By Carolyn R. Russell
A thunking rhythm on the other side of my bedroom door ~ the SOS code from when we were little. Footsteps, and she’s in the room, her eyes a window slammed shut. After a while she leaves. Later, I test my ability to stand. I can. I put on the dark blue suit I was to have worn for my Bar Mitzvah in five months’ time. Something I can’t imagine following through with now.
Downstairs, the Shiva thing is unfolding about as I’d expected. Lots of people I don’t know, or people I know but don’t want to see. A few friends of my own. There’re in various stages of freaked; I feel sorry for them and don’t gesture to them or go over. I go to the foyer where I find Dinnie slumped in a chair by herself. I wonder if I look as bad as she does and immediately feel guilty to be thinking about something so stupid and without warning I want my dad so bad so hard so much to put his arms around me and kiss the top of my head and say I smell like arrowroot biscuit. Dinney says is this really happening and I lose it. Drop to the carpet and sit there and Dinney comes and sits with me.
The new baby rabbi shows up. He sits right down on the floor next to me and hands us each a hard-boiled egg. Says to eat it, says it’s our custom to honor the dead’s blessed memory with an emblem of life’s eternal circle. I feel hot and close my eyes: a neon wash of red and orange.
I smash the egg against my knee and say that I’m finished with symbols. The three of us stare at the crumbled mess staining my suit pants and spilling onto the leafy carpet pattern.
“You must be very angry,” he says.
Dinney has her hands over her face now and her tears are leaking between her purple fingernails and onto the fabric of the one dress she owns that covers all her ink. She must be angry too because she pushes her sleeves up to just above the elbow; the tattoos on her forearms blaze against her paper pale skin. I place my hand on her wrist in solidarity.
“You’re good kids,” he says.
Kumbaya I mumble.
Mom finds us and then we’re all on the floor crying. Not the rabbi, though. He leaves and I don’t know what he says to people, but no one bothers us for a long time.
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A Best Microfiction 2024 winner and a pending Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions nominee, Carolyn R. Russell’s short stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction have been featured in numerous publications. She is the author of four books, the latest of which is a collection of cross-genre flash called “Death and Other Survival Strategies.” Carolyn lives on and writes from Boston’s North Shore.