kilimajaro

To pass the time on his way up the mountain, Michael started irritating the hell out of everyone.

these new fine dancing steps

What made her stop and pay attention when they first met is that Raja tried to pick her pocket, not the other way around.  Three days into his glorious independence, his nice clothes wrinkled and ripped and his hair a mess, posh accent hanging off him like a school uniform, he sidled up to her — out of all the people in Union Square, out of the entire city of New York — and tried to stick his hand in her backpack.

Becky laughed.  She couldn’t help it.  And then she surprised the hell out of herself by buying him a sandwich and teaching him how to do the business properly.

if i had a camera

Seen from the sidewalk: a large, middle-aged man sitting in a parked blue SUV, holding a blond wig and combing meticulously through the curls, with a look of perfect concentration on his face.

jubilation

Jon knew when he got married that he was promising to love his three-year-old stepson as well as his wife.  It wasn’t hard.  One time, about a month after the wedding, he’d come home from the vineyard, freezing cold and smelling of rotten cork, and found the two of them dancing to “Cecilia” in the living room.  Sarah was singing along in her beautiful voice, while Andy had his chubby hands clasped to his chest and was spinning around in chaotic circles, trying to sing with her even though he didn’t know the words.

The Afterlife of Yitzhak Rabin

The guide wasn’t boring at first, but after a while Idan started counting the bullet holes in the old wall to keep from going crazy.  Near his group, men with tall dark hats and long peyos walked past, speaking the buzz and crackle of Hebrew, and once, a small group of schoolboys in kipa ran past, with their teacher following them and shouting.  The guide droned on.

A girl from the group, one he hadn’t met before, wandered over to where he was standing.  “It never ends,” she said.

“Welcome to the Holy Land,” Idan told her, and felt the warmth of it when she laughed.

“I’m Rebecca,” she said.  “Are you Sephardic or Ashkenazi?”

“Uh.”  Idan held his arms out helplessly.  “Sure,” he said.  “Anything.”

She smiled and shrugged.  “Well, that’s what you’re here for,” she said.  Looking at her, he thought maybe coming here wasn’t a stupid idea after all.

The kids around them started moving.  When he turned and looked, the guide was leading them through the gate.  “Come on,” he said, “We’re walking again.”

“Thank fuck,” Rebecca said.  Idan grinned at her.  Not a stupid idea at all.

They walked through the gate together, and the inner city of Jarusalem opened like a fern.  Hills and buildings and traffic and noise and people, and far away the golden shine of the Dome of the Rock, and the Wailing Wall underneath it.  Kids from Idan’s group laughed and shoved at each other, racing down the hill.  Their guide stopped them at a small shop near the bottom.  “Everybody get some water,” she said.  “Even if you think you don’t need it.  Even if you don’t want to carry it.  I don’t want anyone getting sick on this trip from dehydration.”  But half the kids stayed outside anyway, just shuffling around, and Idan stayed outside with them.

Just as they started off again, Rebecca leaned over, pointing to a young boy wrestling mightily with a goat, and said, “You see that boy over there?”

Idan shrugged.  He wasn’t going to go help the kid out, if that was what she meant.

“He’s an Arab.”  Idan shrugged again, and she frowned.  “The man in the shop back there was Arab, too.  That’s why I didn’t buy any water.”

“What?”  Idan shook his head.  “Why?”

“Everybody knows the Arab merchants in Jerusalem fund the terrorist attacks.  That’s how they get all the money for their bombs.”  She said this like she’d tell him she was born in California, or like her sister was five years old; straight and simple.  Idan turned to look at the boy with the goat, but he was gone up the road already, back toward the old wall.

Idan said, “I’ll be right back,” and left Rebecca on the cobbled road, running back toward the little shop and ducking inside.  It was close and dark, and filled with strange, beautiful smells, with a glass-front fridge full of Coke and water bottles near the back.

