Mathew Goldberg

Teshuvah

Fishbein keyed Rabbi J’s Subaru as it collected ragweed outside the garden center. Or, more accurately, he knifed the car using the souvenir pocketknife he’d discovered at a sidewalk shop on the Buda side of the Danube. The smooth grain of the handle conjured Magyars leaping head-first into scimitars. Fishbein traversed the driver’s side of the car and faked a phone call, dragging the squealing blade across the shiny, crimson hatchback—a new-model Subaru that fit an NGO-worker better than a man who’d spent the last ten years behind bars.

Earlier this Saturday, at Temple Beth Shalom, Fishbein said yahrzeit for Mark Susskind and spied Rabbi J two rows in front of him, J reading and chanting as if nothing had happened. J wasn’t a rabbi anymore, but Fishbein still thought of him as one. And even though Fishbein hadn’t seen J since Fishbein quit Hebrew school in seventh grade, he recognized the man right away. A cheap, polyester suit hung loose from J’s shoulders, the top of J’s spine bent into a stoop, and a black yarmulke floated in a lake of bare scalp. J used to be a titan; then again, in middle-school, anyone over five-eight was a giant. Back then, J had a red, unruly beard touched by fire, but now, his beard and hair were both thin and gray. The early April sun gleamed through a ribbon of stained glass, and J mouthed Ein Kamokha while his long fingers trembled over the words in his prayer book. Fishbein shut his siddur and squeezed his fingers white. 

After the service, Fishbein waited in the synagogue’s lot, then tailed J through Olney, Maryland. J drove slowly, signaling well ahead of turns, stopping for every bike and pedestrian. He parked at a garden center located between a Safeway and a brewery. J pried off his tie and dress shirt right there in the lot before yanking on a polo emblazoned with the shop’s name: Good Earth. Potted trees lined the shop’s entrance, and J made for the large outdoor garden where crisscrossed scaffolding swallowed him whole. 

Through the Subaru’s windows, Fishbein spied crumpled fast-food wrappers, a bag of sunflower seeds, and a pint of rubbing alcohol. The doors appeared unlocked, which, for some reason, infuriated Fishbein. After slashing the car—a mark for Mark—Fishbein retracted the knife and crept into the outdoor garden. Look like you belong, he told himself. At MITRE, Fishbein engineered aerospace threat-detection. He designed a digital sensory net that would allow warships to shoot down ballistic missiles just after their launch. The Budapest conference concerned mobile radar systems.  During his MITRE interview, the recruiter had asked, “How would you feel if you designed something that led to the loss of human life?” 

“I’ve never thought of that,” Fishbein had said. 

Fan whirred inside the garden center, spreading the rich odor of mulch and potting soil. Hoses dripped, and water pooled on the stone floor. Fishbein hung back and pretended to examine rosemary as J arranged basil and mint at a nearby table. J stooped over, his fingers shaking as he tweezed wilted leaves and hummed the Kaddish. Fishbein felt a migraine coming on and pressed his fingers to his temples. 

“I’m sorry.” A woman wearing a Nationals cap approached J. 

“Don’t be sorry,” J said. “I’m here to help.”

“I can’t find the lavender,” the woman said.

“The holy herb,” J said, straightening up. “Is it ornamental use? Culinary? Medicinal? Are you doing the yard?”

Doing the yard. The voice was the same—that sing-song Yoda-voice ending on a rise.

“It’s for the backyard,” the woman said. “You know, to add color.”

“You can’t help but love this color,” J said, his eyes, behind wrinkles and pockmarks, still that sharp jade.

“Home Depot is cheaper,” the woman said.

“True, true,” J said, “but we stand by our products. You’re paying for service.”

The woman squinted at a price tag. “I don’t know.”

“If you have insomnia or headaches,” J said, “lavender is a miracle drug. Clip some and rub a little on your wrists before bed, then sniff to destress.” J reached for the woman’s wrist to demonstrate. “Go ahead.”

