We carry the bride’s coffin on our backs, hastily constructed by our frail hands from what was once her litter. The starving season is a killer, even for brides brought from afar to marry kings and princes, dowries of gold and spices carried with them through the streets of hollow wasting faces. The bride’s hand maidens walk ahead of us, adorned in white, the color of weddings in their country, but to us, it has always been the color of mourning, the color of death, the color of the snow that comes to take our children. We step in tandem, careful not to drop the corpse, even as the air itself turns bitter and blue in the cold, and still yet we walk northward, to where tears freeze as you weep, and your heart stutters, for the air is fractal.…
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You gotta get a good rock. A big one. But not huge. Come down the hill to the end of our grass. There. An “X” marks the spot — we’ve got lotsa rocks around it. It’s not an “X” really, but mommy says the place is “precious,” so it’s kinda like treasure. So you grab one rock. It’s smooth, fits in your hand, and it’s not too heavy.
We need paint. Come up the hill to my house. Shh! Mommy’s being quiet in her chair. We can get some nail polish off the dresser in her room. It’s a kind of paint. Mommy won’t mind. She doesn’t see me when it’s her quiet time. Look, here’s a good red one beside the picture frame. The photo’s kinda old.…
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My daughter has a lot of demands when I want her to go to bed. She’s supposed to be in bed at eight, but I usually don’t fall asleep until after midnight. I give her enough attention during the day; you’d think she’d be tired enough to fall asleep when she should. But no.
I put her down at eight, but she asks me for a glass of water at eight-twenty. It has to be a clean glass, and it has to have the right amount of water. If I don’t do it right, she gets cranky.
At eight fifty-two, she’ll ask me to read her a story from the leather-bound tome on the stand in the corner. It has lots of stories, but she only wants to hear the same one.…
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She met the monster under her bed before she could form words. She was, however, at that age, rather adept at crawling. Evading the gaze of her parents, she reached her bedroom within seconds, past her crib, and headed straight for the eyes hovering in the darkness under what would eventually become her bed.
The eyes that met hers were a deep blue, with rusty streaks like forks of lightning. At first, the large eyes recoiled from her approach. The baby stopped and tilted her head slightly. She took one shuffle closer and reached out a small hand with short, chubby fingers. The monster slowly extended its neck and sniffed at the outstretched hand. It opened its mouth, revealing rows of yellowed, pointed teeth before unfurling its tongue to take a tentative lick at the substance stuck to the open palm.…
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The ground beneath her welcomed each footfall gratefully. The grass was saturated with the most recent rain. The rains came more and more frequently these days which Martha knew, after twenty-nine years in this town, meant spring was approaching. Martha basked in the little sunlight that peaked out behind the thin, white clouds above. The smell of rain-soaked earth rose up to her nose with each step toward town. The bare trees were just starting to bud, small little things, hardly visible on the dark brown boughs. The clatter of wooden wheels on the road to Marly accompanied her into town.
Martha longed to take off her shoes, lift the hem of her blue dress and stomp off into the mud, letting it push its way between her toes.…
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Arise, my darling;
My fair one, come away!
For now the winter is past,
The rains are over and gone.
—The Song of Songs 2:10-11 (NJPS)
Jakob Wasserman’s soul scrutinized the members of the Burial Society as they began to clean under his nails and between his toes and to cut away several pieces of dried skin from his corpse. He asked the mal’akh ha-mavet if it would be all right to stay longer and observe the men working; he was curious. The angel consented and told Jakob they did not need to leave until after the burial.
The men preparing Jakob’s body were earnest about their work and meticulous in its execution. They had performed these purification rituals for many years. Even so, from time to time, Jakob would see what he believed to be an infraction of the correct procedure and wanted to bring it to the men’s attention.…
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In the early fifties the crowded tenement district in the old mill city where I grew up was gradually thinning out as families were beginning yet another migration into newer, more prosperous communities.
My mother had died when I was three and my father and I lived with my grandmother in one such tenement. She, like most of the older people there, spoke with a thick Italian accent, and most times it was easier for her to revert to her native Italian language.
I was thirteen the year I became a Freshman in the public high school which was located in a neighborhood unfamiliar to me. I didn’t realize it at the time but on that first morning, dressed in a new outfit she had sewn for me, I took my first steps away from the only world I had ever known.…
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