Jessica Cohen

“It’s like with Nina I had missed-carriage, and with Rafi it all of a sudden was everything right.”

He was utterly illiterate in motherhood when Vera burst into his life.

The girl was always waiting for him. That anticipation is her most solid memory of the period. Constant hunger. She cannot remember what she did while she waited, but even today she can reawaken that anticipation in herself, the stomach contracting upon hearing his heavy footsteps on the stairs. Apologies for the third person employed here, but the first person is too painful.

Rafael, and perhaps the girl, too, in her own way—who knows, who knows what the world whispered to her animal instincts—seemed to need a complete consummation of the abandonment Nina had condemned them to.