The following is from Ismet Prcic’s Unspeakable Home. Prcic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1977 and immigrated to America in 1996. His first novel, Shards, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Chicago Sun-Times Best Book of the Year, as well as the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction.

I made myself at home in my mother. I drank her host-blood for nutrients, bathed in it for coziness and warmth, paying nothing in rent. I stretched out and elbowed for more and more space in her, imprinted my wanton shapes into her squishy organs as into a beanbag, leeched out and bogarted all of her accrued minerals. I tossed and turned, causing hot flashes and acid reflux, urges to vomit and actual vomitus. Her ribs were monkey bars, her bowel sack a trampoline. If she got merely near citrus, I secreted my alien chemicals which skirmished with her own, resulting in clusters of rash-bumps on her neck and breasts. I made her fart, snore, burp, and diarrhea at all the inopportune moments. In turn, I gained weight and sentience, got snug like a kidney in tallow, grooving to the muffled music of her inner workings.

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I was called upon to exist and cherished into manifestation, growth, and, of course, just like many a spoiled human cub, I overstayed my welcome. Nine and one quarter months, ten and a half fucking pounds in American measurements, chiefly in the bum and noggin.

When the time came to move out, I threw untoward parasitic tantrums, boarded myself up in utero by willfully tangling up in the umbilical web, and hung in there for dear life. They did things to induce my eviction, and after a twenty-two-hour campaign, I was made to leave home via bruised and battered limen, made to breathe that homeless outside air all by my lonesome. I wept as my warm mush hardened against the cold into a body, the same one I have spent forty-some years now trying to make feel like my mother felt back then. But no go, so far.

I’ve been incapable, so far, of making myself at home in me.

Out of the Gradina maternity ward in my father’s drunken arms I was carted into an orange Fiat Cinquecento, where my mother, still hospital-gowned and with no underwear on, sat in the back, in tears from pain and exhaustion. These tears were characterized as pissy because she made a comment that her husband forgot to bring her a change of clothes in his selfish excitement at having a boy. Not a peck on the lips from him until the next day.

My father’s sister drove and squealed, lambasting my mother for daring to be wounded in this way, in this particular moment, as if she weren’t a woman, a mother of three, herself.

I bawled at all of them, especially Aunty, irked by novel sensations. The two-bedroom apartment on Titova Street was full of strange relatives and sharp, hangoverish sounds and smells. A throbbing blur of kitschy late-seventies color palette—browns, oranges, and greens.

They plopped me on the fleece surface of a comforter in a darkened bedroom, and Aunty butted in to unswaddle me, dismissing my mother in her own home, her need to hold me. I promptly pissed right up and into her face.

*

Time passed in the two-bedroom on Titova Street, bringing staunch, everlasting, everloving, fucking change. In time I quit my sedulous fussing, realizing the fettle I was in, that there was no arguing with is, with now, that every so-called home was but a sojourn between changes, any way you sliced it.

Change was the name of the game and the game was compulsory so I made a home of my mother’s breasts when they were near, my oaken cradle when I chilled, my blue blanket when I slept. I made a home of the orange shag carpet like a sprawling lake in the living room, my block toys—sampans in a storm—strewn about.

I made home inside my dreams too, hoping to bring back the good old times, prodding into the pliancy of dreamstuff, striving to conjure it into my mother’s womb again, my ears wide open, hoping for the hum of her aorta. I’d send my protuberances out to goad, expecting sweet, loving pushback, just to find nothing but more and more of that flapdoodle dreams are made of. I did take note that the dreamstuff was just like the stuff of the two-bedroom on Titova Street—continuously mid-change.

At some point—when my turtle expired in a furniture-moving accident, I think—I was told of heaven, which sounded eerily like my first home—in the feel of it, at least—and I’ve spent years thinking of it that way, like it was a place to one day find again, go back to, somehow. But home, like heaven, is not a place. Land and walls have fuck all to do with home. We’re born into lingering homelessness. Returns are as absurd as raptures. Who returns? To what?

The problem really lies with the nature of language. It allows us to call home places that only resemble it, to call love feelings that only come close to it, to round up 0.784 to 1 because it’s easier to live in the world of integers. It’s easier to live with ourselves when we can justify our selfishness by calling our wants our needs. We even limit something we call reality to a consensus of realities, rounding up intricacies of individual experiences into a common one that is more painlessly negotiated. Go us!

When we were new growths, eager to escalate, to be big already, to have that grown-up power already, my cousin Eko—who didn’t read or dread consequences or do any kind of arts and crafts but loved to throw aerosol cans we found in the riverbed into leaf-fires, eager-squatting at the base of some knobbed willow with his hands over his ears, waiting for that giddy boom that was to come—this troublemaker, earnestly believed that cartoonish U-shaped magnets we saw on Looney Tunes right before the evening news on Yugoslavia’s Channel One would attract objects that were not necessarily made of metal, like, in this particular case, pigeon flesh.

We were outside of our grandfather’s house on Jalska Street, in the country, where I spent my summer holidays and where he lived. It was a balmy, birdsong-choked, bugs-kamikazeing-into-your-head-holes, arachnids-trying-to-topple-you-like-in-Star-Wars kind of afternoon when a miscalculating country pigeon flew full speed into the next-door neighbor’s living room window and thudded hard like you wouldn’t believe. The birds, the bumblebees, the breeze, they were all stunned quiet.

