חלק אלוק ממעל

It’s an empty tarmac. Still, I fanatically wave, hallucinating the growl of turbine jets hovering 20 feet from my head of damp hair, but it's only the spit and hiss of thunder. Rapid firing of electrostatic discharges and a fistfull of rain pelting off a tinman. “Come inside,” the attendant urges, fingers batting aggressively, but the allure of safety is lost on me. What could compare to the comfort of one’s father yet to land? His heart lurches and swells from the window seat, the pang of desperation dissolving as he nears; I am sure of it. Your thumb will brush away tears I wept for fear of finding nothing. It’s an empty tarmac. I stop waving as the storm clears and the sky settles into a great, unpunctured, glassy expanse of nothingness. 

My arm draws an arc over the brim of a lake, hurling my crooked, filthy stone rock bottom. He gathers the waters of the sea like a mound; He stows away the depths in vaults. From out of distress, I called to Hashem. With abounding relief, Hashem answered me. I do not fear — What can man do to me? And as I’m retreating, look at the golden leaves, I think to myself, the way the sun lowers and casts an orange glow over the water; take a look at the splendid rows of houses, and with gratitude renewed, enough of this pain from you. Until the Peace I shoved inside fidgets maniacally with repulsion. Until I feel the edges of stone clip my palms, returning no matter how strong my arm, arcing again, again, again, again, again, into insanity. 

Old pictures strewn around my ankles, studying the child in a pink beret by the backyard swings. Where did she go? As I ask, she answers. The simple fact startles, stuns to dead stillness my fingers making mindless patterns on my knee. Where did she go? What a stupid question to ask of your obsession, the object of your desecration. Later, the realization fades. Later, I mutter “It’s alright,” soothing the sting of laying claim to my body. She was me, and so I pause before abusing. She was me, but not in any way that I can see, and so not in a way that matters. Blotchy patches of red on my stomach where the scorching water kissed it, a rash, a sickness. My hands move frantically, grinding a bar of soap down to the bone, every surface slick and milky white. Slipping from my fingers, the last shard circles round the drain; I dive down, cinching it between thumb and forefinger, eyeing it like a defector. It takes restraint not to taste it, sterilizing my insides; instead, it melts before I complete my thought. The child wraps her hair in towel like a turban, chuckling. Climbing the sink to show me, I muse, “we must be sisters.” Two tarred-black bodies. Two abandoned ruins coated in grime.

You never came to pick me up. I called like a maniac, when I had a second, out of earshot of the others. Eva clung to her mother like a baby kangaroo, the kind of woman to say “come home, dinner’s waiting for you.” It was December and frozen over. The woman made a face like the cold could kill her daughter. Wisps of her breath as flickering angels, singing in a falsetto that sent me straight to heaven. Let me hold you, lovely girl, let me hold you. 

You promised ‘someday soon’ until you snapped, said it outright, “I never even loved you.” So I salvage myself, an actor in a series of short plays; I am Eva, dotingly adored by all. My words are Amalia’s, steady without tremor. Like Inez, a laugh landing at just the right time.

Half past six in the morning on a nondescript street. Above me, a prototype tree. My neck careens up to its sprawling tangerine, though in dawn light, a pale, muted gray. Is it a lie to describe the leaves as they will be when noon light engulfs the void between them? Pumpkin and marigolds, some ancestral memory. Look above, a treasure tree. Calloused hands reach out from the aether, parting branches to envelop me. 

Half past six in the morning on an empty street. She moves without flush or stutter, no threat of being seen, eyes averted towards a tree. A gentle smile breathes warmth in the cracks riddled through her. 

You appeared to me like a prayer.