Roses and Vines Marija Stajic (bio) When I was a year old, my mother wanted me dead. Dysentery killed my mother’s firstborn, Stanko, three days after her widest smile, while her stomach was still distended from childbirth, and she still spotted cotton cloths in her underwear. As nights melted into mornings and moons turned into suns, she gathered tears in her black apron that matched the color of her face and the thin skin under her eyes, while Gorchintzi women hugged her tightly and whispered in her ears: “God’s will, my dear Mika, God’s will. You’re young and healthy, you’ll have others.” Mika began to cling to her four-year-old Radica at the cemetery up on the hill overlooking her small, rocky, infertile land. She dug her hands and short nails into Radica’s small shoulders, as men slowly lowered the handmade casket the size of a shoebox. Mika didn’t let Radica out of her sight after the day of the funeral. The girl with curly brown hair slept in the matrimonial bed, between her parents, her chest turned to Mika, their breaths intertwined. A year later, I was born. And one July day, Radica vomited on Mika’s mud floor while I fed at my mother’s breast. “Mama, I’m so very cold,” she said meekly, her mouth as dry as wood, her small bony knees trembling. Mika weaned me off of herself that same instant and placed me in my crib, as I still sucked air like a fish out of water. Her face turned as white as the bleached sheet drying on a wire in the yard. Her eyes popped out of their sockets. She began whimpering like a wounded dog. Then she threw her knees to the floor, ignoring the pain and the warmth of the fresh blood rushing and staining, pushed her palms tightly together and looked at her rain-stained ceiling, her whole body convulsing in a prayer. “No, God, not again, please, not another one!” [End Page 108] I slept in a wooden crib my father had hacked himself from an oak that grew on our land. I was a small, sickly baby, not a typical meaty, sturdy, southern Serbian child. No one believed I would live. If I had been a boy, they would have named me Vuk, Wolf, to protect me from illnesses that didn’t have cures and madjije, precarious voodoo spells. But I was a girl, and my father named me Ruza, Rose. I was the second living child in my family, and as such I came into my family with fewer expectations, less of a burden than my sister. I also looked like a porcelain doll, as if I had been swapped with a gentle, aristocratic child, with my curly red hair and ivory, spider-web-fragile skin. As fragile and red as rose petals, my father thought when he saw me for the first time. And when my sister got sick, my mother would let me cry myself to sleep as she leaned over her pale Radica every few minutes, her breath shallow, her chestnut hair still smelling of milk. Before she got sick, Radica looked like a strong peasant child. She ate pickled cabbage and local peppers and garlic, and she helped my father fetch water for the cattle and my mother plant seeds. She should have been the one to live, to extend the lineage, to be there to take care of my parents in their old age, to throw the first batch of dirt on their coffins, to take over the land and cattle, and me. Every night since Radica had gotten sick, Mika carefully lowered her own bony body, limb by limb, joint by joint, as if she were pulling herself apart like a child would a doll, down to kneel next to Radica’s bed with its metal frame smelling of rust. Mika’s silky grayish hair reached her waist, her body wrapped in a white nightgown her mother-in-law had made her as an engagement gift six years ago. Her pink toenails dug into the cold floor, her tears rolled down her...