plastic toilet is very flimsy), encoded every little detail into our memory so we 

could draw it later in our collective art journal, which included a full toilet series of our 

favorites—at that time it was the fish tank toilet from the Bury Miś restaurant in the Tatras, but 

purple and yellow just took the cake.  

The look on Babcia’s face when she came hurling into the room one day, flapping the 

newly discovered art journal in her hands. “And what is this?” We just giggled. We couldn’t help 

ourselves. The sight of our stern and rigid Babcia flailing a notebook embellished in our detailed 

toilet drawings was more comedy than we could ask for. Ever since then, we were always 

acutely observed by her menacing stone gray eyes at family functions, the kind that said, If you 

need to use the bathroom, you will hold it until we get home. 

 

Thick crescents with bulging bellies, ready to burst at the seams, soon line the 

countertops like troops, hundreds of them. An inviting cauldron of saltwater bubbles audibly as 

Babcia fetches the only cooking utensil she’s trusted for years. Garlic-infused, both the potato 



17 

pierogi and the decade-old wooden spoon that knows this process as well as my Babcia. She says 

the spoon has memory, that it collects flavors and disperses them to all her dishes, which is the 

reason it should never be washed with dish soap—or it’ll season your rear end, she threatens. 

Steam fills the room and keeps us great company. We exchange jests and stories in 

tandem with all the mixing, kneading, chopping, rolling, steaming, boiling, repeat. Uncle Józef 

and Michał discuss the ebbs and flows of Eastern European politics over the years. An enticing 

aroma centers our focus on the food and reminds us not to let the pierogi stiffen to leather from 

over boiling. They possess an intelligence though; after their plop into the piping hot bath, they 

signify their completion minutes later with a rise to the top, buoyant, bobbing, bite-sized, ready 

for retrieval. The dough has transformed to a shell of pasta al dente, the contents cooked. Babcia 

prepares the accompanying sauce to top them off, a drizzle of sizzling butter and seasoned 

onions. 

“If I have taught you anything, I sure hope you remember to store the butter outside the 

fridge,” she says, facing me, the American. “You never know when you will need soft butter.” 

A golden butter drizzle tops the freshly plucked pierogi from the steam bath, the peppery 

onions caramelized. 

The first plate is flowing over and there are dozens more to go. We snack only on hearty 

bread specked with whole seeds and the crunch of gray rock salt crystals, fighting the temptation 

to bite into the pierogi until there are enough for dinner. Babcia takes this opportunity to remind 

us that when we eat bread, we are not merely eating bread. 

“You are consuming the sunshine that sustained the wheat,” she begins, “the rainfall that 

quenched its roots, the earthy soil that provided nourishment to the wheat berries, the sturdy 

hands of the farmer, the historic iron of the weathered farm tools, the thought and care behind the 



18 

tried and true recipe, the livelihood of the corner market’s bakery, and you are not to take this for 

granted.” She brings attention to our sore hands and fingers to substantiate her reminder, inserts a 

story about how our elders faced atrocity so we don’t have to. 

“Maja, make another loaf for the oven,” she commands, noticing the dwindling slab on 

the countertop. 

I whip up a mixture in record time, hopeful Babcia will notice my efficacy, but she is 

silent. I set the dough in the olive oiled glass bread pan and click a ticking timer. Yeast is fickle 

in that it never behaves exactly the same unless all factors are one hundred percent identical each 

time: elevation, the temperature inside, the temperature outside, humidity, the degree of the tilt of 

sunlight on a particular day or hour or minute. But the bread still rises, usually. It never comes 

out looking exactly the same. Sometimes the top layer is brown and crisp, sometimes the inside 

too soft. But in the end, it’s all bread. 

 

Babcia prepares the melting cheeses, and we wait restlessly. She pours cream into a 

buttered pan atop the dancing gas flame, steam accentuating the rivers of sweat on her forehead 

and cheeks. 

“We reserve yellow cheese for flavoring,” she reminds us, the cheese bolstered with 

toasted breadcrumbs from that afternoon’s soup. The Poles were forced to learn how to 

maximize their calories, a trait I am certain Babcia has yet to consider obsolete. 

The cheese bubbles and fuses indistinguishably with the butter and cream, each balloon 

of salty air frothing the hot oily mixture. Drenched in wonder, with mouths agape, we watch the 

thick iron pan tilt gently over a platter of pierogi z ziemniaki i z serem, potato and cheese 

pierogi, bathing the hearty pockets in a warm, cozy, savory embrace. Seasonings of dehydrated 



19 

thyme and cracked black pepper delicately crown the masterpiece. Babcia is careful not to 

overseason, filtering the pungent toppings through her weathered fingers.  

“Overseasoning disrespects the dish,” she reminds us, following numerous complaints 

about how Americans oversalt their cuisine. 

 

Among all the lessons, labor and laughter fuels our hunger. At long last, when the sun 

goes down and the many ceramic platters are heaped with the velvety gems, it is time to feast. 

We close the laborious procedure with the clink of wine glasses filled with fizzing grenadine 

syrup cocktails. A layer of flour dusts the kitchen but will somehow vanish by morning. 

“I thought it was too early for snow!” Uncle Józef typically inserts a comment at which 

we all feel obligated to laugh, and we do. 

Seven family members huddled around a small wooden table draped with burgundy and 

white pinstripes can merely put a dent in the day’s work, as is meant to be. Pierogi feature 

another element of versatility in that they can live multiple lives, boiled dumplings reincarnated 

into fried pockets. They can be cryogenic, frozen in time and boiled again in the dead of winter 

when fresh ingredients are sparse. Babcia favors the panfrying. Fried pierogi contain vestiges of 

last week’s creamed potatoes. They have found new life in masło butter and robust herbs. 

Scorched just right, each battered in olive oil and Slavic syllables. 

Babcia quiets the room with a stare and lifts a glass of sparkling grenadine. 

“Pierogi are like the people of Poland,” she begins in her native tongue, “simple and 

versatile. They represent timelessness and resiliency. We have seen depression, famine, war, 

corruption,” she eyes each of us grandchildren, “and we somehow take these things and use them 

for strength. The best pierogi are made from scratch. As are the best people. Solidarity!” 



20 

“Solidarity!” 

A windchime of clinking glasses unite above the table’s center, splashing sticky crimson 

juices around the dishes. Even the children partake in alcoholic drinks. Babcia says they are good 

for the spirits. “What better time to learn moderation than before the rupture of a childhood of 

repression?” 

 

We sit down to eat, for the next twelve meals or so, a variation of that single day’s 

efforts. And we are always reminded with the threat of a wooden spoon to our rear ends to be 

resourceful and resilient, because my elders didn’t survive so long for us to be anything but.  



21 

The Orchard 

In the orchard lived a witch. She lumbered about in ashen gray knits, threaded her spindly 

body through torsos of cherry trees and apple saplings. Her arms were sturdy boughs from which 

gangly fingers forked. I watched her shoot light from these spectral claws, watched as she 

pointed to a row of Jonagolds and dappled the trees with shades of Golden Delicious and Gala. 

She could grow three varieties for every one tree. Another time I stood tucked behind the 

woodpile and witnessed her cross a plum tree with sour cherry. “The next great cultivar,” she 

cackled with a swoop of her viny digits. The witch supplied a roadside produce stand that stood 

eerily unattended on the edge of an outskirt road. It remained fully stocked, glutted in wintertime 

with red cherries, piercingly purple plums, gleaming green apples, and jammy blue berries 

against a fleecy December snow. Few patrons ever stopped, few questioned the impossible sight 

of a bounteous harvest on the winter solstice. The occasional passerby pulled over to assess 

whether this was mirage or miracle. The unmanned stand stood audaciously at the orchard’s edge 

year round, existing independently from stand tends and regular purchasers. 

