Dan Josefson

“This was when my dad was still living with us, but he would come to services from work, so when we went home afterward I’d have to choose who to go home with.  I don’t know if it upset my dad, but I always went home with my mom.  Mostly because she drove the Beetle, which was so much more fun. She would play these old Patti Smith cassettes, and I’d sing with her. But the best part was she’d let me put on the dome light, so it felt like we were in this little space capsule, just the two of us. That’s my favorite memory, me and my mom going home from temple Friday nights.  That car was like a lit-up igloo rolling through the dark.” 

When I heard the washing machine finish, I put our things in the dryer and went back to roaming the house.  About fifteen minutes had passed before I realized that I’d forgotten to add the fabric softener. But when I went to put it in, there was an older woman standing in the back doorway, staring at the machine.  She looked up.

It was the woman from the picture upstairs.  I could tell, although she was older.  Her face had changed.  It continued to change as I stood there.

“I’ll call the police,” she said.

I was overwhelmed by pity. This woman was an adult, she probably owned the house, but seemed so scared.  I knew I should run, but I was curious about this feeling.  It wasn’t unpleasant.  Somehow I felt okay as long as I kept her from entering the house, her house. 

The walls of the Classroom Building were cracked down to their foundations, and the rooms scattered with fallen acoustic tiles; the ceiling’s grid of aluminum beams held only fire alarms whose frayed wires wound into space. The linoleum floor tiles in the atrium were warped and uneven. And among the yellowed paperbacks and brittle hardcover books in the Teacher’s Lounge, I found that strange notebook with the teachers’ speculations about which of us might grow up to be killers.