Something of Fleas
by May Cannon
The Pianist is late and so instead of rehearsal we settle for lunch. Khurshedsho’s in a mood and so again we’re at Pinta and again we’re eating meat. He’s moved here recently, Khurshed tells us––the pianist, that is––and he’s settled down. He’s fleeing the war, the one in Ukraine, the one he cannot imagine fighting in, and so he’s moved here from Russia, and Khurshedsho knows something of that, he says. He knows what it is to flee war, he did it himself, and he understands too what it is to flee war and in its place find yourself in the arms of a beautiful woman, as the Pianist has, as Khurshed once did.
She’s in labor––the wife of the Pianist, the woman with whom he has been married, here, in Kyrgyzstan––and that is why, Khurshedsho explains over his steak, he is to be late, and Khurshed knows something of that too, of children, because he too knows something of war, of flight, and he tells us that the Pianist is almost here that he is not allowed in the hospital where there are not to be guests, that instead we’ll eat, and the Pianist’s wife is beautiful as is he but he’ll, Khurshedsho tells us, be damned if she hasn’t been ready to burst for weeks and it’s good, he supposes, that she’s there in the hands of professionals but it is a disappointment that the Pianist cannot be with her. That he must instead join us for lunch.
And the Pianist, he tells us, is a man and he know something of men, Khurshedsho, he knows something of men because when he first began to know something of war and flight and children he was one––nineteen. And yes well maybe he was a man but of course he was. He must have been, he had to be, he tells us from the head of the table but had he not been a man already? Before he flew into the arms of a beautiful woman? Before his first child, before nineteen? For, he says, he had already been called a man once, by the woman he had loved, yes the woman, he says, this time as if only to himself, before he had fled, when he had been but fifteen.
But the Pianist too knows of these things, these things, Khurshed says, that he too knows something of, and he will be arriving soon, the Pianist, as his wife is in labor, and he says that they, like he, are not more than fleas. We, he says into his plate, are fleas and I know something of fleas I know that we leap, he tells us, from the backs of great bears.
The Pianist, too, knows something of fleas. And something of bears. But today he knows something of flight and birth and as he knows it his fingers drum against the table. A fantasia on wood as he waits, like us, for his food.
May is a Bishkek-based writer, editor, and teacher. He is a recent college graduate, and currently teaches mathematics at the American University of Central Asia.
‘Something of Fleas’ won first place in The Prose Poem’s 2024 Prose Poetry Competition.