Gorno Selo

Our whole generation of girls is barren. Our grandmothers have told us don't do this, don't do that, but they are wives tales and we dismiss them, even our mothers dismiss their stories and superstitions. This is the modern age! We sit on the cold concrete to watch a basketball game at the school. We let our shirts drift up and expose our lower backs and peach skin stomachs as we practice our faces to our phones, lips pursed, sighing when our grandmothers yank at our shirts to tuck them in our jeans. We sit on the stone steps without a thought to first laying down a protective blanket. It is years before we realize what has happened, when we begin to marry and no babies appear. A sixteen-year-old, a twenty-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, girls in the prime of our lives, and not a single baby among us. Families hesitate to marry their sons to girls from our village, even when our mothers pull up our shirts to show the body suits we wear under our shirts–no breeze has ever touched my daughter's skin. Divorce is not allowed and one man in an accident shoots his wife as she returns from the barn, milk and blood soaking into the cobblestones and a second marriage to a girl from another village, a baby boy nine months later. One girl takes a picnic with her husband's family and never comes home, six months later we find her after the winter thaws, curled in the embrace of a tree's roots with her face caved in. A third floats to the top of her family's well after no one reports her missing a week, skin bloated to the seams and near purple. Her husband burns the marriage certificate and photographs of their wedding and says that there was never any such ceremony, he never even heard the girl's name, and he makes a good marriage to a girl whose family lives in the city and gives him a job in their store.

The boys in our town drift away as they begin to marry. By tradition they should stay here, in their family homes, but no one wants to risk their own wives or daughters being tainted by our story. Our brothers move away, the families with younger daughters leave the village for visits to their relatives, leaning with the weight of the woven bags into which they've packed their homes. We lay blankets on the ground before sitting, wear body suits under our jeans and t-shirts and long sweaters, though it is too late for us. As our grandmothers lay dying they ask what did we expect, they couldn't have been more clear in telling us what would happen. Don't think promaja doesn't exist either, one good cross-breeze and we will find ourselves with faces paralyzed on top of our frozen ovaries. They join our grandfathers in the cemetery sitting above our village. Without their anchor our parents begin to drift, too, they tell us there is no future in this town. The farmers have to leave for other villages to sell their produce. The three stores at the village center, all opening out from the ground floors of their owners' homes, one selling food, one plates and pots and rugs, and one tools, begin to keep more limited hours as their owners move out of the village and return a few days a week to sit in their old homes selling us what we need. Then after a year they close altogether, no one tells us and we notice only when a week has passed with no former neighbors walking stiff through the town square. A teenager from the lower village bikes to the square one day a week with a cart filled with milk, eggs, tomatoes, onions, dried white beans and lentils, rice and pasta. Then one week he stops for no reason we can learn, and we have to go to his village down the mountain for their weekly market on Saturday. It...