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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I stood on the shore and watched as Rebecca strode across the surface of the frozen lake, carrying an ax over her shoulder. I didn’t know what she was planning to do with it. When she called and told me to meet her at the park, I thought we would talk or eat lunch in the car. When I saw her walking across the lake, I thought maybe she was planning to do some ice fishing, even though she carried no equipment and had no expertise in the sport.
After she traveled about a hundred yards across the lake, she turned around, cupped her hands over her mouth, and yelled, “Come here, Robert. I have a surprise for you.”
I was freezing and didn’t feel like moving.…
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It was a bitter cold night in March 2015 when a certain sage-grouse female’s (SGF) life changed forever. That night she was designated “SGF4601” and thereafter, her movements would be closely monitored for the rest of her life. After being gently captured, she was fitted with a GPS “backpack” and released. Until her death four years later, her life was scrutinized by biologists, adding to our understanding of sage-grouse behaviors and their habitat. –Morelli, “A Year in the Life of an Idaho Sage-Grouse”
When I awoke, I was different. Or the world I lived in had changed. Or both.
Something was behind me, over me, on me. I could not see it, but I could feel it covering me so I knew it was there—something with a thin, hard-edged shape that I could not slip free of or away from, try as I might.…
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It was very early in the morning when I caught the bus. Afraid I wouldn’t make it on time, I left my apartment an hour early. I took the most circuitous route to the bus stop; call me old-fashioned, but I find relying on my instincts at the pitch of stress to be much more reliable than aimlessly trusting my phone to lead the way. Even if I have to rush through alleys overhung with baby-orange clouds of aurora, through obscure neighborhoods, or through streets mostly deserted but for the occasional silhouette in a top hat who would cross the street from afar to avoid passing by me, I still feel at greater ease at least knowing how I got to where I needed to go.…
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The bootlegger’s is a pinched, dim shack, surrounded by brush, set adrift from a wiry dirt road that’s barely perceptible from the main artery. But the boy could find his way to it in the darkest dark, so familiar is the beaten path that leads to the shack’s wooden, whining door. He would never venture alone to this place, a place that renders his stomach watery with dread; he goes because his heart is strung taut to his father, a man who treats the shack like a ruinous mistress.
Today, it’s just before noon, and there are only four people in the bar, because it’s a Sunday morning and it’s too early in the day for a drink for most. The bartender Jenny is wearing a peachy-pink lipstick that makes her skin seem sallow rather than enlivened, and though the boy knows she’s younger than most of the people he sees in this place, there is something aged about the way her eyes recede behind thick circles of black makeup.…
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On Monday, he had a first date with a man he’d been talking to for about two weeks. They met at a park a few hours before sunset. They talked about themselves, their childhoods, their interests and intentions. They had dinner together. They shared a drink. They made jokes, and felt completely and utterly attracted to one another. They enjoyed their time so much that they ended the night inside each other’s mouths. Laughing, smiling, holding onto one another, happy. By the time Marcel got back to his apartment, he knew they were in love. He fell asleep thinking of their future together.
On Tuesday, Marcel woke up to a phone call from the police that both of his parents had died. They’d been attacked in their sleep by an intruder the night before.…
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