First Person

Some Kind of Blues

My mother and father spoke Serbian. We whispered it at home like it was a secret language devised for our house and family alone. We spoke it and yelled in it. We ate our meals with it. The television talked in a different language, but we used Serbian in the commercials. My mother tore strips of flesh off us with it. I went to school and spoke English and crossed the border every afternoon at about three thirty without ever noticing. Walked past a woman in her car outside a milk-bar one day. She was yelling out the open window,…

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