101 Words

Boy, Mum will have it in for him when he gets home.

In the dinghy, wearing a tee-shirt, shorts, and jandals, Matai hugs his knees. The southerly is straight off the ice; rain pounding.

The peanut butter sandwich he’d stuffed in his pocket is soggy and the bottle of squash washed overboard. And the oars.

That morning, out of the blue, Mum had said, “Fish for dinner. Wouldn’t that be neat?”

Matai had wanted to show Mum she could rely on him, since Dad had left.

At night Matai hears a helicopter and prays they will spot him.

“Stay strong, heh.”

Daisy recalled the memory of her favourite cousin coming round, carrying huge bin liners full from her newly excavated wardrobe.

With every growth spurt and fashion change, Daisy inherited a myriad of treasures. New Romantic frills, spotty bikinis, stonewashed jeans, Duran Duran T-shirts, random dresses of all lengths and styles. Daisy would parade proudly around the living room in mismatched combinations to her parents’ amusement and friends’ envy.

Now, at 44, she stared emptily at her cousin’s final bag of hand-me-downs.

Unwilling to face the cold reality, she dragged it into the spare room. She wouldn’t be wearing them this time.

Christmas eve, Sue placed trash in the truck bed and jumped in.

“I’ll be right there,” Rudy said. “Just bringing stuff for the swap shop.”

In the rearview mirror, Sue saw the car seat, highchair, mobile. The pink trike, its little helmet swinging.

“But what if we need these?” Sue stared at Rudy.

He turned on the truck. In the driver’s seat, he looked straight ahead, saying nothing while they unloaded the trash and drove to the shed of giveaways. Sue wouldn’t help.

But as they left, Sue turned. A young father hugged the trike and looked up. How he smiled.

Among demagogues and bombings, I stop watching news. Mom’s a rabbi; too much heady stuff anyway.

Instead, I insert laugh tracks into idiocy. Nazis saluting in cold unison, Nuremberg. Romanovs, three hundred years of delusions, bowing, God’s anointed. The anti-Semites who drove my great-grandparents to America.

Evangelicals, proclaiming morality, while fucking around.

I laugh at invisible studio audiences, who don’t know they’re being repurposed.

I laugh at repurposing, which purposes the obvious. Because I get called kike and liberal. Swastikas get painted on our front door and I try to insert a laugh track.

I wish I could insert tears instead.

The room lit up with white-gloved applause. Sarai lifted her fingers off the piano keys, stood, and bowed. At eleven, she had already achieved more than most pianists dreamt of in a lifetime.

Sarai looked around, at the ladies in expensive Hawaiian pearls, at their husbands’ bulging bellies struggling to stay enclosed beneath jackets.

Her mother sat in the front row, tearing with pride.

As Sarai waved, her sleeves slid down to her elbows. She dropped her arms and continued to smile at the audience, hoping the spotlight hadn’t revealed all.

Her cuts still stung, but not like her father’s absence.

Ethan opened the box and carefully removed the contents, his fingers nearly freezing in the moment it took to button his coat around the bundled items. Quickly, he replaced his gloves.

Wind-whipped ice pellets stung his face. He clomped through the thigh-deep snow, nearly tipping over twice.

The house was obscured by the driving snow. Ethan wondered whether he was walking in the right direction. Was this bundle worth all the peril?

At last he reached the house and entered. He heaved the door shut against the whooshing flakes. Panting, he called to his wife.

“Honey, I brought in the mail.”