The witch was my grandmother. The relatives called her Baba, but we cousins loyally 

called her Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga always greeted us with chocolates, the kind that are 

voraciously irresistible to children, with violet rabbits and smiling ladybugs inhabiting the 

wrapping. “Please, children. Go ahead and eat your treats,” she would say upon setting the bars 

onto our humid hands. She watched closely until the bravest of us took a bite. 

The best part of visiting Baba Yaga was running about in her orchard, but we always had 

a meal to endure first. We entered through the wrought iron gates in late summer, the car 

growling over jagged gravel, the crows dispersing and gratily chanting, foliaging the corpse of 

another tree. The swollen little red car exhaled as we emptied from it in front of Baba Yaga’s 



22 

cinder home. Baba Yaga always dramatized the reunion with a careful calculation of just how 

long to wait until she materialized from behind her steel blue door. While we stood circled 

around the little red car and looked in all different directions at the surrounding apple trees and 

shadowy cherry trees, Baba Yaga creaked through the steel door and teetered unsteadily outside. 

“Ah, the most important guests of the season,” was always her greeting. We waited for the adults 

to make the first move and followed swiftly and closely behind them up the stairs, concealing 

our small bodies behind the billowing skirts of our elders. 

Baba Yaga’s house was a marvel as much as her orchard. From the outside, it appeared a 

dilapidated box of weathered cinder, with an outside basement door and a breathing chimney 

atop the tiled clay roof. But as soon as we scaled the wooden stairs ascending to the 

unsophisticated gray structure, a complex labyrinth of great rooms and arterial hallways tangled 

throughout. The adults were never perplexed by this, never paused to wonder how a structure 

that could seemingly from the outside contain only one bed, a single toilet, and a stove, housed a 

splendor of grand rooms, including a library and a family portrait gallery. 

Greetings were a long and necessary component of these visits, as were goodbyes, and 

they often consumed a revolution of Baba Yaga’s chicken-footed cuckoo clock. Baba Yaga 

embraced the adults with her robed tree branch arms, the sleeves wisping like loose skin on a 

skeleton. We cousins remained behind the safety wall of the adults, but Baba Yaga always 

pierced the wall before long with her inky black eyes and floated in our direction. 

“I brought treats for the children. My how you’ve all grown! We’ll have to venture to the 

cherry tree out front and start a yearly marking on the trunk.” Her arms drifted upward like the 

wings of a raven, shadowing us with a gargantuan squeeze. Baba Yaga was not a tall or broad 



23 

woman, but she could wrap her arms fully around even the widest baldcypress, or in this case, 

three whole children. An array of chocolate bars fanned from beneath her cloaks. 

“Thank you, Baba,” we each said with thin smiles as we took one. We knew the ticket to 

relinquishing her piercing stare was to begin unwrapping the treats and enjoying them. 

A great feast set for a dozen sprawled the table in the towering dining room at the front of 

the house. Including Baba Yaga, seven of us occupied the heavy wooden surface, a cross 

sectioned slice from a soaring beech tree, but there was no square centimeter left undecorated 

with heaping plate of food, or greenery plucked from outside, or the warm melt of a wax candle. 

Intricate golden ropes on black wallpaper beanstalked from floor to ceiling, where mahogany 

beams webbed from the nucleus of an extravagant hundred-candle chandelier. The chandelier 

was easily six meters up, and there was no ladder or iron rod nearby to assist in candle lighting, 

but each time we visited, there they were lit like a great constellation in that tenebrous room of 

few light sources. Even with a couple of scattered windows, the outside sunlight never penetrated 

Baba Yaga’s home. The golden threads in the wallpaper shimmered against the candle flames, 

giving the impression of dining in a tall bronze cage, an all-knowing perceiver watching us from 

the outside. Baba Yaga preferred to candlelight her home rather than rely on the capriciousness 

of electricity. The hallways were lined with iron candlesticks, the surfaces of every room 

smothered in thick wax cylinders engulfing multiple wicks. Spattering flames jerked with the 

disturbance of a visitor passing through, but the fire stood obediently still in Baba Yaga’s hover. 

If Baba Yaga’s dining room was a bronze cage, her kitchen was a cathedral. White 

marble walls spired to the sky. An east wing and west wing intersected the main hall, the east 

side lined with iron pots and pans and wooden utensils, the west side a drying rack of upturned 

bundles of lavender, peppermint, rose, sage, chamomile, cornflower, dill, thyme. The stove 



24 

powered a shrieking tea kettle whose cumulonimbus output could fuel a rainstorm. The cast iron 

oven stood at the altar; behind it an opulent backsplash of stained glass patchworked the 

kitchen’s spine. 

We took our seats at the table. Fried cheeses and robust leafy salads were the first foods 

passed around. Baba Yaga watched her guests fill their plates before placing one corner slice of 

breaded cheese and a single shred of lettuce on her plate. She never ate, and no one ever asked 

why. We kept a close eye on her great iron oven. It was always lit but vacant, a towering stack of 

wood on guard nearby. “In case the food needs warming,” she would say whenever one of the 

children glanced at it. The adults were never suspicious and heaped their plates with second-

course yellow fasolka beans and sliced mosaics of sausage, a clinking and clattering of 

silverware and ceramic among the crescendos of conversation. The adults usually made us sit 

through the second course before we were released to play in the orchard. 

When we were finally allowed to escape the house, we couldn’t run fast enough out the 

steel blue door. The crisp appley air replaced the steaming tea kettle breath in our lungs as we 

scattered in all directions around the hundred-acre orchard. The crow cannons clapped and sent a 

cluster of birds dispersing into the sky. We scuttled down rows of apples, plums, cherries, 

gooseberries, currants, bilberries. I stopped when I reached a colossal cherry tree with green and 

yellow plums on top, pulled my wispy frame onto the lowest branch, then the next, then the next. 

When I was about halfway up, I spotted my cousins running through the mazes of fruit trees, 

stopping to see what new varieties had appeared since our last visit. As dark red cherries were 

slowly replaced with canary and jade plums, I heard them shout their new discoveries. 

 “Raspberry flavored apples!” 

 “Black currants with strawberry crowns!” 



25 

“Gooseberries the size of melons!” 

We oscillated around this impossible orchard, mined for flavors the world had never 

tasted before, aware of both our luck and our surroundings. Although we knew the adults were 

inside feasting and engaging in hours of conversation, we kept our ears piqued and eyes sharp. 

The orchard was an unpredictable place. Once, years ago, I ventured into the woodshed lined 

with dusty blue rosemary bushes. After climbing stacks of fresh aromatic pine and buttery 

applewood inside the shed, I turned to exit and discovered the rosemary bushes had turned to 

spiked briar patches, ominous daggers sprouting from each snaking branch. I howled for my 

cousins. “Sabina! Olek! Sabina! Olek!” They came bounding across the orchard to my rescue. 

“Relax, Inga. It’s just rosemary. You can walk straight through it.” 

“No! No! It’ll cut up my body and Baba Yaga will sell me to the butcher!” 

After convincing them the innocent rosemary they could see before them turned to 

barbed razors after entering the woodshed, Sabina and Olek fashioned a small makeshift bridge 

out of nearby sticks and branches for me to climb over. This feat took all afternoon, and as I 

crossed the bridge and looked back at the bristly rosemary bushes guarding the woodshed from 

the outside once again, I made them both swear never to tell Baba Yaga I had gone in there. 

