Aryeh Davidson > Recent Status Updates

“He waited for his sobbing to subside, and then fumbled for the scotch. He sat on the cot and drank in darkness. Wet came the tears. They would not cease. This was like childhood, this grief.”

“She didn’t see him. She wandered the street. Busses. Trucks. Unfriendly crowds. She was growing frightened. She returned to the subway and began to descend. Karras grew frantic, ran to
The street and began to weep as he called her name; as he could not find her; as he pictured her helpless and bewildered in the maze of tunnels beneath the ground.”

I want to be old but I do not want to be a woman

When she fell I was not looking. She screamed in the air….. That I remember and the sound her body made when it struck the ground, a crash that was both hard and soft at the same time. She lay down there on the stones we call hearts and wheaten there was blood or not I cannot say, for her dress was too red to show it.

The reality is a baby the older sibling is forbidden to touch, for how would that elder one choose to ‘play’ with the interloper, the thief of a parent’s love? By beating it to death, by stamping on its face, by taking the feeble wriggling body to the river and watching the current carry it away downstream. Those are the games to play with a new brother or sister - if opportunity is given.

Rosemary is one of the women, gossipy, given to inane chat, a mine of clichés, Luke says, which made me see a deep cave and men on their knees with picks and hammers, mining clichés out from between the strata: here’s another, ‘He broke his heart,’ and another, ‘It was a merciful release!’

“No pain, no pain, no pain,” he says over and over again. “When we leave, if I have to fill something out like ‘country of birth’… I will say I do not know where I am from. I have no birth certificate. I was born walking. That is what I will say, Rachel. My country disappeared when I was born.”

“The sounds of the shofar emulate the sound of a cry, every variation of sobbing,” he said once finished.
“That’s what the shofar is supposed to be?”
“Yes,” the youngest said, “And the last, did you hear how it cuts like a gasp, like a pant? It’s the last sobs of a desperate man hoping for another year. Shana tova.”