“I have not yet begun to fight!” John Paul Jones 1 The road descends all the way to the sea, as though the whole world was a huge basin where everything drove, sailed, glided and swept down to the bottom. I’m on my way to visit my mother. I’m riding my old green […]
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The man who has been the dearest person to my mother for the past 42 years is dead. Facing a dead man is a shitty feeling. A baby’s howling creeps through the open window. It’s midnight. I imagined that I was rummaging through all the junk at home and found a suitcase and filled it […]
On dark, stormy nights they would run through the sleeping streets, burning torches in their hands, and no one saw their faces and no one knew their names. And the echoes of the steps of fourteen feet and the flicker of the torches unnerved the slumbering town. And the mighty wind that was blowing, and […]
I have nothing against fame except for the misguided notion—which people who achieve it often have—that they can remain the same doe-eyed individuals, freely roaming the earth. The only one I have ever met who managed to overcome this rule of nature did so solely by the fact he was kind of an asshole to […]
In the morning, when I first open my eyes, is when I really feel like a criminal for the first time. Like the crazy moms who bathe their babies, gently caressing the head, and then holding it under water until all the bubbles are gone. I get up. Walk to the girls’ room. Shake them […]
As the flames died to embers, he knew something had to change. He looked around the little rented cabin and his eyes met Emily’s. They had talked about having to move again, about needing a better job, about making something of life. But their words had slowly faded and then, for a time that seemed […]
I can’t recall when I first started scribbling those little notes I later stashed in various hiding places around the apartment. It sure as hell could not have been a lot earlier, because at the time I was still a little girl and surely needed to have first learned how to read and write. But […]
The alien wasn’t green and had no antennas on his head. He looked ordinary except that he was about a quarter size. In fact, with his gray clipped mustache and his gloomy countenance he reminded me of Tzuberi, my late father’s accountant, and his expression was just like that of Tzuberi when father would bring […]
In the still of the night, you are surrounded by darkness in the room of your childhood. Sticky and smelling of semen, you hear the familiar footfalls that you recognize as your mother’s. Next to your bedroom, the door to the toilet creaks open wearily and you anticipate the sound of a thin, intermittent stream […]
His heart suddenly flipped over in his chest. “Just like a carp in the kitchen sink,” Grigory Katz thought. To calm himself down, he stuck his nose into his scarf and breathed in his own warm air for a few seconds. Then he began to watch the tracks where a train ought to appear, but […]
Yuda is banging the wall with his pillow; Moishe is switching the lights off and on again. I lay silent, not involved in the nightly disturbance. “He’s coming!” calls Zvika, the sun-shield watcher. We get under our blankets, pretending to be asleep. The door is opened, and my father peeps in. He stands silent in […]
Our school was named after Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the first woman awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Therefore, we had endless lectures about her life: how Zoya did in school, what she read, what essays she wrote. This was supposed to inspire us, as we were told, though they didn’t explain inspire to do […]
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