Translation by Dafna Ruppin
I hate the savanna. That’s somewhat of a strange statement, since the savanna provides me with a very good living, and anyone I know turns green with envy when I tell them that I’m a wildlife cameraman, but for me the savanna has become the place that I’m stuck in. I cannot move ahead, and I cannot get out of it. I just lie down in ambush with my cameras and their huge lenses and get bitten by mosquitos.
Last week I got a contract for documenting the lives of two lion cubs which were born here. They don’t really have names, but the director of the film, who never actually bothers to travel all the way to Africa, calls them Roarago and Roaragi.…
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My boom box teetered on the limestone boulder next to the pigpen. Cousin Libby put it there, unconcerned by my catch of breath when metal scraped rock. The boombox, my only birthday present when I turned thirteen last week, was now scarred by scratches.
“Why didn’t you put it on the grass?” I asked before I saw the puddle beside the boulder, a spray of rust-colored dots on the dirt.
“So that’s what all that ruckus was about.” Libby skimmed her pinky over the surface of the puddle, then tried to trace a heart on the faded wooden plank of the pigpen. But she only had enough on her pinky to draw a backwards question mark.
From the other side of the pond, a holler, a girl waving with one hand, shielding her eyes from the afternoon sun with the other. …
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The boy had been born missing a hand, on the left side. But, since he was born without it, there was nothing for him to miss and he’d never know otherwise.
He’ll figure it out, everyone told the parents, and though they knew he would, the mother wept knowing how cruel children could be and the father cried for all the girls he’d love, knowing that, save the special one, they would all fail to return his affections.
His mother loved him like any other mother would love a child, probably more to make up for the part that he was missing. He was too young to see the stares or hear the whispers but the mother saw them and died inside a little each time.…
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“Yorba, yorba ,” his aunt yells from the back row of the van. “It’s spelled with a J,” she says in English, “but said like Y.”
I nod but don’t turn from the window. I can no longer keep track of what language we are in – Hebrew, Yiddish, Hungarian. Even English sounds foreign at this point. All I know is that we are forever going yorba – left. Maybe it’s illegal to turn right in Israel.
We are driving to the Dead Sea. All week, David’s aunt, uncle, and cousins have been telling us we must see the Dead Sea. So on the last day of our visit, we set out in the morning from the rocky Mediterranean coast. The dripping bougainvillea reminds me of Southern California as do the highways signs, written in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, that use the same green metal and bold font as American ones.…
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I used to climb these steps in a few bounding leaps. Not now. And not in so many years.
The space, the full city block which was converted from an old railroad terminal in the middle of what was known as Hell’s Kitchen, is a post office now, surrounded mostly by near-empty condos and hotels that once reached into the sky with restaurants you needed to make reservations for, months in advance.
And I no longer count the steps, even out of tradition or curiosity. I am too afraid my attention will slip away and I will lose count, or not make it to sixty-six at all. This time, finally, relieved and rewarded, I stood at the top, between a dozen massive Doric columns that faced 8th Avenue.…
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Sweat rolls down Alice’s face as she sleeps, cascading around the oxygen mask muzzling her nose and mouth. Nurse Tom, in full hazmat suit, checks Alice’s IV, presses a button to silence a beeping machine, and places a cool cloth on his patient’s forehead. Nurse Tom twists the plastic cap off a bottle of TastyWater, pours some into a Styrofoam cup, and leaves it on Alice’s bedside table in the event that today is the day she wakes up.
Alice’s grade 11 Environmental Studies students gather outside the big glass wall of her quarantined hospital room because the school only had one Environmental Studies teacher (Alice) and now these kids all have a last period spare.
This superbug Alice has contracted is the 999th confirmed case of antibiotic-immune bacteria in the Greater Toronto Area.…
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Will and I sat outside the VA on a bench, watching cars circle for spots while an ambulance blared from the dock around the corner. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, trying to erase the last hour of our lives from my memory, focusing instead on the weather and our neighbor’s wife they’d found in the freezer. We’d read the article in the paper that morning an effort to distract ourselves from the appointment. We knew what today would be—but we didn’t want to. We couldn’t entertain the idea, so we read the paper. We never read the paper, and now I knew why. You learn horrifying things like your neighbor shoved his wife’s dead body in the freezer after she’d had a heart attack.…
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