Virtual Blog Tour: A Cute Tombstone, by Zarina Zabrisky

Zarina Zabrisky is the author of two short story collections IRON and A CUTE TOMBSTONE (Epic Rites Press) and a novel WE, MONSTERS (Numina Press).  Zabrisky’s work has appeared in over thirty literary magazines and anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Nepal. She is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of 2013 Acker Award. Read more about the author at zarinazabrisky.com. You can purchase A CUTE TOMBSTONE here!

Zarina Zabrisky Explores the Portrait of Russia & Its Citizens in A CUTE TOMBSTONE

A young woman named Lyn, who is residing in America, flies back to Russia to bury her mother. Eerie, funny, A CUTE TOMBSTONE is a dark satire on a bureaucratic and brainwashed country—or state of mind. After deciding on a closed casket for her mother’s funeral–which is not what Russians traditionally do, we are told–she goes to the Ritual Agency to order her mother’s portrait to be placed by the casket. Lyn brings a few different photos of her mother to choose from: with blond hair in Paris at a music award ceremony just before she passed away, with black hair as a college basketball star, and on a beach with Lyn’s father. Lyn assess the waiting room of the Ritual Agency while she waits her turn:

“Dead women and men from the advertising display fixed their steely eyes on me, frowning. This was a no-smiling zone. I could imagine their lives: At six, they probably played with German trains and tanks–war souvenirs. At eighteen they were getting married in dresses made from curtains, airy veils and ill-fitted military uniforms–the women pregnant already. At sixty, they had great-grandchildren and died of heart attacks and lung cancer. I read samples of obituaries: ‘Deeply respected veteran of labor and the loving grandfather–’”

FROM ZARINA:

What is a personal portrait? Does it mirror the personality? Do facial features reflect or represent the “feel” of a person and our knowledge of loved ones? I’d say not the beauty, but the truth, is in the eye of the beholder. Lyn wants the “feel” of her mother and faces a problem of choosing from the different roles her mother had had in life. She is pretty much confronted with the impossible choice–we have a thousand, a million faces, and the truth is as elusive as sunlight. Only the heart can see.

The psychological portrait of any nation is formed by its experiences.  By its economy, its climate, even its food.  But, most of all, by its history. The faces of the deceased in the morgue tell the story of Russia, the long gone and recent: from eight hundred years of serfdom and illiteracy to a sudden switch to militant atheism and lack of private property. There is only one mention of Lyn’s mother’s marriage: the photo of her and Lyn’s father on the beach, in love, looking at each other. Partly, I intended to show that there was love, partly, and created “presence by absence,” but it is also important to state that at the time photo-cameras were rare and luxury object. Even at a time that I was growing up we only had black-and-white photos, and we developed them at home, in the darkened room, tubs of odd-smelling solutions on the desk, dipping wet white squares in, watching the ghostly shapes and faces coming out of the paper… those photographs were hand-made with love, and kept in boxes, with corners curved… There were not so many, really.

Lyn’s mother would be growing up right after the World War II, after the siege of Leningrad, and that meant that at least one–or more likely a few–members of her family died a terrible death of starvation, and the rest have survived the unspeakable horror of three years of extreme frost, the giant city infested with rats, no heat nor electricity, corpses piled up in streets, cannibalism, and infanticide. To add to the post-traumatic stress, Stalin’s cult of personality reached its peak in 40s and early 50s. These were really dark ages.

Even the toys add to the portrait of Russia for readers. I still have my father’s only toy from these times: a wooden stick almost, with painted eyes and mouth. It’s a bear. Lyn’s parents would be growing up right after the war, in 40s, and is a survivor.  Their mentality is formed by horrors of Stalin’s man hunt and the fear of Siberian labor camp.  If you live in the society, you are a part of it.  The country’s history is written in the dead people’s faces.