Perl

When the mirror broke Yocheved was assailed by emotional turmoil. At first she sought to facilely explain the reason for the break, which ran from the corner to the middle and from there in a black crack that continued to the left-hand bevel. She did not of course believe in the validity of signs of fate and so she laughed and said she would try and guess where the Grim Reaper is standing and intriguing against the rights of the last born.

The turmoil raged and fanned the flames of an old anxiety. She recalled that for years she had been unwilling to illuminate a darkroom before her eyes had become used to it and had scanned its contents back and forth in the dark. She had told her grandson that a person should never lose the terrors of his childhood, lest the day came that would leave him without the remedy and defenses that anxieties provide.

From one point of departure she led her new life that opened with numbness and rotten teeth. "Without the reparations and compensation for loss of income and property the German Republic pays me I'd be tossed around like a drop of water in a heat-wave." This axiom was launched by social needs, her body and blamelessness. The turmoil permeated the pores of her memory that rose like a jet of air and disseminated in her consciousness the forced custom of repeating the experience of existence over and over.

When she began her new life she would lose her patience and again suppress it. When she lost patience with the habit of ingrained tolerance, she starved herself of the custom of satisfaction and autonomous financial security. When she grew fat from her ability to choose between ebb and flow she changed her name from Pearl to Yocheved and established a life's work, whose products are respecting The Creator and His 613 commandments. She did not struggle with the question of His existence and adhered to His commandments while deriding her own spiritual needs. Once the adherence had borne a mating and a fetus she rewrote the rules of the game, buried her past and told the knowledge to go to hell.

She said, reconstructed, using the word 'inferno' - a sign that ended all discussion, and divided her life into before the event and after it. Her two sons grew up and built Solomon's Stables, her husband died of lung cancer, her father and sisters were erased from her memory that filled up with deprival, her death was held up on the outskirts of Miami, sending before it a white wake of goodwill.

Boaz Kaizman

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