Our time in the orchard was robust, though we always knew it would end with a call for 

dessert. Dessert was to be enjoyed together. “Come in for cake, children!” A whipped torte of 

silky vanilla cream capped with sweet conical strawberries appeared on the dining room table, 

the dishes from the day’s feast nowhere in sight. The adults took a moment to pour drinks in 

glasses and we tended to the cake. Syrupy rivers of berry compote ribboned the yellow-white 

sweet cream. 



26 

“Some of you have traveled very far to be here today,” Baba Yaga eyed me with her 

igneous glare. “What better way for me to show my gratitude than with tort truskawkowy. 

Strawberry cake. I know the children favor such confections.” A dwindling stack of plates 

circled the family’s hands. Baba Yaga cut enormous pieces of cake, revealing a layer of bright 

red jam inside the sponge. She handed over heavy wedges of torte until we each had a slice the 

size of a cantaloupe. Lastly for herself, she peeled a single frosting daubed strawberry from the 

bottom tier and dropped it onto her plate. We enjoyed our dessert at the endless dining table as 

the sun dropped behind the sycamore trees outside. 

 

With another rotation of Baba Yaga’s cuckoo clock, goodbyes were said and we were 

free to leave the house. The little red car swelled as we entered, fuller than when we arrived, with 

cheeses and sausage and fresh orchard fruit and strawberry torte. Baba Yaga waved her hand 

goodbye on her front porch like a limb swaying back and forth in the breeze. A firelit lantern 

outlined her frail body, her clothes dangling like cobwebs. I savored my time with the cousins in 

this extraordinary orchard, but I also experienced immense relief each time our visit came to an 

end. 

One of the adults clicked the key to start the car. It rattled and sputtered with each turn, 

but the car remained asleep. “We’ve surely eaten too much,” another adult chimed in. After a 

couple turns of the key, it was apparent that the car would not start. The food cemented low and 

heavy in my stomach. 

“Car troubles, ah?” Baba Yaga remained stone still on her front porch, silhouetted like a 

gray moth against her steel blue door. The cousins and I glared at each other in the back seats. 

We tried a few more times to start the car, then one of the adults got out and opened the hood. 



27 

Baba Yaga remained on her porch with the silent flame suspended in the lantern behind her. The 

full harvest moon rose and bobbed like a pumpkin in the sky, illuminating the orchard and 

casting elongated skeletal shadows on the ground. 

“Best we try and leave in the morning,” one of the adults finally said. “Are there any 

nearby lodges we could stay the night, Baba?” 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, descending the stairs. “I’ve got all the room you need 

right here.” Her face turned vulturelike as she approached the car. “I’ll call for a mechanic in the 

morning. Come, let’s get you settled in your rooms.” 

The cousins and I remained firmly planted in our seats until the adults came around and 

opened our door. “Let’s go, children. It’s getting late.” We silently slid out of the little red car 

and followed the adults closely once more up the elderly wooden stairs. Although the inside of 

Baba Yaga’s house was always candlelit, I had never seen it so luminous. Sunlight never 

penetrated the home, but the moonlight drowned it. The dining room now felt like standing in a 

lantern, the kitchen an angelic saturation of brilliance, pillars of red and green and blue 

moonlight leaking through the stained glass. 

“Children, you will sleep upstairs.” Baba Yaga pulled a rope dangling from the paneled 

hallway ceiling and revealed a folded staircase. It unfurled and twisted like vines until an iron 

spiral staircase sat planted on the cold wooden floor. “Go and get situated. I’ll show the others to 

their rooms and be up to check on you.” The adults walked down the hallway, and we glanced 

upward at the previously concealed upper level, an unending abyss portaling above our heads. 

“I’ll go up first, but you two need to follow close behind,” I whispered. We toed our way 

up the snaking staircase, dizzying ourselves with continuous upward circuits. With each 

complete orbit, a level of candles lit themselves so that only the next loop came into view. 



28 

“How much farther?” asked Sabina. “Everything is starting to spin.” We staggered up 

more and more coils of stairs, the darkness above our heads ever present with each row of newly 

lit candles. Beneath us was a growing well of shrinking candle flames, as if we were climbing 

the embered inside of a hollowed fireplace log. 

“I think I see the top,” I finally exhaled. A final row of candles illuminated a tall brass 

door. 

“How long has this room been up here?” asked Olek. “I never knew Baba Yaga’s house 

had an upstairs.” 

“We discover something unusual each time we visit,” responded Sabina. “This is hardly 

surprising.” 

The tall brass door scraped open as we summited the staircase. Inside was a slender 

hexagonal room built of stone. A long, narrow window occupied each of the six walls, providing 

a full panoramic view of the orchard, which looked like hot orange autumn under the harvest 

moon. A stack of twin bunks and a dusty emerald couch rested at the center. Various collections 

in glass cases inhabited the corners. One case displayed an assortment of beetles needled to a 

plank of wood. Another showcased fragments and bones of various species pieced together. A 

patchwork creature. Bouquets of dried brown flowers crunched and littered the timbered floor. 

Tiny spiders poked their heads from behind the papery petals to see what had been successfully 

ensnared in their lacy webs. 

“You each take a bunk. I’ll sleep on this couch,” I said, unfolding a rosy quilt and 

needleworked bird pillow into a bed.  

“How are we ever going to fall asleep in here?” asked Olek, examining a snakeskin 

collage framed in gold on the wall next to his pillow. 



29 

“Did you find your beds, children?” Baba Yaga appeared spryly at the tall brass door, 

neither sluggish nor out of breath. “Ah, Inga. I see you’ve been dealt my old couch. The thing is 

cushy enough, though be warned, I’ve had my very strangest dreams napping on it.” She slapped 

a knobby hand on its cushion, releasing a spew of dust, and floated back to the tall brass door, 

extinguishing the two torches on either side of it with a gold metal cap so that only moonlight 

poured in. “Sleep well, children. I’ll have breakfast ready in the morning.” 

“Thank you, Baba,” we replied as she vanished behind the closing door. 

Olek waited a moment before speaking in whispers. “How do you think she got up here? 

Clearly she didn’t walk up that staircase like we did.” 

“Obviously this house has many hidden passages,” replied Sabina. “She probably flew up 

here on her broom.” 

The three of us quietly giggled from our beds at our many concocted theories for how 

Baba Yaga traveled around her home. After almost an hour of muted conversation, both Sabina 

and Olek exhaled long, drowsy breaths. I laid my head back on the scratchy needlework pillow. 

The hexagonal room domed to a mounded ceiling. At the very top was a glass window, an eye, 

that opened to the sky. Baba Yaga lived far away from the city, so every square centimeter I 

could see of the night sky whirred with movement. Flickering stars, fiery bodies with bright 

cascading tails, spinning green and yellow and purple spheres, glittering satellites. The harvest 

moon was now on the other side of the sky from where it rose. Moonrise, moonset, I thought to 

myself. 

Sabina and Olek had long been still and quiet. I sat up on the couch after extensive 

stargazing. When would I ever again have the opportunity to see the orchard at night? I walked 

over to one of the long and narrow windows and looked down onto the property below. Now that 



30 

the moon was beginning to set behind the trees on the opposite side, the ground was darker. But 

the orchard mimicked the night sky. Glowing specks of light littered the ground for acres. An 

expanse of constellations dotted the landscape. I walked over to the other side of the hexagonal 

room and peeked out another window. On this side I could actually tuck my chin and see Baba 

Yaga’s house far below me, as cindered and as blocky as it looked from the ground outside. 

