The Month After October

Itamar left the house at 3:55 a.m., five minutes before the time he had scheduled the Uber to arrive. He hated being late, hated the way haste scattered a feeling of disorder around itself. He waited at the doorstep in the fresh cold of November, a trail of white feathers billowing from his exhales. Inside, the house was dark and warm, Camille and the children sound asleep.

Last night, he had promised Tula to wake her up before he left so they could hug goodbye. After she kept crying and begged him not to go, he had even promised to let her, and Ollie too, walk with him all the way to the front gate where they could wave as he drove away. But when the moment came to wake them, he decided it was more important to stick to their regular sleep schedule. He had only peered into their bedroom and listened to their breath—soft, peaceful, and that did not wish to be disturbed—before tiptoeing to kiss his wife and sneak out the main door like a burglar in his own home. He trusted Camille to appease the children when they woke to discover the sun already in the sky and their father long gone. Children had woken up to crueler realities. He couldn’t stop comparing. Since the war began, all he did was weigh and estimate, categorize and rank in order. Small pain, big pain, unbearable pain, and pain that was impossible to imagine until it was yours. In Hebrew, people...