Holly F. Pettit

Westchester When there were no longer enough for minyan, they left the building locked, met instead at the local pool where several and eventually all became members.  Their wives moved from house to house, hall to kitchen to living room, talking up politics like they still had a say. Their children, already beginning to comb gray heads, already starting to have heart attacks and families, began to appear more and more weekends.  They no longer argued or cared the food was mush, but sat around on porches staring at the woods as if there was something to see, and if they sat long enough something long and tired and shaggy would tire of their gaze, snatch the starers off their chairs and carry them back to a hidden granite crevasse to be pulled and torn and gnawed to strips of purple flesh, cartilage, knobby bone.

Copyright © 1999 Holly F. Pettit All Rights Reserved