We squatted behind the hedge-swallowed wire fence and through it saw the creature’s gray breast heave then quit in the weeds between two properties. The way its wing fanned out in plumage looked like a curtsey.

“If I had that big Acme magnet from the toons,” Eko whispered, “I could . . . zoom in that pigeon right here, get it right onto the spit?”

“What?” I spat. “That’s not how—”

That’s when the widow Umija, the next-door neighbor—a slatternly Baba Yaga and the reason why we really ducked behind the hedges in the first place—popped into the frame of her window to investigate. We went prone in time; she didn’t see us. Just stood there, head on a swivel like a human turret, searching the scene for culprits. When she shut the lace curtains, it wasn’t with malice but like a fisherwoman casting a net. One could still monitor through the lace.

We hated her because every time we played soccer in the commons in front of her house and our ball went over the fence and into her yard, she would stoop and creep through the overgrowth till she found it, raise it up into the air just long enough for us to see it and hope that it would be thrown back to us, then stab it to death against her thigh with a boning knife, muttering hate. It wasn’t until recently that my mother told me Umija had lost her man, two of her three children, and eleven brothers and sisters to tuberculosis.

There were no homeless people in my grandfather’s village.

Every madcap, certifiable, down-on-luck, heartbroken, disillusioned, abused, henpecked, handicapped, dead-inside, shell-shocked, disregarded, misunderstood, bipolar, fucked-with-during-childhood, can’t-face-the-real-world fetid sot or poet, nomad-at-heart or piddler-about, village idiot or slut, they all had a home with a cot. Who paid for that? an American would have asked. Normies paid for that. Normies who knew that their normalcy amounted to nothing but luck. Normies who knew that they were two or three bad turns away from becoming just like that. They suffered them, paid for their meals, laughed at them, and thanked their lucky stars. They paid for it like they would a mulct. These were their lunatics, their fuckups. Unlike city folk, they knew their community and could tell a bad zit from a chancre.

During those hoary, slow-motion summers, Eko and I could hear the jangle of a horse-drawn buggy way before we could even spot it surface out of the green. We’d mad-dash to the turn in the dirt-and-pebble road to see if we could beg our way onto it for a jaunt. A carter would often just salute to us and keep the horse at a trot. But sometimes he’d slow down and let us clamber on and—for the stretch of the road from in front of Grandfather’s house on Jalska Street, across the froggy Jala, through the neighborhood of Žabljak, all the way to where the dirt road met the asphalt leading either left or right into the world at large, which was where we knew we had to get off—we felt like something was happening, something was actually going on, in our lives.

Once, there was a tuber-shaped man in the back of the buggy with us, barefoot and crammed into a straining, buttoned-up coat, way too small to keep all of him in, and topped off with a French beret, of all things. He ponged of death and had a huge moist mouth like a beartrap and distinct grooves in the fat of his face. Some momentous chompige too—a toothy living-and-breathing caricature.

“The air-people will come in hives,” he said, his black eyes burning, “and kill us all with their air-machines.”

He was known as Idriz Belegija, a tediously familiar occurrence in the village. Belegija is a piece of rock or maybe metal (it’d be telling if it contained lead, because we all know how heavy metals impact sweaty human skin on a hat brim, though I don’t know shit about agriculture) that reapers would wet and use to sharpen their scythes in the fields. During harvest time the hills around the village sounded like dozens of samurai continuously sheathing and unsheathing deadly swords.

“The locusts are gonna come and they won’t be grasshoppers.”

“C’moan, Idrizaga,” piped in that particular carter. “Shut that shit up in front of the kids!”

But Idriz beamed at us, his jowls slightly trembling. His eyes never left ours and we didn’t know where to look but back.

By the carpenter’s house Idriz spotted a covered woman working the pump at a well, stiffly bending up and down to keep the stream steady. He stuck his face in his armpit and took a coveting whiff. “I’d sure like to smell her personal exhaust before it’s all over,” he whispered, his shoulders drawn up, trying not to be heard by the carter. Eko and I couldn’t help but look. The woman stood up and bent down, stood up and bent down, and was gone as the buggy made a right turn around a foundationless, slapdash little house with no facade, its two concrete steps leading to the front door at least ten inches separated from it, sinking into the yard.

“If you want to see a show,” Idriz said, “and learn something,” his eyebrows dancing, working the two-finger piston of his right hand into the raspy cylinder of his left, “that’s the place.”

And at the end of that year I would see, through a hole in the wall of the slapdash house, a mentally disabled man with a bony pelvis batter away at the backside of a mentally disabled woman, wearing a diadem made of corn husks, a show that I still cannot currycomb from my—child’s—eye. I learned nothing from seeing this, except to stay away from sex as long as possible.

The real lesson came later in adulthood when, again, my mother told me the final chapter of their story, these two intellectually limited neighbor kids who fell in love, and whose parents couldn’t keep them apart, and so built them a hovel where they could be the way they were. That they kept the woman medicated so she couldn’t conceive, as her lover was a funny braggart who invited villagers to come and watch them make love. That love found its way and that they had a little girl who miraculously was born without her parents’ afflictions, who raised herself and her parents while going to school, tricked her father, at age thirteen, into having a vasectomy, finished a vocational high school, joined the department of tourism and catering trade in Tuzla, and moved to Neum on the Adriatic Sea, sending money home on a monthly basis.

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From Unspeakable Home by Ismet Prcic. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster.