Fiction

The man is collecting twigs and vines from around the yard and along the fence line, and the woman is twisting them together and then affixing them to a base they’ve made from concrete blocks. The blocks are the chair’s legs, and the seat is a garden hose coiled like a snake, or like a cinnamon roll, and then kept coiled with tied rope. The hose sits upon the legs, so if someone sat down they’d fall into a crevice. Maybe it’s a trap.

When we discovered the blood on Shira’s bed, we knew she had been possessed by a dybbuk. Grandma Mira used to tell us stories about the dybbuk—how it was a ghost that left a trail of blood on your bed, how it entered your body through the tips of your fingers or toes, how it made you convulse and foam at the mouth, how it enlarged your pupils to the size of matzah balls.

The year we turned sixteen, Genevieve entered an Amway-sponsored beauty pageant held in a local shopping mall. There were about a dozen teenage girls competing and two parts to the competition—the evening dress and the Q&A. Genevieve’s mother spent weeks altering a cocktail dress of her own from the ‘80s to fit Genevieve. It was the most exciting thing I could have hoped for my life: my best friend in a pageant.

Pain is part of sports, I know. Not feeling pain runs in our family, Jerry says. I always say I can’t understand how you can teach someone to be tough without hurting them. He says I say that because I’m not a man.

When I am almost asleep, there is a noise. A noise like singing. A noise humming or whispering but a song too, like maybe Mary is singing or maybe someone else. It comes from far away.

It was poorly applied and dark and reminded her of a sort of tunnel vision she once had, one of those episodes where the edges of your vision spiral into themselves like the shards of a kaleidoscope, and at the center of it all you see an old television airing a documentary about honeybees. There’s a disease spreading through the colony. A worker bee gets sick and knows, by instinct, to fly off to a remote area where he will die alone and afraid, because this is what you do to prevent the rest of the hive from getting sick.

“Ay, Connie. It might matter in your pueblito in Jalisco, but not here. I heard about a woman who invited ex-boyfriends to her birthing room in the hospital. Imagínate!”

A newborn’s heart is about the size of an adult man’s thumb. An adult man’s heart is about the size of that same man’s own fist. At age eleven, Jonah estimates his own heart to be the size of an adult woman’s fist if the woman is slender and strong and doesn’t wear rings.