Egyszer volt, hol nem volt, az Operenciás tengeren is túl, Piroska and the Wolf heard the workers unearth a bomb. The men had been digging the basement in sweaty, mustached shifts punctuated with “Morning, Pisti” and “Move the kibaszott wheelbarrow” for days, and she and the Wolf had dug along in tandem, hidden behind the corner of the house. In the beginning, she’d liked playing in the piles of dirt and broken bricks that came with their new home, liked imagining her hands to have claws like all the others, but after her fingers remained her own no matter how much she dug, Piroska had begun to find it all a bore. Until the cussing started.
Piroska recognized the cussing—it was the same as what her grandmother used while driving—but the most important words were a mystery. She kicked the Wolf in the shin, tugged on a shoulder, elbowed the Wolf in the side.
“What does—”
Shushing her, the Wolf elbowed her back and crept to the corner to listen to the workers where they’d started smoking by the fence. One of them was talking on the phone. “Igen, it’s another one. Második világháború, legalább a hundred kilos. Tell Emese…”
Piroska lost the rest of the sentence as the words compounded, familiar fragments morphing into new combinations that made no sense. The Wolf surged forward in understanding, rounding the corner to stare down at where the workers had stopped their shoveling. Scared of being seen, Piroska stood with the Wolf between her and the workers, the mystery just barely in sight.
It was unimpressive at first glance: the same yellow-green color as the peppers their grandmother kept putting in her sandwiches, it was caked in enough dirt and clay that it was reduced to a lumpy oblong. If the Wolf hadn’t told her, excitement sparking between them, she’d never have guessed.
Piroska teetered on the edge of backing away but the Wolf grabbed a stick to poke the bomb with and suddenly the mustard color became a steel gray and the fins grew back onto the thin end from where they were missing, even spinning a little.
“The fins don’t spin like that, Piroska, it’s not a plane,” the Wolf interrupted her, starting to pick at the hard shell with her claws. “It has a little light, like the ones at the Balaton that blink faster when there’s a storm coming. It means it’s about to explode.”
“Hey! Sipirc!” a worker snarled, dropping his cigarette as he started towards them. “Don’t play with that.”
“Girls!” Their grandmother’s call echoed through the yard and they both scrambled around to the back before she could let out another howl. Her floury hands propped on her hips and sharp ears pricked, she squinted at them before gesturing to the back garden, shooing them in the direction of the mural. “Let them do their work. I’ve just put a batch in the oven. Play where I can see you.”
“Nagymama, they said they found another one!” Piroska was too enthused to notice the Wolf’s pinch in her side until it was too late. Her grandmother’s frown was foreboding, the same kinds of clouds that had settled on her brow when she’d seen the splintering branch they’d been using as a swing last week.
“I can’t understand you when you speak like that,” her grandmother said, feigning ignorance.
Piroska tried to remember what she’d said, what they’d said, the words jumbling in her mind as she struggled to find the right tongue in her mouth.
“We’ll bring some figs in!” the Wolf called, the words sounding just right from between such sharp teeth. Flicking Piroska in the arm, she switched back. “Let’s go.”
Eager to escape before her grandmother noticed her fumbling, Piroska followed the Wolf towards the mural. Unlike their neat, unfenced lawn on the other side of the sea, the back garden was a barely contained jungle: the grapevines a tangled thicket that served as the rearguard for the two fig trees that their mother had painstakingly pruned while the rest were left gnarled and decaying, the ground underneath covered in the leaf litter and detritus of decades. She missed their old trampoline, left behind because it was too big to fit in the shipping container according to their mom, but the mural on the high wall that formed the border to the right was almost as fun. The wall was really the side of a house covered in a smear of colors that formed an ocean sunrise; peeling patches of plaster had created a row of undulating clouds that spread across the horizon, leaving what lay behind them a mystery. Growing in front of it was a tree bent in half; the trunk had bowed from the weight of its heavy fruit in the past and formed a low arch that swung its branches in the wind like the skirts of the dress the Wolf got to wear for her néptánc recital.
“I want to play ‘A Világ Vége,’” Piroska said, rubbing the spot where the Wolf had flicked her, out of reflex rather than any real pain. “You said we could do that if the workers were boring.”
“What if instead we play…” the Wolf mused, climbing onto the bent tree’s back with long legs contorted to reach the best footholds, scratched hands scrabbling at the bark.
“I’ll give you one of my pogi,” Piroska blurted out immediately, knowing the Wolf’s ways of twisting favors into debts. The cheese pastries were Piroska’s favorites, with none of the poppyseed that everyone else looked at her in judgment for disliking, and the loss of even one was a high price she was willing to pay.
“Pogi? What is that? You mean pogácsa?”
Piroska shrugged, then nodded. The other kids had called it that during their tízórai break, a word she thought she’d finally decoded. But if it was wrong…
“Deal,” the Wolf said, crouching down on the apex of the tree, where the burden of its bounty had splintered the bark like a cooked virsli’s skin splitting open. A fanged smile stretched across teeth that gleamed with wires in the dappled sunlight, marking a bargain struck, and the Wolf started the game.
“Sing me a song from across the Operenciás sea and beyond the clouds,” the Wolf ordered.
It was the hardest part of the game; everyone in class knew them all by heart except Piroska, who mouthed along to the words she knew. But they’d sung a short one about the sun just yesterday that she could still remember.
