The Second Winter Read Free Page A

cut him,” she said. “You made him bleed.”
    “He was hurting her.”
    “What?”
    “The rooster,” Julian repeated. “He was hurting her.”
    But Polina didn’t hear him. The memory of her uncle Czeslaw’s hands on her rib cage, lifting her, overcame her. She had left her house — earlier today, only one or two hours before — and she had started down the road to find Julian at the barn, as they had agreed. Her uncle had ridden up behindher on his bicycle and asked her to climb onto the bike behind him. She hadn’t wanted to, but she hadn’t resisted when he hoisted her up. As lithe as she was, she was too heavy to be carried like a child. The steel rack behind his seat gouged her skin. She hated the feeling of his waist beneath her fingers, but she didn’t have any choice. If she didn’t hold on to him while he was pedaling, she would have fallen. The cobblestones became a blur below the tires. They crossed the bridge, then wound through the streets on the other side of the river to the apartment where Czeslaw lived with his wife and two ugly sons. Her uncle squeezed her neck as he led her up the stairs. The rancid smell of dirty laundry assaulted her. The light had been dim. Czeslaw brought her through the kitchen into the bedroom where he and her aunt slept together on a mattress on the floor. She had never been in this room before, and it felt foreign to her, as if she had entered a different apartment altogether, one that didn’t belong to this same city she knew as her home. There was a doll lying on the mattress that caught Polina’s eye.
    After that, the next thing Polina could remember was Czeslaw sitting in a wobbly chair beside the mattress, pulling on his shoes. He pointed at the doll, which was now on the floor. It had a face made of china, hair cut from a horse’s tail, a body stitched together in silk, stuffed with cotton. When she didn’t move, he picked it up, shoved it into her arms.
It’s for you
, he told her.
Don’t you want it? It’s a little girl. See? Just like you are
. Then he had lifted the doll’s red dress to show her the fabric body underneath, and his laughter had made her shiver. Beneath the dress, the doll’s torso and legs had the clumsy shape of a cow udder.
    “He was trapping one of the chickens against the fence,” Julian said.
    “What?” she managed.
    Julian liked the way her lip stretched taut over her chipped tooth and uneven bite. The incisors on either side of her front teeth jutted into the skin, turning her upper lip white. It reminded him of Polina as he remembered her years before, with one front tooth missing, the other not yet fully developed. “He was pecking at her. Look.”
    She followed his finger to one of the hens at the far side of the coop. Its head and neck were bald of feathers where it had been attacked.
    “He was going to kill her. If I didn’t throw the rock, he would have eaten her, I think.” Julian was still gripping the second rock. He had made his point to Polina. He lifted his arm again, took aim.
    “Don’t,” she said.
    Julian squinted at his friend. Hadn’t she heard him? “He needs to learn his lesson,” he said.
    Polina shook her head. “Just don’t,” she said. “I don’t care what he’s done. Just don’t hurt him anymore.”
    Julian let the rock slip from his hand. It landed on the hard, dry earth at their feet with a quiet thud. He fingered a small object in his pocket. “I was going to give you something,” he said. “Now I don’t want to.”
    “What is it?”
    Julian tightened his fingers around the smooth chunk of raw amethyst at the bottom of his pocket. “I found it in the river this morning,” he said. When he drew out his hand, the worn stone caught the sunlight like a jewel.
    Polina took it carefully from his palm. She didn’t thank him for the gift, but just slid it into her own pocket.
    “I thought maybe you would want to keep it,” Julian said.
    Realizing that she had dropped the doll,