Fishbein bit his bottom lip. Twenty-five years earlier, Mark had stepped off the Maryland side of Great Falls, greeting the rocks head-first. 

“Every plant is breathing forth the divine mystery,” J continued.

The woman nodded and began loading plants into her cart. “How much water do they need?”

“They don’t need much. Prune them in spring or else you get a big hole in the middle.”

Fishbein considered the weedkiller and its remorseless carcinogens. 

“Plant them in the sun,” J said. “Lavender, it wants to be seen.”

*

At home, Fishbein showed Maddy the hive of red dots on his laptop.

“You’re looking at the whole county,” Maddy said. She sat with Fishbein in their breakfast nook with a cup of chai. Fishbein’s coffee had turned cold. 

“We have much, much fewer than other cities,” Maddy said. “We checked all this before we moved in.”

“I don’t remember,” Fishbein said. 

“Switch synagogues. You barely go, and, thank God, Jason never goes.”

“It’s not about that, Mads. He shouldn’t live near us. He shouldn’t be in the same state.”

Maddy surveyed the owl statues in their backyard Fishbein had brought home from the garden center. 

“Fish,” Maddy said. “Are their heads rotating?”

“Their eyes light up too,” Fishbein said.

“That’s terrifying.”

“They’re for the rabbits, Mads.”

The rabbits dug holes and munched clover in the yard. Jason, four-years-old, liked chasing the bunnies.

“Jason could have been at services with me,” Fishbein said. “Other kids were there. Will be there.”

Maddy blew on her tea. “Is he in there?” She pointed to the registry on the screen.

Fishbein nodded. J was listed at an Olney address—a red-brick townhouse with dark blue shutters—owned by Howard Hoffman, a congregant at Beth Shalom. Fishbein assumed that Hoffman also owned J’s Subaru. How did J have any supporters after that TV segment? Even though it aired ten years ago, the Internet was forever. 

Maddy checked to make sure Jason wasn’t in earshot. “He never…with you?”

“No. I told you. It was Mark.”

“And he went to jail.”

“Two decades later. And not for Mark. Jesus. Whose side are you on, Mads?”

“Please. I’m a mother for fuck’s sake. I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate.”

“Exactly.”

“Look. He’s a monster. So, we stay the fuck away from him.”

Maddy was a consummate pragmatist, an in-demand neurologist, who, perhaps because of her limited face-time with patients, tended to rush right from symptoms to prescriptions. She split her time between offices in Baltimore and the District. Fishbein hadn’t told her about tailing J, and definitely not about knifing the car.

“I’ll talk to Rabbi Stern.” Fishbein said.

“We don’t want a cluster headache. You’re too close to this.”

“Too close,” Fishbein echoed. “Exactly.”

Maddy inched her hand toward his. “It’s just…I know how you get.” 

*

The next day, Fishbein met with Rabbi Stern in her office. A spring shower tap-danced against the rabbi’s large, wide windows.  

“Ours is an accepting congregation,” Rabbi Stern said.

She was thirty-something and oval-faced with a drop-fade crewcut. Swedish Fish filled the candy dish on her desk. She had a painting of four rabbis in Russian hats crossing Abby Road, one of the rabbis barefoot, holding a cigarette. On her desk, the rabbi had miniature flags of Israel and of Palestine.

Fishbein shook his head. He’d grown up in a Conservative synagogue. Maddy, a blonde shiksa, was raised Catholic, and Fishbein was barely practicing now, hence this LGBT- and interfaith-friendly, Reconstructionist temple. 

“Did you see the video?” Fishbein said.

“No. I choose not to.”

J thought he was meeting a boy. He brought a grocery bag filled with Coors Light and lube to a staged house. When the camera stepped out, J hid his face with his hands as if to turn invisible. Fishbein watched the show with Maddy, the couple newly married.    

