Insect armor

Waiting for the bus to Oleksandriya, a drunk man totters in front of a Roma woman. He is carrying on what appears to be, through his garbling mouth, a grotesque flirtation. “Oy!” he groans, clutching his head. “Oy!” He has almost fallen over. His eyes are heavy with skin-sacs. She – maybe 15 years old, maybe 40 – has the stunted, sharp look of these women who shuffle through train stations in felt house-slippers. They recite a plea, palm out, the way school children recite poems they don’t understand. Flat words colliding into each other. This woman carries an infant beneath her arm. It, too, seems ageless, very wrinkled, very quiet. It could be fetal, or an old man impossibly shrunken, or not a human child at all.

A young man, perhaps his grandson or nephew, is now standing behind them. He is acutely uncomfortable. Many people outside the bus station are watching. “Come on, our bus is coming.” He shifts from leg to leg, scowls at the sidewalk. The man takes out his wallet, fumbles, still stumbling, and hands her a five – “Milk for the baby,” he says to her beaming. Somehow he ends up behind me in line to board. “Go on, beautiful.” The muscles in my neck and back clench, unclench.

Warm weather brings out lechers, like cicadas from the ground. In the city, one of my friend’s neighbors tries to grab us and kiss us. We wriggle out of his ham-hands, telling him not to touch us. I worry for my friend, but I feel more anger and annoyance than fear. I, too, am cicada-like. My anger is insect armor.