Nothing was different except that the outside basement door that we’ve never seen open before 

appeared ajar. I thought of waking the cousins. We always wondered why Baba Yaga had an 

outside basement door. She told us it was for storing wood in the winter, but such a reasonable 

answer doesn’t suit her character. I studied it closely and, just like in the night sky, detected 

motion. Someone carrying something from the basement outside. Then someone else. Then 

someone else. They were men wearing hats and overalls and holding crates, a congregation of 

them. I looked out into the orchard and saw these figures bustling in between the rows of fruit 

trees. I thought again of waking Sabina and Olek. This was an adventure they couldn’t miss out 

on. But Olek would never get back to sleep again after seeing this. I resolved that I would get a 

closer look myself, to make sure this wasn’t a charm or façade of Baba Yaga’s house, then be 

back to wake them if it were real. So I let them sleep a while longer as I slipped out of the tall 

brass door. 

The candles lit up row by row as I descended the long spiral staircase. It was a different 

kind of trek walking down those stairs, perhaps more dizzying staring into an abyss below you 

rather than one above. The one above you don’t risk falling into. I made my way to the final 

circle of stairs and planted my feet on the planks of Baba Yaga’s ground floor hallway. The 

house was still and calm, as motionless and empty as I had ever seen it. 



31 

The outside basement door was directly below a small kitchen window. I crept up the 

hallway and onto the cold marble tiles of the cathedral kitchen, the change from wood to the chill 

of the tile causing my toes to curl, taking care to move more slowly and carefully with each 

approaching step toward the window. The orchard trees came into view, and they were planetary. 

The fruit glowed vibrantly on each tree, luminous apples, bright plums, sparkling cherries. The 

droves of overalled men plucked the phosphorescent produce from its trees and piled it up in 

crates. A conveyor belt of workers hauled the crates off toward the roadside produce stand. 

That’s how she does it, I thought. Under the cover of darkness, deep in the shadows of the 

countryside, where the nearest street lamp is so many hills away that its light could never betray 

this meticulous system.  

“Crepuscular creatures we both are, I see.” I jerked my head around and there stood Baba 

Yaga at the kitchen’s entrance. “I’ve always been most active after twilight myself.” 

I stood cold and still in that marble kitchen. Baba Yaga centimetered closer to me in her 

slippered feet. Her footsteps made no sound. “Having trouble sleeping?” 

“I have a hard time falling asleep in unfamiliar places,” I responded. “I spent a lot of time 

looking at the sky before coming down here.” 

“Sometimes the only familiar thing about a place is its sky,” she said, standing shoulder 

to shoulder with me and looking upward out the window. I thought it a strange thing to say. 

“The sky here is actually the most amazing I’ve ever seen. Nowhere else are the stars so 

animated.” 

“They are, child. The stars never dull their performance. It’s the obtrusion of the city 

lights that dims them.” 



32 

I lowered my head and stared at the night sky below us. “Baba, what are all these 

glowing fruits?” 

“I see you’ve discovered my workers,” she replied. “Why have regular apples when you 

can have this?” Baba Yaga often spoke in non-answers. 

I watched as a line of overalled men walked mechanically in rows, crates out in front of 

them, brimming with succulent glowing cherries, the skin looking tight above the veins of juices 

even from the distance of the kitchen window. 

“How does it happen, Baba? How does your orchard look just like the luminous night 

sky?” 

Baba Yaga gestured dramatically to the setting harvest moon in the sky. 

“Look, child, at this moon. Have you ever seen something that looks so much like a globe 

grape? And there,” she trailed the sky cinematically with her wrinkled finger, “the tail of a 

comet, a rosemary sprig. Jupiter, a big juicy peach.” I looked at the bright orange planet and 

imagined its red blood vessels running like rivers across its yellow-orange flesh. “Planetary 

bodies,” Baba Yaga continued, “are ripe fruits dangling from a careening branch, just like the 

ones in my orchard.” 

I looked between the sky and the orchard, and I tried to comprehend Baba Yaga’s 

analogies, but I know my expression gave away my disorientation. 

“You think, child, that stars don’t exist on Earth,” she pulled an apple out of a pocket 

beneath her cloak, “but then you slice an apple,” cut it in half on its equator with a knife dangling 

from the kitchen wall, “any apple, every apple, in two,” held the apple hemispheres up to me in 

the glow of the window, “and realize you were wrong.” Two stars inside those apple halves to 

reckon with. 



33 

“Have you ever been told the history of this place, Inga?” 

I looked from the orbiting fruits outside to Baba Yaga’s starlit face. 

“This orchard was once a graveyard, you know. And my house, the church. But who 

wants to live on a plot with a thousand headstones? Better to turn them all into something 

generative. If I lay rotting underground somewhere, I can only hope someone would come along 

and transfer me to a great big cherry tree.” 

“All those fruit trees. They’re all graves?” 

“Each one nourished by the body and spirit of a dearly departed soul. Really gives this 

place its charm, I surmise. Well Inga, it’s getting late, even for me. Spectate as long as you’d 

like. I’ll see you in the morning.” And she crept away silently until her thinning body blended 

with the hallway’s darkness. 

 

Breakfast was a surprisingly underwhelming spread. Crepes with strawberry jam and 

cottage cheese stood stacked on a few plates. Scones, croissants, and bricks of butter were 

distributed around the table. An infusion of orange juice with pink cranberry mimicked the sky 

outside in a tall glass jug. It was nowhere near as luxurious as dinner the night before. The adults 

were anxious to get home and tend to their responsibilities. The mechanic was out front repairing 

the little red car. 

“I made a discovery last night,” I whispered to Sabina and Olek while Baba Yaga and the 

adults indulged in a final conversation. “I came downstairs after you fell asleep.” 

“Did you see her chanting incantations?” asked a wide-eyed Olek. 

“Casting spells? Flying on her broom?” Sabina mouthed. 

“Shh, I’ll tell you when we get home.” 



34 

The little red car was awake and running when we descended the creaky wooden stairs. 

Sabina and Olek’s murmuring voices revolved around my head as we, once again, said our 

goodbyes to Baba Yaga. 

“Until next season, children.” She stood firmly planted on her front porch, her arm 

swaying gently back and forth. Sabina, Olek, and I turned our heads at the shrinking cinder home 

in the rear window of the little red car the entirety of the long gravel driveway and watched as it 

got smaller and smaller. A cluster of crows dispersed from the wrought iron gate as we exited, 

this orchard upon which lived a witch.  



35 

Staying the Course 

I am at work. I am staring into the next participant’s eyes, looking for clues. I am 

watching the little square window panes reflecting from their whites and sea glass irises. 

Checking to see if the treatment worked. Trying to establish a pattern in this research. What they 

see is reflected from their eyes into mine. The rind of their pupil and the inner edge of their iris, 

how that ring where the two meet is the cutoff for their vision, how they can’t see anything past 

the circumference of their pupil. Wondering if this one was in the placebo group. I am staring 

into their eye, thinking about how they are in there somewhere deep inside the black hole of their 

eye. How there is an I inside this eye. Their pupil swells and contracts in the variable light, 

pulsating between voracity and protection. How everything they see enters that small black hole 

in their eyes. How it all enters and gets absorbed by the singularity, that point in the middle 

where gravity reaches infinity, where nothing that enters can ever escape. And it made me think 

of your eyes, if I’m still anywhere in them all these years later. Or if I’ve escaped, or if I’m 

buried, lodged far below the thin, glassy, convex surface that protects something deep and dark 

beneath it. 

“Next participant, Klaudia. Please have the results uploaded to the system by the end of 

the day.” 

The door opens and they leave. And the next I enters. 

——— 

Twenty-five years ago we were children on the school playground.  

