My zayde kept begging me not to leave him there. I tried to reassure him, told him there wasn’t always that great a difference between a funeral and a carnival. Even as I spoke, crows were gathering on the headstones, just a few at first, then maybe a couple of dozen. Child, child, the crows cried, you can’t kill what’s already dead. It got me wondering if sunshine was an overrated virtue. I couldn’t decide one way or the other. Since then, where my dog is, that’s where home is, and that’s not bad, that’s about as good as anything.
“By three things is the world sustained,” the rabbi said. Then he asked me, in his morbidly conscientious way, to name at least two that laid end to end would stretch from London to Paris, about 300 miles. While I was working out how to respond, the congregation started to yell, “No! No!” as if there needed to be some sort of machine that could detect all things with value that had been taken by the water. It’s why now when my children hear sounds at night, they think the rain is coming back, and even I’m scared to sleep.
Outside my door, there’s a ruckus, several million maniacs and imbeciles, in the fragrant company of feral dogs, finding something, a sort of darker blue, like the butt bruises of roller derby queens after a match, and if you say yes, yes, you’re the good guys, and if you say no, no, you’re the bad guys, held at gunpoint and given three days to get ready for death or glory, and just when it seems science can’t help, older women show up at noon with their white hair and canes and wheelchairs and walkers, angry that this is happening again.
