Zeek | Tisha B'Av

Tisha B'Av
by David Harris Ebenbach

They've torn the skin off my street. Underneath are the long striations of muscle tissue, but petrified; it seems possible that the city underneath us is essentially dead, that the sewage in its veins moves only for show. It might also be possible, in a long-suffering universe that reaches so casually from here to there, that the city underneath is just an old body moving on geologic time, and that I am impatient, that I am a single-celled frenetic beating against the windows of life. Meanwhile this afternoon's rain fills the striations and pours up dirty against the curb, where things are easier; meanwhile on either side of the street scaffolding rises up against the sides of these buildings bone by bone and hangs on, and then at some point each structure comes down, all the ligamenture for just an hour in shining piles along the sidewalks. The advantage then is the sky; maybe I am walking with a book once the rain has stopped and then I realize I am blinded by the pages, and I look up through what I remember to be planks, and there it is - the fringes of the universe, soaked in some kind of blue.

David Harris Ebenbach's first collection of short stories, Between Camelots, won this year's Drue Heinz Literature Prize and will be published in October 2005 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Image: Jay Michaelson

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