We didn’t know each other then. We hadn’t met yet. But we occupied the same space 

every day at 12:30. Mulchy wood chips that smelled strongly of camphor when the nearby coast 



36 

brought rain. We watched the same kids do flips off the swing and land in this cat litter for 

children. Did you also get a hulking splinter in your right toe when the weather was warm 

enough for sandals? I still have a scar from mine. It’s no wonder the playground mulch has 

turned to rubber since our time there. 

 

Twenty years ago we were aware of each other’s orbit. 

I didn’t know your name then, and you didn’t know mine, but I watched you fill a 

divided square of your lunch tray with a heap of yellow banana peppers every day in the school 

cafeteria. You picked them so carefully with the tongs, assuring none of the pieces had a stem or 

seedy pith attached. I ladled a syrupy scoop of yellow cling peaches in that place on my lunch 

tray where your banana peppers went. You and I were almost always one after another in the 

checkout line. We were both punctual about mealtimes, often leading our classes to lunch. 

“That’s a strange choice,” the cashier would say each time she slid your card, “but I’ll let 

it slide since it’s a serving of vegetables on the food pyramid,” and she tapped the laminated 

nutrition visual with the corner of your card before handing it back to you. You were so kind to 

give her a smiling thank you each day. 

 

Nineteen years ago we started high school together.  

I figured out your name because I heard a guy who sat behind me on the bus call you 

“that weird pickle girl” and someone else say, “You mean Lana? She’s Russian or something. 

They eat a lot of pickles.” And then someone else said, “Those aren’t pickles. They’re banana 

peppers, you dumbass.” And the first guy said, “That’s even weirder. Who eats banana peppers 

like that? She would be kinda hot if she didn’t eat such weird shit.” I wondered then if the food I 



37 

ate was weird. If these American kids knew I went home and ate gołąbki and gulasz. If I was 

another foreign girl whose external value was calculated by arbitrary cultural differences. I felt a 

silent moment of solidarity with you then. 

 

Eighteen years ago we were in an art class together. 

We weren’t grouped together at the same table because your last name was Berberović 

and mine was Jakubczak, but we were grouped together because the art teacher reconfigured our 

last names to Berber and Jacobs. We were in that group with Maryajose Espinoza, who was 

Mary in that class, and Ramesh Chakrabarti, who was just Mesh, and everyone else’s last name 

was Jones or Davis or Johnson or Smith. 

I distinctly remember the bowl of lemons you painted when we learned shading. Most 

kids remember painting that candlelit bowl of fruit on a table with generously stretched shadows 

and too-bright-green grapes. Perhaps some of our parents still have them deep in a dusty cabinet 

somewhere. But yours was museum worthy. The astute curvature of the correctly green lemon 

leaf, a deep, wise green. I remember how everyone’s eyes had a speck of lemon yellow in them 

that day, because yours was the painting that pulled all our gazes, those balmy lemons with tiny 

spots. It was the first time many of us learned lemons had pores. I thought of your painting for a 

long time after that, during many cold sunrises alone on the chilled leather seat of the yellow 

school bus, when I watched the sun crawl up the skeletal winter trees and envisioned it being a 

lemon. One of your lemons. 

 

Seventeen years ago we spoke for the first time.  



38 

You were always independent in the way that you were limitless. I was independent in 

the way that I was detached. You weren’t popular, but you were anyone’s friend, and that made 

you everyone’s friend. Socially, you had the upper hand. Which is why I still remember the 

feeling I had when I was standing alone in the afternoon bus line and felt a tap on my shoulder 

and turned around, and it was you. 

“You’re Klaudia, right?” 

“Yeah. And you’re Lana?” The question mark was manufactured. Everyone knew who 

you were. 

“I am. It’s short for Dzejlana actually, but no one calls me that except my family. I think 

we’ve had some classes together.” 

I didn’t mention your lemon painting. 

“Klaudia. Jakubczak, isn’t it? That’s Polish?” 

“Yeah. And your family. They’re…also Eastern European?” 

“My parents fled the genocide in Bosnia. Slowly the rest of my family has trickled over. 

Were you born here?” 

“No.” 

My family is from a town in Poland where six thousand people live on a single street. It’s 

over nine kilometers long and almost everyone has a narrow slice of farmland in their backyard. 

When we moved here, I found the gridlock streets and back to back houses claustrophobic. I 

couldn’t possibly understand why someone would want to build their house in someone else’s 

backyard. 

“I wasn’t born here either. I think we’re some of the only ones.” 



39 

I felt a pull of gravity from you in that moment. Through your eyes. I didn’t know how to 

take it, so I just looked away. 

“Does your family go to any of the Eastern European festivals in the city?”  

“No. My family doesn’t go to the city.” 

“There’s a spring festival this weekend. Would you like to come? I know some Polish 

families will be there.” 

There your hand was, extended to something you would realize later was impenetrable. 

“I don’t think I can this weekend.” 

“There will be so much delicious food, Klaudia. Roast hams, warm soups, pastries that 

will make you remember your childhood.” 

I watched my bus pull up directly behind you, bus number forty-nine. My focus was on 

your face, in sharp contrast against the blurred backdrop of deep yellow pooling behind you. It 

illuminated the amber flecks in your eyes. They appeared a sprinkle at a time in your inky brown 

irises, like stars coming out for the night. 

“My parents are working this weekend. I won’t have a way to—” 

“We’ll pick you up.” You slid your backpack off your shoulders, unzipped it, and pulled 

out a shimmering pen and sticky note. “Here, write your address down. We can come get you 

before we go. Saturday morning at nine.” 

The bus grumbled impatiently behind you. I hurried to scribble down my address, 

nervous from the moment you mentioned coming to my house. I’ve never had a friend over 

before, even if it was just in the gravel driveway. 

“I’ll see you this weekend, Klaudia. Go before you miss your bus.” I handed you back 

your pen and sticky note, the ink glistening in the sunlight, like the pen held a liquid galaxy of 



40 

tiny stars. Part of me hoped it would smudge. I swiveled my shoulders and slid delicately past 

you. When I climbed onto the bus and sat in my seat, I saw you in the silver frame of the school 

bus window, rolling the sticky note in the pinch of your fingers into a scroll. In that moment I 

worried both about my handwriting being so illegible that you wouldn’t show up on Saturday, 

and it being clear enough that you would. Then I watched as a flurry of little children encircled 

you. They looked like little yous, three or four of them. You embraced them each tenderly. One 

was on your shoulders as the school bus rattled forward and my view was replaced with brown 

brick buildings. 

 

That weekend I woke up very early. My parents both left for work around six and I was 

up as they were heading out the door.  

“And what has gotten into you today, up before the birds?” my father asked. 

“I’m going to the city.” 

“The city?” my mother said, wobbling a steaming mug of black tea in her hand. “And 

who will prepare dinner tonight? I need you to thaw the meat and peel the potatoes.” 

“I’ll be home in time to do that.” 

“Good. And maybe you could begin weeding the garden plots? We will sow carrot seeds 

next week. See you this evening.” 

My parents were always really tired when they came home from their contracting and 

laundromat jobs. That is always what they told me, how they were so, so tired. 

Once they were out the door, I stood in front of my closet for a long time envisioning 

what you pictured I’d be wearing. Had you seen me in your mind wearing a spring dress? I only 

had one. Perhaps a pair of jeans and a brightly colored sweater. That’s often what you wore. But 



41 

mine weren’t like yours. Even my brightest clothes were dull from years of wear and washing. 

