2054 by Werbeloff Jason & Rice Colby R. & Wijeratne Yudhanjaya & Lawrence JT

Author:Werbeloff, Jason & Rice, Colby R. & Wijeratne, Yudhanjaya & Lawrence, JT
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fire Finch Press
Published: 2018-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

Two

The Red Door

Dinner that night was everything Mother had wanted, and more. Mrs. Goldstein had taken pains to compliment her on the heat of the flames. The exquisite calibration of buckshot for mains. The hollow points for dessert.

I sat there all the while, watching the Goldstein twins eat the kinetic energy flung their way. Wondering if they were in the mikvah tonight. Wondering whether Yael, with her freckled carapace, was the source of the voice. Or perhaps, and this thought made me sweat at the impropriety, even through my carapace, that perhaps it was Yonatan who had stood in the mikvah tonight and spread a thousand illicit thoughts to me across the distance of our cubicles.

It couldn’t have been her. Not Yael, with her open smile and diligent discussion of the Torah during the meal. Not Yonatan either, who beat his chest and brayed with delight at the buckshot that struck him in the neck for mains. That bray was nothing like the mellifluent echoes that had permeated the mikvah. His talk of the latest hovercars in Bubble One was painfully incongruent with the sensuousness of the song I’d heard. The song whose memory even now sent a shiver up my shelled feet.

That feeling, that trembling heat, didn’t leave me that night. I tossed in bed until my calloused shoulder wore through the mattress, and the distant vibrations of breakfast gunshots seeped into the air.

It was morning, and I could not remember whether I had slept. Whether the images of flesh, of gyrating forms sliding over and into one another, were dreams or memories. And whose memories they were.

I stumbled to work that week in a daze. Knocked over chairs. Chipped walls. Sleep was sparse. I slipped into wakeful dreams about pink buttocks tensing, thrusting.

I’d shake myself awake, just before I sliced my arm with the angle grinder. That would have destroyed the grinder, even if it wouldn’t have hurt me – nothing could harm me in my shell. Nothing, but my dreams.

I went to shul each night that week, hoping to hear the song in the mikvah again. I tried the overflow pool, and when I didn’t hear the voice, I attended the main service too. The mysterious singer wasn’t there either.

By the time the following Shabbos had arrived, a week after I had first heard the voice, my mind was a mess. I could barely do my job, and Old Man Mendel had to wake me more than once behind my workstation. When a customer walked in to find me asleep, Mendel hadn’t been impressed.

“You young folk,” he’d thrummed. To emphasize his point, he’d beat the words through the crown of my head. “Get your act together.”

I left that afternoon at the same time as the previous Friday, and should have been in the same rush to get home. To help Mother take out the waste (again, I hadn’t done it the night before), prepare dinner, and light the twin nuclear reactors. I should have scrambled to don my Shabbos suit.

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