Shadow Box, Rustle Thunder
written by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
The satellite radio station or web broadcast or app or maybe a mix, he never was quite certain, blasted songs that gushed growl and cacophony and crash. The men—the gods in training—grunted and heaved and sweat. They leaned over one another as they exchanged “spotting” favors and words of encouragement, bulge above face, within reach of iron and finger. The plates clattered against each other when restacked, supplementing the din. Some wiped down the benches, but the smells of their collective efforts lingered in the air for decades, a potency impossible to eradicate. Their chests had no need to burst forth from impossible tank tops; they simply flowered beneath. Undaunted, the “skinny” calves would not be denied, insisting, too, upon admiration. Here was fruit to be measured, weighed, and appraised before the hard-to-please mirrors. Here, then, a cornucopia for all of the senses. Before the booths of the (meat) market square, this garden.
Only here he was. He, of all people! In this way station? What a struggle it had been to step over the threshold. He remembers that first time. Thinking:
Everyone’s staring
everyone’s gesturing
everyone’s hissing
everyone is laughing
everyone everyone everyone
Only there was no “everyone.” Just an occasional inscrutable glance. And then later, smiles from the regulars. Once even, a wink from a god. The slip of a boy who had once sat in the front, completed homework worthy of gold star, stayed late in the hopes of avoiding the jeers and the punches in the shadows of corridors, the schoolyard, and streets, and who now hoped to avoid new jeers and punches with his updated figure, was being rewarded for his effort, for his persistence. He was, wasn’t he?
Only when he was back home beneath a god who had somehow not looked away, who had said “I like your orange glasses” as he walked with him from the garden into the inner and outer sanctums of ecstasy, when he was reveling in this mass that undulated over and into him, he detected a faint sound. A rustling, it was. In the corner? No, beyond. In the bedroom closet? Further still. In (or near) the proverbial closet? A cream muslin frock was whispering in the wind. He could hear the breeze separating its folds. There was a red-and-white gingham picnic blanket beneath, which only heightened the plain resplendence of its skirts. And there was a stroll between birches, and he could see the frock gleaming between the whites of the trunks, and he could hear the frock murmuring, calling, insisting to him.
Only the frock’s lilt never did leave him. Rather, its notes escorted him as he returned to the dungeon, to the comrades-in-lifting, where the conductor of that earlier ecstasy was no longer to be found. Notes of what-might-have-been. Trills, thrills of what might yet be. Where would the frock apparition lead him? Could he follow it to its exquisite, terrifying confusion … I mean, conclusion? As he made his way through the clang of iron and later into to the baths of anti-purification, he felt the frock’s fabric caress the (hard-earned!) swell of his ass, then flutter off beyond his reach, beyond the bodies flashing in locker room gloaming.
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub (56) is a poet, writer, and translator of Yiddish literature. He is the author of two books of fiction and six volumes of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems. His recent translations from the Yiddish include Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel by Ida Maze and Blessed Hands: Stories by Frume Halpern. Please visit his website at https://yataubdotnet.wordpress.com. Taub lives in Washington, D.C.
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