They often came to me a few tones duller than they had been in their past lives. I looked outside 

at the faint light in the sky. It was tinted gray with clouds. A jacket would be safe, one I could 

curl up inside of. I didn’t know how many people would be at the festival. I didn’t know how 

many people would be rolling into my driveway in a few hours. How would I explain to your 

parents that my parents weren’t home? That there wasn’t a car in the driveway because they both 

shared one? That was normal in Poland, but not here, and I didn’t know whether or not it was 

normal in Bosnia. Maybe it was better that there wouldn’t be a car. Maybe your family would 

arrive in a big luxury van and it wouldn’t have to be positioned directly next to our twenty-three-

year-old sedan. Finally I chose a long dark brown coat, one that started high at my neck and 

draped down to my knees, and I slithered into it. 

I walked into the kitchen and stared at the dark wood cabinets. Would we eat breakfast at 

the festival? Did you expect me to have eaten already? I paced around, opening the pantry, the 

fridge, the small closet of jars of cucumbers in brine, oat groats, jams. I sliced a piece of rye 

bread and smudged it thinly with butter. I took a bite. I put it down. I couldn’t eat more. I wasn’t 

hungry. I went back to my bedroom and stood in front of my closet again. I took the brown coat 

off. I tried my dress on. It didn’t fit anymore. I put on some jeans and an unclaimed shirt my 

mother brought home a few months ago from the laundromat, the place where the majority of 

our clothes came from. I brushed my hair. It looked like splattered espresso. I tied it back. I let it 

loose and brushed it again. I walked back into the kitchen. I picked up the bread but couldn’t take 

another bite. I walked back to my bedroom. The sun had fully risen now. I felt a pit in my 

stomach. Maybe I would tell you I was sick and couldn’t go. Maybe my handwriting was too 



42 

scribbled and you’d never find my house. Maybe you were just being nice asking for my address, 

thought more about it, and wouldn’t show up at all. 

 

It was 8:50 and I sat swirling on the stool in the kitchen. The gray tint in the sky had 

unfortunately cleared to blue, which meant I could no longer substantiate wearing my long 

brown coat. I floated back to my closet and dug out a large once-white sweater. I pulled it over 

my t-shirt and jeans. It hung loosely in a way that made me feel safe. My stomach dropped when 

I heard the growl of unfamiliar tires in the driveway. I peeked out of my curtained window and 

saw not one, but two cars. A caravan. Two large sleek SUVs, each of them boisterously stuffed 

with people. They parked like tanks in front of our dilapidated carport. Doors began flinging 

open. Small children poured out. Adults maintained their seats in the front and middle rows, 

more than just two parents. I couldn’t locate you. I balled up my bedroom curtain tightly in my 

fist, my eyes darting around for your honey colored hair. But everyone’s hair was honey colored. 

The doorbell rang. I collected myself and walked back out through the kitchen and placed 

my hand on the door. It trembled with a quivering hoard behind it. I opened it slowly. I saw four, 

five, six pairs of moving eyes, like they all belonged to a single shifting serpent. I looked around 

and found your amber brown eyes in the bunch. 

“Hey Klaudia!” You parted the ocean of children and gave me a hug. I kept my hand on 

the doorknob to assure none of them spilled into the house. “These are my siblings and cousins.” 

You turned around with the palm of your hand pointed upward to display the sea of children, 

seven of them I finally counted. You identified each of them by name, but I didn’t retain a single 

one in that moment. They all looked up at me and ran in circles and wanted to give hugs and see 

the inside of our house. 



43 

“This is Klaudia, my friend. But we’re only here to pick her up. All of you need to return 

to your seats in the cars, please.” You helped me shuffle two small boys from bursting through 

the front door. A few had trailed off into the trees surrounding the house. One of the boys limped 

behind the other in a way that caught my gaze. 

“Ernad! Adnan!” I heard an adult yell sternly from the passenger seat of one of the cars, 

like her voice was an object she could throw. She rolled her window down all the way and 

waved at me, bulky gold bracelets clattering at her wrists. “Good to meet you, dear. I’m 

Dzejlana’s aunt Elma.” I found her accent comforting. I did my best to smile but probably looked 

at her through horrified eyes. 

“You can ride with me and my parents and grandmother. We’re in the black car. Sorry, 

it’ll be tight, but each car seats eight.” You collected the younger children by their hands. I 

locked the front door and followed you as a cluster of them whirlpooled around me. 

We crawled into the third row of the black SUV. It had so many air conditioning vents 

dotting the ceiling inside, each of them functional, blasting crisp, cold air. 

“These are my parents, and my baka, and three of my siblings.” Each of the adults waved 

from the front as they were introduced. Your grandmother was perched in between two children 

in the middle row, a seemingly intentional mediator. I sat smashed in the third row with you and 

your little sister. 

“Your parents didn’t want to come? We’d love to meet them,” your father said. 

“They have work today.” They had work every day. 

“And what do your parents do for work?” Your mother swiveled her head from the 

passenger seat. She had to project her voice over the middle row of competing children, and it 



44 

was booming but kind, and in that moment I tried to remember if all Eastern European women 

have baritone voices. 

“My dad is repairing a deck today I think,” I said. 

“Sorry, dear. Can you speak up?” 

I turned to you. “Klaudia’s dad is a deck repairman.” 

“Ah,” your mother said. 

“Deck repairman. A uniquely American job,” your father laughed from the driver’s seat. I 

tensed my shoulders. “In Europe of course everyone has a garden patio. Not many build their 

structures out of wood like here.” 

“Klaudia, does your family have a bakery they go to?” asked your mother. 

“Not really,” I said. “Usually I– we bake bread at home.” 

“You will give them a loaf, Dzejlana.” 

You turned to me. “My aunt and uncle run a bakery and deli in town. Dino’s. That’s my 

uncle. He was one of the best bakers in Sarajevo.” 

“You must go to Dino’s and not the Kojićs’,” your father gruffed. “The Serbs like to 

claim authentic Bosnian recipes.” 

“She knows this, Eldin. You’re Polish, Klaudia, aren’t you?” your mother asked me 

through the rearview mirror, thick dark sunglasses obscuring what I pictured to be your eyes on 

your mother’s face. 

“Yes,” I said, but I hadn’t ever heard about the Bosnian-Serbian bread rivalry. 

“Where in Poland, dear?” 

“Sułoszowa. Not far from Kraków.” 

“And what other Polish families do you know around here?” 



45 

“Not really any.” 

“Oh, we will have to introduce you to the Adamczyks and the Sosnowskis. They should 

have booths at the festival today.” 

I had no idea there were other Polish people in our town. 

 

When we parked downtown and everyone scattered out of the SUVs, your uncle walked 

over holding a child’s hand in each of his and introduced himself. Your parents and aunt and 

grandmother quickly formed a circle around us. 

“Good to meet you, Klaudia. I’m Dino, Dzejlana’s uncle. Maybe you’ve heard of Dino’s 

Bakery and Deli in town?” 

I looked around for you. “Um, I’ve heard of it, yes.” 

“Ah, heard of it? Have you tried any of our breads? I brought some for a booth at the 

festival today.” Behind him I saw you and some of the older children unloading the back of one 

of the SUVs. Large loaves of rustic, puffy bread in bags. Then I saw you unloading what 

appeared to be a stack of small paintings. “Why don’t I send you home with a loaf. What kind of 

bread does your family like?” 

“We eat dark bread mostly.” 

“Come. I’ll designate a fermented rye and a bag of lepinja for you.” He spoke more 

quietly. “Fellow former members of the Eastern Bloc need to take care of one another.” He 

winked. 

Once your uncle had set up his booth with the help and hindrance of fourteen pairs of 

hands, you came over to me and asked if I wanted to walk around. 

“Are you selling your art here?” I asked as we merged with the flow of the crowd. 