“It’s not édes, it’s fényes. How can a sun be sweet?” the Wolf said, frowning. She stood up precariously on the tree’s curve, her hackles raised. Piroska tilted her head back to look up, knowing she had to have a good answer or the Wolf would stop the game to quiz her about her vowel homework, but her mind was still stuck on the bomb resting in its earthen shell on the other side of the house. If it exploded, were they still close enough to die, too?
“Because it’s a bomb!” She quailed slightly under the Wolf’s annoyed glare but kept quiet for the verdict on her last-ditch idea.
“It’s a sweet bomb,” the Wolf repeated slowly. Piroska expected an end to the game, but the Wolf continued, “Like a fruit. Sweet with the first bite, until bang, it’s bright like the sun. You have to watch where you step then. Look! There’s one by your foot!”
Piroska squealed at the Wolf’s sudden shout, kicking something soft with her toes. The chaos of the backyard had become dangerous, rife with unseen explosives that lurked in the boughs and beneath the trees, now home to bunches of them that filled the heat of the summer afternoon with soft ticking and blinking lights that winked amidst the leaves.
“Bombs don’t have to tick,” the Wolf reminded her but then seemed to warm to the idea. “Only the ripe ones do.”
“Ripe ones?” Piroska wrinkled her nose in confusion and finally stopped squirming in place.
“Like these!” Straightening up, the Wolf pounced from the top of the arch and landed beneath the gnarled branches of a meggy tree, bombs popping in tandem with the stomping of sandaled feet.
“Shouldn’t you be dead?” She knew from experience that if she’d done the same, the consequences would have been much worse.
“It’s because they’re too small, and my feet too big,” the Wolf replied, pressing one between her fingers until the red juice ran down to her knuckles. Picking the seed out, the Wolf chewed on the remaining flesh with a grin. “You should be glad pomegranates can’t grow here. When they explode, it’s like fireworks.”
They had trampled a thin trail through the garden over the last two months since they moved in and Piroska stepped slowly onto it while keeping an eye out for any more threats nearby. Her heel sunk into gooey flesh, a hard pit digging into the sole even as she tried to wipe it off. Catching the Wolf following behind her, she startled, the line of another song coming to mind: Ne nézz hátra, jön a farkas, nagyot üt a hátadra. But she’d already looked back, and now the wolf was coming. She clutched her knee.
“It’s gone! My leg’s gone!” The shoe was all that was left, the straps tangling in the weeds as it was flung aside. “I’m going to bleed out!”
“Now that’s what I want to hear!” The Wolf howled with laughter, glee evident in every sound. Stalking closer, the Wolf grabbed her by the arm and dragged her towards the row of grapevines, Piroska hopping along on her remaining leg.
“Are you going to hit me on the back?” she asked, almost overbalancing in the wake of her amputation.
“What? No.” The Wolf looked at her, confused. Maybe she’d remembered that song wrong too. “When you’ve already lost a quarter of yourself? I have a better idea,” the Wolf said once they’d reached the shade of a fig tree. She found herself hoisted atop the Wolf’s shoulders and shoved unceremoniously amidst the branches. “Na, pick some! Now that you’ve lost your leg, you won’t mind losing some fingers either, right?”
“But…” Piroska spluttered as the leaves bashed her face and she scraped her cheek against a branch. The bombs hung in fat teardrops around her, their ticking overlapping in her ears until it was a long stream of continuous sound.
“I’ll drop you if you don’t,” the Wolf threatened, shuffling under the weight as Piroska tried to find a comfortable way to sit.
Grabbing a branch, Piroska pulled it towards her and started twisting the bombs off by their stems, filling the pockets of her red hoodie until she had to admit that even her hands were full.
“I can’t pick anymore,” she protested as the Wolf squeezed her ankles, though she wasn’t sure it was on purpose considering how hard the Wolf was trembling.
“I can’t carry you anymore either, you sózsák,” the Wolf ground out, crouching slowly and finally falling backward. Piroska, hands still clutching the bombs, tumbled to the ground even as the Wolf sprang to her feet.
“Your other leg’s gone too!”
Piroska could feel the flattened mess at her hip, the pocket’s fabric not enough to keep one of the bombs from detonating. How many figs could fit into the one in front of the house? It was at least a couple watermelons in size. Luckily, there were none of those in the garden. Though how could she possibly set one off? She didn’t have the same claws as the Wolf, after all.
“It was like that before,” she said, frowning.
“No, it wasn’t.”
“It’s just squish—”
“Girls, come eat!”
“Itt a vége, fuss el véle!” the Wolf announced the end of the game, loping off towards the back door on long legs that ate up the garden’s distance. Piroska was slower, taking a detour to find her shoe before hobbling to the kitchen and dumping the figs on the counter. Next to them, the pogácsa were arranged in rows, cooling on the rack, cheese glistening in the cross-hatched tops. Piroska touched the side of one quickly, tapping the crust before snatching it while her grandmother’s back was turned.
At the edge of the table steamed the misshapen ones they were allowed to eat before dinner. The Wolf cradled one in clawed hands and stared at Piroska with hungry eyes.
Waiting until their grandmother began to wash the figs, Piroska held out the stolen pogácsa and watched it disappear from her grasp, leaving behind only a slight stickiness from the grease on the bottom.
She began to dig the pulpy remains of the squished fig out of her pocket, her hoodie stained and sticky, when a scrap of the perfect pogácsa came into view.
“Why?” She quickly grabbed it from the Wolf’s hand.
“Wounded soldiers need to eat some pogi too, especially when they don’t have legs.” The Wolf shrugged, braced teeth sinking into her half.
Piroska copied the Wolf, the taste of cheese filling her mouth, and her teeth became a little sharper.