The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Read Free Page B

just that same note.
Do your dishes after lunch
. She leaves lunch in the fridge, two plates covered by other plates, rice and lamb from Sunday to Tuesday and rice and okra the rest of the week. They taste fresh even though we have to microwave them.
    I go back to Avishag’s room.
    “Avishag,” I say, shaking her hard, “where’s your mom?”
    Avishag keeps her eyes closed. Still half sleeping, she arches her back and fine-tunes her bra. She passes her long fingers on her golden necklace, and she is so dark in between these white sheets, it is as if she is too present, and then she opens her eyes suddenly.
    “I think she decided to go back home,” she says. “She said she would before we even heard that Dan … before we knew everything.”
    “Go back home?” I ask. “But she is your mom.”
    “She said she is moving back in with her mom in Jerusalem. She said she is not going to raise kids all by herself if they are just going to go shoot themselves, and she said I never offer to do the dishes, and that I am a grown woman now and she—”
    “She can’t be gone,” I say. “Wake up.”
    But Avishag closes her eyes and turns her back to me, pulling the white blanket above her head as if it were a cave.
Jewdifying the Galilee
    I go to school alone. I don’t know where else to go and I can’t stare at Avishag sleeping any longer. The classroom has only three boys in it, sitting on their desks and looking at a magazine about Japanese cars. One of the chairs is flipped on its side, and someone has knocked over the trash can so there are orange peels and notebook pages on the floor.
    “Lea’s mom is gone too,” one of the boys says. “She told Lea she decided she was just going to stay in that town that has the massages forever,” he adds and bites one of his fingers. “But I don’t think she can actually do that. And Mira the teacher will come back soon too.”
    “This is a whole town of crazy bitches,” another boy adds. Then they turn their backs to me and huddle over the magazine.
    I step outside and try to catch my breath, so I look down, but above me there are ravens and sycamores and the birds circle below the sun so there are dots on the asphalt underneath my feet, winking at me first here, then there, and I open my mouth and puke, until I am able to raise my head up again, and I keep it up.
    I can’t see a single person out in the streets. When they built this town less than thirty years ago, it was because people had this brilliant idea that they should Jewdify the Galilee, and in particular the Lebanese border. There is one empty brown hill after another in that region, the government said, and if we are a country, we can’t all live in just one part of it. So they gave plots of land for barely any money to couples who promised to work in the factory they built in the village, and that way the couples had money and a home and then they had children.
    The only thing they didn’t think of is that money and houses create children and that children need buses, among other things. The only way to get out now is through hitchhiking.
    I stand by the old pay phone at the outskirts of town and stick out my thumb. I first think about calling someone, but I don’t have any coins to use the pay phone.
    When a red Subaru stops, I lean over and smell the aftershave of the bearded driver. He is listening to “Macarena,” really, he is.
    “Where are you going?” he asks.
    On the ground, a snail is slowly making its way towardme, leaving a trail of saliva behind it. Soon, there will be the first rain of the year. Soon, Avishag and I will graduate. Join the army. Everything. Even princess Lea will have to join the army. Everyone does.
    And I realize I have no one I know outside the thousand houses of the town and that I am standing here on the lukewarm asphalt all alone.
    I tell the driver I might as well stay where I am.
I Don’t Go Up the Hill
    And it is because I don’t want to climb anymore just