The Search for Shmulie Shimmer
Published in Issue #18(Excerpt from a Novel)
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Who’d have thought I’d ever find myself at the center of a mess? I wasn’t tough, God knows. I had never shot a plastic laser pistol, much less ever held one in my hand. I wasn’t gifted with extraordinary strength, courage or nerve—no one would ever call me fearless. I was just a man whose past put him in the middle of the trouble. I neither desired it nor wished to accept it—but I did because history plays its quaint jokes.
History came my way one late afternoon. I was biking my seven laps around what remained of Prospect Park, Brooklyn. It was the middle of February, just shy of the second anniversary of the Great Calamity.
What was I doing in the park on a bike in the bloody middle of February? A reasonable question.
One fine day not long before New York City went to hell, I’d found myself on a table in St. Murray’s emergency room. Cardiologist Murray Levine that is, the doc who saved my life. I had collapsed in my classroom in the presence of half a dozen students still willing to leave the science building to study religion across campus.
I lay on the hard floor wondering if my life was coming to its uncelebrated end, and if so, if the heaven I’d all of a sudden wished existed awaited my immortal remains so I might visit with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Moses Maimonides, and my maternal grandmother. Unless for my great sin I was doomed to...
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