Rosh Hashanah, 1967
- Apr 16, 2021
- 2 min read
by Lori Sambol Brody
I wear white go-go boots and a miniskirt to temple, even though mom purses her lips. Five minutes into the service, the cantor strums his guitar, and I slip out to Go to the bathroom but I’m not coming back, I’m meeting Becky and Karen near the preschool classrooms. They admire the boots and how the white patent leather reflects rectangles of light from the fluorescents. I’m Emma Peele, I’m a Bond girl. We run through the labyrinth of halls, until we are told not to run by some old lady with a tattoo on the soft inside of her wrist, and then we just walk fast. Becky and I tell secrets about Karen. Karen and I tell secrets about Becky. We haunt the hidden corners of the building, the dark broom closets, the windowless offices, the bathrooms. We dance with broomsticks; we paint our lips Pink-a-Fling pink with my mother’s Max Factor lipstick. Other kids from our school try to avoid us. I sidle to a group of boys, beckon them Come. Dean leads them, awkward young colts, as they follow me. Dean, the fastest boy in junior high, the second cutest boy, the captain of both the cross country and chess teams. In a preschool classroom, shofars and apples cut from faded construction paper adorn the walls. I dance on a table because my boots are made for dancing. The Twist, the Watusi, the Swim. When the shofar blows from the sanctuary, I lean forward to kiss Dean. Teki’ah, shevarim, teru’ah. Dean of the flared jeans, Dean of the Davy Jones hair, Dean who will run away in two years to the Haight, then to a Humboldt commune, and then into darkness when he disappears during an acid trip. Dean who flinches from my lips and says, You’re too much, you’re too much.
Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California. Her short fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Tin House Flash Fridays, the New Orleans Review, Craft, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her stories have been chosen for the Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019 and Best Microfiction 2021 anthologies. She can be found on Twitter at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.
