Idiots First Read Free

and he was shouting.
    Isaac mewled loudly.
    â€œBetter calm down or you’ll hurt somebody’s feelings,” Ginzburg said with a wink toward Isaac.
    â€œAll my life,” Mendel cried, his body trembling, “what did I have? I was poor. I suffered from my health. When I worked I worked too hard. When I didn’t work was worse. My wife died a young woman. But I didn’t ask from anybody nothing. Now I ask a small favor. Be so kind, Mr. Ginzburg.”
    The ticket collector was picking his teeth with a match stick.
    â€œYou ain’t the only one, my friend, some got it worse than you. That’s how it goes in this country.”
    â€œYou dog you.” Mendel lunged at Ginzburg’s throat and began to choke. “You bastard, don’t you understand what it means human?”
    They struggled nose to nose, Ginzburg, though his astonished eyes bulged, began to laugh. “You pipsqueak nothing. I’ll freeze you to pieces.”
    His eyes lit in rage and Mendel felt an unbearable cold like an icy dagger invading his body, all of his parts shriveling.
    Now I die without helping Isaac.
    A crowd gathered. Isaac yelped in fright.

    Clinging to Ginzburg in his last agony, Mendel saw reflected in the ticket collector’s eyes the depth of his terror. But he saw that Ginzburg, staring at himself in Mendel’s eyes, saw mirrored in them the extent of his own awful wrath. He beheld a shimmering, starry, blinding light that produced darkness.
    Ginzburg looked astounded. “Who me?”
    His grip on the squirming old man slowly loosened, and Mendel, his heart barely beating, slumped to the ground.
    â€œGo.” Ginzburg muttered, “take him to the train.”
    â€œLet pass,” he commanded a guard.
    The crowd parted. Isaac helped his father up and they tottered down the steps to the platform where the train waited, lit and ready to go.
    Mendel found Isaac a coach seat and hastily embraced him. “Help Uncle Leo, Isaakil. Also remember your father and mother.”
    â€œBe nice to him,” he said to the conductor. “Show him where everything is.”
    He waited on the platform until the train began slowly to move. Isaac sat at the edge of his seat, his face strained in the direction of his journey. When the train was gone, Mendel ascended the stairs to see what had become of Ginzburg.

BLACK IS MY FAVORITE COLOR
    Charity Sweetness sits in the toilet eating her two hardboiled eggs while I’m having my ham sandwich and coffee in the kitchen. That’s how it goes only don’t get the idea of ghettoes. If there’s a ghetto I’m the one that’s in it. She’s my cleaning woman from Father Divine and comes in once a week to my small three-room apartment on my day off from the liquor store. “Peace,” she says to me, “Father reached on down and took me right up in Heaven.” She’s a small person with a flat body, frizzy hair, and a quiet face that the light shines out of, and Mama had such eyes before she died. The first time Charity Sweetness came in to clean, a little more than a year and a half, I
made the mistake to ask her to sit down at the kitchen table with me and eat her lunch. I was still feeling not so hot after Ornita left but I’m the kind of a man—Nat Lime, forty-four, a bachelor with a daily growing bald spot on the back of my head, and I could lose frankly fifteen pounds—who enjoys company so long as he has it. So she cooked up her two hardboiled eggs and sat down and took a small bite out of one of them. But after a minute she stopped chewing and she got up and carried the eggs in a cup in the bathroom, and since then she eats there. I said to her more than once, “Okay, Charity Sweetness, so have it your way, eat the eggs in the kitchen by yourself and I’ll eat when you’re done,” but she smiles absentminded, and eats in the toilet. It’s my fate with colored