This piece was published online on New Voices, October 14, 2022
It was in a gray year, on a day like a scuffed knee, pulsing and threatening to bleed, when Feyvish was out to walk. Strange sounds haunted the neighborhood, carrying that threat, the awful smell of it, the misted blood that put him so on edge. To calm himself, he walked with his eyes down and watched the concrete cracks unravel in a clumsy telling of a familiar story. The sidewalk took an arc around a tree, and he thought of the person who must have laid this pavement many years ago, so considerate of a sapling.
This neighborhood should have such noble judges, thought Feyvish up the street from his home. It was an attractive street, a heymishe stretch of neighborhood with a mix of two-story houses hugging close to the road and four-floor flats set back behind shared courts, where windows looked in on tiny hills and rings of pavement wed to old shade trees.
