Today is Costa Rica
Published in Issue #11 Translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen subscribe to unlock the full storyWhenever the wind blows—and it usually does—it sounds like ping-pong. The thin, hollow plastic ball hitting the green varnished hardboard table, and the ropes whipping the thick, synthetic, polyester fabric as it waves around in the wind. To him they sound the same, and that’s what he always thinks about in that critical moment when the flag’s life begins: no longer a starched and folded piece of cloth in the corner of a white box, one more shirt in a massive grey closet, but a living, colorful creature that frolics in the wind, representing a foreign country with its own language, its own territory, its own people. That’s what he thinks about—a ping-pong ball’s sharp, high, plastic sound when it drops—while he hangs the flags.
He climbs onto the back of the truck and looks at the flags. Which country’s are these? Sasson says he can’t remember exactly. Costa Rica or Puerto Rico. Something like that. He doesn’t have the paperwork with him. Sasson holds a glass cup of Turkish coffee in one hand and a lit Time cigarette in the other. He knows it would be too much to ask Sasson to check his paperwork. He’ll have to look it up in his book when he gets home.
He hangs the Puerto Rico or Costa Rica flags and takes down the Vatican ones. They’re dirty now. Dirtier than usual. White gets dirty quickly. That’s why most of the countries hardly have any big white spaces on their flags. Only Israel, the...
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