I wanted to tell my father that the fish salad was shining, but he was asleep, calling my name in long somniloquous moans. I stood at his bedside, the shape of our room made visible by the scarce lights of the Marshal Zhukov Street. Slava! My name rose from his lungs…
In the second place-winning story from the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest, a Manhattan publicist returns to his sleepy Southern hometown and attempts to revitalize its Jewish life.
Lev returns from the park eager for breakfast. He pulls his chair across the tired linoleum and calls out, “Won’t you join me? Your show can wait.” He hates the way he sounds, like a grown man coaxing a cat from a tree…
I am 22 and pregnant, which means I’m not a teen statistic, but you can chalk me up to the idiot percentages who think they know what they’re doing with a condom. When I was a kid, I planned my future around a timeline like the one I’m in. Then again, when I was a kid I planned to explore the earth by sea. Now there are no explorers left: satellites can read your watch from space and planes can take you across the planet in a day…
Leib’s brother was named Michael, after Michael Faraday, creator of the balloon and author of the work The Chemical History of the Candle. Faraday was a prominent chemist and physicist during the mid-1800s, and Leib’s father—a balloonist during the week, an aspiring inventor on weekends—found Mr. Faraday’s biography and rubbery inventions encouraging in both his personal and professional life.
Lecha Dodi // According to tradition, Mordechai led the way. When the day was expiring, he emerged from his house in white garments. The cares of the working week fell away, and he prepared with discreet joy for the Sabbath. His hair, just visible under his head covering, would be moist from immersion in the ritual bath.
Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Fiction // July was Reva’s month to fall apart. She slept through the alarm and ignored her husband’s attempts to rouse her. She showered sporadically. She added bourbon to her morning coffee. She stopped answering email, her cell phone, the door. She arrived late to the summer school class she was teaching and dismissed the students early.
Avi knew his sister would take the news badly. Seven years his junior, Avi’s sister was given to fits of feeling, storms of wild emotion. This evening, as Avi awaited his sister in his home, he adjusted the plates at the dining room table, wiped the insides of wine glasses with the bottom of his shirt and folded and re-folded the three maps he’d purchased that day—topographic, political, historical—and had fanned on the table’s end.
A Russian immigrant in Jerusalem vanishes, leaving her husband literary clues, from Camus to Austen to Saint-Exupery. Can he decipher the message?
