The Carpenter’s Sister
Published in Issue #26 Translated from Hebrew by Dalya Bilu(Excerpt from a Novel)
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The sky above Yonina’s porch was empty, only a bit of cloud flat as a handkerchief floating there. Look at it, I said to her, all alone in the great blue, but she didn’t give it a glance. Yonina doesn’t look up at the sky before she finishes taking care of what’s on the ground, because so what? if you look up you’ll see the signs of the storm that will wreck what’s down below. She was weeding the geranium planters, throwing bits of couch-grass into the yard, sullenly and silently tearing off dry leaves, she loosened the soil with her strong fingers and said, You’re not thirty-nine yet, are you really going to live there? Are you serious? She pointed a muddy finger at the sky and said, He’s completely freaked you out.
Leave God out of it, Yonina, it isn’t his business, I said.
He ruined your life and it isn’t his business? I don’t understand you.
What’s there to understand here? It’s not God. It’s an arbitrary collision of metals that cut into my life and left me three options: the graveyard, the lunatic asylum or sheltered housing, and I chose the third.
Not God, not at all… and that word, arbitrary, where did you get that from? In any case, those aren’t the options, Nava, don’t be ridiculous.
I didn’t take her advice and I went to check out the place in advance. I saw a wide, blank iron gate standing between the trunks of two tall palm trees, above it a sign saying...
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