He reached for the photograph of Mihail. Turned it face down.
“It’s a place,” he lied. “A garden where everything grows wrong.”
Year two: his sister, Nino, started seeing the boy from the hills. A gentle one. Until he wasn’t. Until Lasha came home to find her staring at a wall, her hands folded like broken wings.
One evening, a girl knocked on the print shop door. Tamar. She was the owner’s niece—curly hair, a scar on her lip from a childhood fall. She didn’t ask why he was hiding. She brought khachapuri and cold limonati . the fruit of grisaia qartulad
Tamar didn’t flinch. She unwrapped the bread, broke it in half, gave him the larger piece. “In our village, we say: nu geda, grizeli kargia —don’t be afraid, the bitter is good. It teaches the mouth to recognize honey.”
That was year one.
– The End
“You talk in your sleep,” she said. “You say ra grisaia —what is Grisaia?”
In the print shop’s back room, Lasha kept a single photograph: Mihail, his brother, in military uniform. Killed in Abkhazia '93. Not by a bullet. By a landmine made in a factory that no longer exists. The fruit passed down: father’s blood, sister’s silence, brother’s scattered bones.
He almost laughed. “Because you don’t leave. The tree follows you. The roots are in your lungs.” He reached for the photograph of Mihail
თბილისი, 2024
The old print shop smelled of rust and forgotten tea. Lasha had been hiding there for three weeks, sleeping on a pile of Soviet-era posters.