46 

“Yeah, some. Just a few small paintings to help with my uncle’s business. Come, let’s go 

find the Polish booths.” 

Though the festival was crawling with people, being out of the car finally allowed me to 

exhale. Some of the crowd were Americans, but mostly people who I wondered where they came 

from. I heard bits of Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Croatian, Romanian, Bulgarian. I kept 

recognizing words only to realize by the next sentence that it wasn’t Polish after all. Where did 

all these Eastern Europeans live? They must have been from neighboring towns across the city. 

None of them lived in my neighborhood or had kids at our school. There were rows of tents, 

banners, and mini-markets showcasing produce, cakes, woodwork, handcrafted jewelry, 

blankets, traditional clothing, herbal soaps, spices, music, flowers. They were so much like the 

markets in Poland, only a slight degree of difference. 

“Look, I see red and white!” You pointed ahead excitedly, and I looked through the 

crowds at the Polish flags down the row of tents. A splendor of elaborately decorated eggs dyed 

deep brown from onion husks welcomed us to the small cluster of Polish booths. The eggs were 

filigreed with ornamental patterns, symmetrical flowers. Wooden eggs sat in clusters next to the 

real eggs, etched and feathered with bright blues and crisp reds and sunny yellows. I had one like 

it on the dresser in my bedroom. Pisanki, they’re called. Maybe you have something like it in 

Bosnia. We walked to the next booth and watched vendors ladle sweet batter over a rotating spit 

on an open fire. 

“Sękacz,” I said to you. “It’s a spiky rotisseried cake we eat at weddings.” That would 

send the kids on the bus into fits of hysteria. 

“I’ve never seen you smile this much, Klaudia.” And that was what alerted me to my 

state of comfort. “What are you going to buy?” And then I panicked. Why didn’t I think to find 



47 

some money? I hadn’t pictured a festival being like a market. I don’t know why I had pictured a 

carnival. I should’ve grabbed a pile of coins from the jar in the kitchen. Why didn’t I think to do 

that? Not that it would’ve been enough for more than a bundle of turnips. 

“I’m only here to look today,” I said, and I could tell by the way your gaze lingered on 

my face for a few long seconds that you could sense my panic, so I averted my eyes to the pink 

and white squares of serniki in paper muffin liners and imagined their sour sweet vanilla flavor. 

 

After a while of wandering, and you taking me through the many more blue and yellow 

Bosnian booths than Polish ones set up at the festival and showing me the many versions of 

things I found familiar but through a Balkan refraction, we looped back to your uncle’s bakery 

tent. A long line of people snaked around, and you jumped behind the table to help slice breads 

and package whole loaves and sign your paintings. Your aunt rested her hand firmly on your 

upper back as you collected money in a way that looked like she was placing love on your 

shoulders. I didn’t know why that caused a sting, but I also couldn’t look away. There your 

grandmother sat in a folding chair, in the back corner under the tent, protected by the safety of 

the shade, serenely grounded in the commotion. She watched as you gave customers change and 

handed loaves across the counter and received warm compliments about your paintings. It made 

me think of my own grandmother, my babcia in Poland, and how you had yours right here and I 

didn’t have mine, and it made me want to crumble and decay in the same way it made me want 

to glue myself to you and nourish myself with that love secondhand, a push and a pull. 

“Klaudia, you can keep walking around or go rest if you want to,” you said through the 

bustle. Your dad tossed me the keys from under the tent and I walked back through thinning 

crowds to the cars and opened up the trunk of one and lied down in the back, my loose once-



48 

white sweater flowing over, undulating in the breeze. I lied on my back and thought of the 

pisanki and sękacz. I thought of Poland. I thought about you bringing me to Little Poland, the 

first time I’d been back since moving here when I was seven. I closed my eyes and I tasted 

everything we had seen at those booths. 

 

When I woke up, a mass of people with honey colored hair and amber eyes were 

approaching the car. Before I could locate you, a weight sunk the car down, and I looked for the 

gravity at my legs, and there you sat at my feet with bags of goods. 

“Lana. Did you sell all your paintings?” 

“Most of them. Here, my family and I got you some things.” 

I pushed myself up and crossed my legs. You scooted closer to me and placed four or five 

heavy paper bags in my lap. Your family dispersed and began loading children and tents and 

paper bags into each car. I reached into one bag and pulled out a whole sękacz cake. It was still 

hot and smelled of honey and cream. I could feel you watching for my reaction. Another bag had 

an assortment of Polish cakes: vanilla sernik topped with fresh strawberries, apple szarlotka, and 

makowiec with the blue poppyseeds I remember from childhood. Two more bags were stuffed 

with various loaves of bread, not just fermented rye and lepinja, but a full bakery’s worth. I 

looked up and saw your uncle wink at me as he carried a folded tent under one arm and a child 

under the other. 

“I’m so glad you could come with us today, Klaudia.” You placed your hand on my knee 

and then helped me pack my goods in the car, and I can still feel the heat in my ears and temples 

and behind my eyes from that moment. 

 



49 

When you dropped me off at my house, I was deluged with hugs and warm farewells, and 

I had to wring out my last droplets of energy so I could turn around and thank everyone instead 

of running straight for the door. 

My parents came home a few hours later when I was peeling the last few potatoes, the 

sink filled with curly brown skins. My father opened the door and walked wordlessly to his 

bedroom, another day of sawing, hammering, staining, and heavy lifting visible on his forehead. 

My mother exhaled, hung the keys next to the door, tied on her apron, wiped her forehead, 

washed her hands, and began filling a pot with water. 

“Mama?” 

“What is it, Klaudia.” 

“Why don’t you and Tata have any Polish friends?” 

“What Polish friends, Klaudia? They are an earth away.” 

“No. I saw them. Today at the festival. There were a few dozen Polish people there. 

Some had booths for their businesses.” 

She lit the stove with a match and tipped the bowl of peeled potatoes over the pot. 

“We don’t know those people, Klaudia. Just because they’re Polish doesn’t mean they 

would be our friends.” 

“But there are people from Poland like us here. You have them here and you’re choosing 

not to make friends.” 

“We escaped Poland, Klaudia. We are here to be Americans now. Making Polish friends 

will be a regression.” 

 

 Sixteen years ago was our final year of high school. 



50 

We hadn’t become best friends following the festival. It was me who kept a distance. 

You and I talked at lunch every now and then, where you shamelessly brought cevapi and burek 

on days you didn’t fill your tray with pickled yellow peppers. We said hello to each other when 

we passed in the hallways, your hair always swaying as if a warm breeze followed you. Neither 

of us played sports or went to dances or joined clubs. I spent a lot of time at home, gazing out of 

my bedroom window and reading books. I imagined then that you spent your weekends standing 

tall at an easel in front of the fireplace in your living room, your little siblings haloed around you, 

their golden little eyes drawn to their jewel of an eldest sister, repeating your brush strokes on 

their own miniature easels with exacting imitation. Your parents stood proudly in the threshold 

between the living room and kitchen, so as not to interfere but to showcase their pride. 

You invited me over to your house from time to time. You said your family kept asking 

about “that nice Polish girl.” I figured that meant they worried about me. Worried about my 

clothes, my family, our money, our car. I didn’t want to burden them with too many visits. I did 

go with you and your family to your mosque one day, where each of you wore sleek, decorative, 

lavish garments, and I showed up in a long wrinkled dress my mother brought home from the 

laundromat, and that meant I could never go again. You reassured me so many times that it 

didn’t matter what I wore, but it mattered to me when I showed up and stuck out like a potato 

sack in a sea of silk. 

