City of a Thousand Gates by Rebecca Sacks

Author:Rebecca Sacks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Something feels wrong, feels off. Miriam texts Ori: Where are you? You’re on base?

You are supposed to get ugly with a girl in your belly, because, they say, she steals your beauty. But Miriam was pretty and glowing when pregnant with each of her older girls. It was Ori who drained her, sapped the color and glow from her cheeks, clogged her pores. She was swollen and lethargic. She took offense at everything. It must be a girl, people said, for her to take so much from you. She heard a smugness in their comments: You’re ugly and you can’t give Yuval a son. But it was Ori. Beautiful boy with such fine features. So sweet-faced as a toddler that you had to squish him to you, like something out of an old German fairy tale, yellow curls and dimpled apple cheeks. Now he is tall, broad, erect. He cuts off the necks of his T-shirts in the kibbutznik style; it shows off the new swell in the muscles of his shoulders, so at odds with the soft, full mouth. Little Avital’s seminary friends giggle and whisper around him. Young teenage girls in long jersey skirts, all wearing T-shirts from their brothers’ combat units. Over Passover—she loves to think about this—one girl dropped a plate when Ori walked into the kitchen. She looked at him and dropped it. The thing shattered.

From his shadowy side of the bed, closer to the window, Yuval lets out a small cry. He rolls toward her, and because she’s sitting up, his nose smooshes against her belly as he flings his arm over her lap. A tuft of his hair, so gray now, sticks out to the side and she tucks it behind his ear with her free hand. Her phone light dims automatically. Yuval is breathing. Miriam is breathing. The room is dark.

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