He stopped just inside the door, breathing hard, thinking — he didn’t know what. He wanted to tell the old Arab man by the Coke fridge about his Argentinian Jewish father, who’d died before he could remember, and about the mystery of blood and skin that Idan had been left with.  He wanted to say, “I don’t believe you would ever do that.”  He wanted to go home.

Idan got two waters and a Coke, all the defiance he had money for, and when he walked outside the rest of his group had turned a corner and were completely out of sight.

what’s right and what’s real

Charlotte maxed out her last credit card on Aril 3rd, two months into her temp job with the NYCLU.  She hadn’t told anyone yet that she was homeless, and as a plan that seemed to be working out okay.  The only person who ever came by her desk was Tommy, anyway, and if he hadn’t been righteously annoying she might have poured out her sorry tale to him in a fit of whatever, but to her good luck he had been, right from the start.  Besides, she had an interview today, so it was all right.

They’d been nice enough to schedule it for lunch time. Charlotte ate her sandwich on the uptown C train and brushed the crumbs off her stiff, borrowed suit, and walked inside to wait.  It took them fifteen minutes to come for her.

The receptionist was a sweet-looking, grandfatherly man.  He saw her sitting twiddling her thumbs, and pointed out the windows to the brownstones across the way.  “See that one?” he asked.  “You’d never guess it was a brothel.”

“I — it’s a what?” Charlotte said.

“Yeah, the police come around sometimes during business hours and bust everybody.  Hookers walking around in bathrobes and handcuffs.  It’s a sight.”

“Well, ah.” Charlotte looked at the building he had pointed to.  It looked just the same as all the others — a little tumbledown, a little cold.

 
AHAHAHAHA THAT’S AS FAR AS I GOT.

hmm

Legs: A Collection of Very Short Stories, by Vhary Leggat

you might not ever

There was a period of about a year, back in high school, when he wanted to kiss anyone, it didn’t matter who; wanted it so much that he ached.  Later, he tried to tell people — the ache goes away.  Sometimes it’s replaced by nothing at all, but at least it goes.

girl anachronism

For a week after Sarah woke up, she had a sore spot on the side of her head that made her weak — stomach hollow, vision blurry and filled with odd swooping shapes, wrong smells, sounds that shouldn’t be there — if she touched it.  Of course she touched it.

try the best i can

It was Wednesday, which meant the 45 line down Union street from Stockton to the Presidio. Halfway through his shift a white girl came on, showed him her monthly bus pass, and then said, “I really like your sunglasses.”

Walter loved those glasses, which were a gift from his Della, small and sleek with red lenses, so he said comfortably, “You got good taste.”

The girl grinned at him, her eyes squinting up to nothing, and said, “Thank you!” and then shuffled in before the old woman behind her could get impatient, and then they were off down the street.

At the stoplight, Walter looked in his rearview and saw the top of the girl’s head, midway down the aisle and bent over a book. She reminded him of Jeanine — they were the same age, and she read like Jeanine, her whole body curved around the book, and maybe Jeanine was out in Cambridge right now, complimenting her bus driver as he took her to her sophomore classes. Jeanine called them almost every night, to talk about how cold it was and the people she had met, how much she missed them. And the other day she’d told Della that she maybe wanted to stay at school for Thanksgiving — she had a project due, there was a friend that she could stay with, she’d come back next year — and Walter wanted to talk her out of it but Della told him hush. He wondered if Jeanine’s bus driver had a daughter, and if they ever talked. Then the car behind him honked quickly, twice, and he saw that the light was green and jerked into motion.

The girl came all the way up to the front to thank him when he got to her stop, creating a bottleneck as people tried to clamber up the stairs and she skipped down them. He watched until she had turned the corner and disappeared.

That night, he and Della sat by the phone when Jeanine called, and she told him about study groups and her introductory physics class, and the food she’d made in the dining hall kitchen from Walter’s recipe, and how she was thinking of maybe joining Alpha Kappa Alpha. Walter wanted to tell her about the girl on the bus, but he didn’t know why or what he would even say, so he just told her that he loved her and gave the phone to Della.