I dug a hole in the cavity of the house that was my room, filled it with books and 

chocolate covered plums, and I stayed in there. My parents weren’t home often. The house was 

cold, even in summer. Most of it was built of dark wood in the sixties and never repainted. A 

bowl of tall, old, leafy trees enclosed it, the ones your little brothers had drifted off into the day 

you came to pick me up for the festival. I thought about the festival often. I knew it would return 



51 

again soon. A new spring was around the corner. It was one of my favorite memories since 

moving to America, and that scared me. It made me scared to accept profuse gifts from your 

family again, not knowing whether they felt sorry for me, whether I was burdening them. Scared 

to have to talk about my family again, seeing how exuberantly devoted yours was. Because we 

had both been through an international move, one of desperation, so our family was all we had, 

and my parents were supposed to embrace that. But they would never open up a Polish bakery, 

never attend an Eastern European festival, never reach out to look for other Polish families. Their 

strategy was to blend in and survive, to work as much as they could while flying under the radar. 

They only spoke Polish in the safety of home, despite their very fragmented attempts at English 

in public. Over time they started buying more boxed pastas and frozen vegetables and canned 

meats and stopped cooking pierogi and naleśniki. Two objects might share a trajectory, but when 

one of those trajectories differs early on by just a single degree, those two objects end up miles 

apart. 

 

One day at school I was reading at lunch when a commotion broke out. People began 

receiving their college acceptance letters. You were one of them. You were accepted to the big 

state university with much of your tuition covered in scholarships. I know your family was so 

proud. I went home on the bus that day and peeled a stack of letters out of my mailbox. The state 

university had addressed one to me, and inside, my own acceptance. My offer wasn’t as 

impressive as yours, but that was warranted. You were the more impressive of us. I found you in 

the hallways the next morning and told you about my acceptance. I asked which school you were 

planning on attending. I’ll never forget your response. 

“It’s going to be the university. It’s my dream school. Klaudia, we could be roommates.” 



52 

I didn’t know why you wanted me to be your roommate. You had so many other options. 

You could’ve selected a random roommate assignment and that person would have been the 

luckiest on campus, and that would have likely automatically made them a great roommate. But 

you asked me. We would never call each other close friends. We were friends by propinquity, 

and we happened to share a similar geographic background. We went through life in a similar 

chute, one more similar than anyone else we knew at that school, and I guess that was enough for 

you. 

 

 Fifteen years ago we started school together at the big state university.  

I brought mostly books; you brought only one I didn’t recognize. It was a children’s book 

perched on the floating shelf above your bed. 

“Can I have a look at that?” I asked while you were bringing your last car belongings in. 

“Sure,” you said cheerfully, handing it to me over the piles of boxes your family had 

helped you move in yesterday. “It was my favorite book as a child. My parents would read it to 

me before bed, about a girl who could go outside at night and scoop up stars from a lake. The 

stars are just reflections of course, but in this book, she could actually carry them around with 

her in a bucket or a jar.” 

I opened the cover, scrawled with well wishes and many volim tes in varying styles of 

handwriting. The next time I looked back up you had already unloaded each of your boxes. I 

must have read it seven times. It felt silly being that engrossed in a children’s book. The 

illustrations were captivating; mostly dark pages with some specks of white starlight. You must 

have noticed how long I lingered in there. 

“See why it’s my favorite?” you said, smiling. 



53 

You hung miniature paintings all around the left half of the room, your half, though you 

said it was as much mine as yours. They were mostly pastoral landscapes from photographs you 

took in Bosnia. A soft field of cottony sheep. The bridge in Mostar. A bustling market with your 

stooped over grandmother leaning into a crate of tomatoes. My walls were barren into midterms 

that first semester. 

“Klaudia, I made you a painting.” 

You handed me a whole sunflower field that day. 

“For your walls. It’s a type of orange sunflower called Evening Sun. It’ll look good 

above your dusty blue bedspread. Orange and blue are complementary.” 

We hung it together. You helped me position it in a way that would draw one’s gaze to 

the ocean of sunflowers above the rippling blue-gray sheets. It wasn’t bigger than a postcard, but 

it brightened the right half of the room in a way that was minimal. Like a single jewel on display, 

good enough to stand on its own, so good that placing it with anything else would only crowd it. 

“I like it very much, Lana.” 

“I’m going out with friends. There is an art show and jazz festival in the campus gardens 

this evening.” 

You grabbed my hands. 

“Will you come with us, Klaudia?” 

I wanted to come with you. I wanted to see the way your foot tapped in perfect rhythm 

with the jazz music while you stood in awe of a rosebush painting. But then I thought about your 

friends. That you would have a crowd of mes there, and I only had you. I had everything in you, 

and your everything was spread into dozens of mes. 

“I can’t tonight.” 



54 

You smiled. “Okay. Just know I’m always here for you Klaudia.” 

That would’ve sounded so patronizing from anyone else. 

That was much of our interaction at the university. I could be close enough to you to 

nurture myself secondhand with your exuberance, but pull away when I felt that sting. It was a 

careful balance of push and pull, of closeness and detachment, one I later realized I could have 

walked more finely. 

 

 Fourteen years ago we were in our second year at the university. 

We decided to be roommates again. You decided, and I shrugged my shoulders sure. 

Partially because I genuinely really wanted to live with you again, and partially because, after all 

the friends you had made since starting college, you still asked me. I had heard stories about 

other friends who tried to be roommates and it ended their decade-long friendship in a great 

splintering fight, the kind that does irreversible damage. But these were close friends, best 

friends. And we weren’t that. If it were anyone else, I would’ve known that living with a quiet 

acquaintance was a fortification for their closest friendships. I saw a lot of people choose to live 

with someone like me instead of a dear friend as a mode of preservation for their tightest inner 

circle. But I know I was not your sacrifice. 

The first night back we read your favorite, our favorite, children’s book together. It 

became a little tradition for us, reading that book out loud the night before the first day of classes 

each semester. It had a permanent spot on the shelf above your bed, and I hoped that no one else 

would ever ask about it. 



55 

 “Klaudia is an incredible observer,” you told one of your friends, Maggie, who visited 

our room one night. “She does so well in all her classes. She soaks in information like a sponge. 

She’s going to be a fantastic researcher someday.” 

You were like that, always pulling threads of goodness out of people and holding them 

admiringly on display. 

“She always has answers when I’m struggling with my math classes.” 

Maggie’s eyes widened. She sat on her folded legs next to you on the floor. “Can you 

help me with my physics homework?”  

The thought of that sent a wave of exhaustion over me. I started closing myself up in the 

library when I knew Maggie would be over. I did that on the rare occasion anyone reached out 

for me. I always wondered in those moments about energy exchanges. How some people 

seemingly abounded with endless energy. How they could take on multiple friendships and 

events and demands and still function. I thought then that I may have been born with some of the 

lowest energy reserves in the world. I hope I didn’t feed too much off of yours. 

 

You flourished at that big state university. You became quite prominent on campus. 

People weren’t weirded out by your consumption of fermented foods. You were always going to 

big social functions. You made friends quickly and deeply. You had known them at the 

university for a few weeks, but your roots with them were fast, deep shoots, so they might as 

well have been your decade-long friends. You had a way of wormholing time like that. You 

started dating people, an endeavor we both entered late, but one in which you led the way and I 

observed. “Just some fun flings” is all you ever called them, but they were enamored by you, and 

it was their hearts that always broke when it was over, never yours. You stayed in close touch 



56 

with your family, calling all your siblings every Wednesday and Sunday night and singing songs 

with them in Bosnian and showing them your paintings. You declared an art major and painted 

beautiful fruit paintings that hung romantically