Hannah Srajer

FRIDAY NIGHT ROYALTY

He does not stand out at first, but blends like a tile in this mosaic of holy men, their shirts white as the crescent of a clipped nail. In the makeshift synagogue they all cluster around my father like pedestrians around a street musician. How he has loved them all, these men of his childhood, the ones with thickets of black and brown harvested carefully on their chins, their lips. I watch from the women's side, my father's voice rising among them as if winged. He hasn't been home for fifteen years but my father has only grown closer to this place, the grey threading through his hair a mirror to the dust dripping from the ceiling, the handkerchief folded deep into his pocket a formality of a century that kept women and men separate, his old friends notice and approve. Th"y take us inside the real temple across the street, the

colossal body starved without a congregation to fill its bowels, its stomach, starved like the 4,000 who never came back but went on to bloat Auschwitz. The windows are sockets blinded by wood boards so the temple cannot see itself rot, the lungs are twin Torah scrolls punctured by age, and the cage of its chest is so large I can only whisper, it is empty of the pulse but then I see my father climb to where the heart should be, up the platform to face the pews, lined and cracked like broken ribs, so he can lift his throbbing arms (palms out) and bless the spaces where he and the rest of the men used to sit as boys. But they are gone. When he opens his eyes to the empty

and sees that he has only blessed me, I swear I hear the beat shudder still.

-Hannah Srajer