“I have to approach everyone with empathy,” Rabbi Stern said. “I spoke to J. He’s performed teshuvah.” She touched her left thumb to each successive finger on her hand. “There’s illness, disease, brain damage. Everyone has their reasons.”

“That’s the tragedy in life,” Fishbein said. “Everyone has their goddamn reasons.”

Rabbi Stern jotted notes. “I don’t disagree.”

“So, why weren’t we consulted?” Fishbein asked. “An email. Something. I have a kid, a boy.”

“I understand.” She looked to the photos on her desk. The rabbi and her partner had adopted two Ethiopian kids—the only black faces in the congregation’s pale lake of Ashkenazis.

“We have an obligation to continue to evolve, to reconstruct,” she said. 

“Assuming someone like that can change. Which they can’t.”

Again, the Rabbi nodded. Her bright office was nothing like J’s. Fishbein remembered a darkly lit cave with a large imposing desk. Even from behind his desk, J managed a gravitational pull. Bar Mitzvah means ‘son of the commandment’. David told Solomon to strengthen himself and become a man.  Those laser-beam eyes beckoned you to another world.

“Forgiveness is a duty, a mitzvah,” Rabbi Stern said. She tapped her thumb against her index finger. “Not forgiving someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

Fishbein dug his nails into his palm. He needed sunglasses when his migraines tightened their vise. “You get used to the poison,” he said.

He’d suffered headaches since his twenties—pulsing pain, light sensitivity, nausea, aura. Maddy had stepped him through Maxalt, Imitrex, Zonisamide—all the game-winning Scrabble words. It’s guess and check, she said. He’d begun monthly Botox injections, and he was reading message boards on psychedelics. Hopkins’ psylocibin studies seemed terrifying—not the drugs themselves, but the possibility of giving over.

“Can’t I get you something?” the rabbi asked. “You look pained.”    

“I want to talk to the Board,” Fishbein said, rubbing his temples.

“Please,” Rabbi Stern said. “Forgiving isn’t as much for the transgressor as for the victim.”

“Except you can’t ask the dead for forgiveness.”

She didn’t know about Mark.

Rabbi Stern nodded. “But you’re alive.”

“Look,” Fishbein said. “It’s simple: I want him gone.”

Rabbi Stern dug through her candy dish and speared a Swedish Fish. “Everything changes. It’s our mandate. We can’t remain in place.”

*

Sarah Zalzman, Fishbein’s old classmate, served on Congregation Shalom’s board. Fishbein took a sick day that Monday and met Sarah for coffee on K Street. 

“We both married Catholics,” Sarah said. “Your parents must be as thrilled as mine.” 

“My mother just wanted me married,” Fishbein said. 

“Jewish men are so beaten down by their mothers.”

Both Sarah and her husband litigated for the cement lobby. Sarah was bone-thin, wearing all black business clothes, but Fishbein still saw the chunky girl from Hebrew school in a two-sizes-too-large Milli Vanilli shirt. She kissed Fishbein on the cheek before she sat down, then removed her phone, which had a large crack bisecting its screen. Sarah ordered a drink with four shots of espresso. Her foot tapped in 5/4. 

“How’s Jason?” she asked. “Greg and I, we always thought about kids.”

“If people knew the work, no one would do it,” Fishbein said.

“When Greg and I get a vacation,” Sarah said, “we get to go where ever we want.” She sounded like a lawyer defending a client she knew was guilty. Her coffee arrived and Sarah flagged the waitress for a straw. 

“About J,” Fishbein said.

“It’s insane,” Sarah said, sipping her drink through her hollow stirrer. 

“Can you call a Board meeting?” Fishbein asked.

“Of course. But there’s the accepting and diverse mission of the temple. Forgiveness is a big deal for them. And the legal fear of a lawsuit. J can only go to public services, and he’s monitored the whole time.”

“He’s in the synagogue with kids.”

“I get it.”

“No. You don’t.”

Sarah leaned back, stung, and Fishbein immediately felt guilty. Sarah had been Fishbein’s middle-school girlfriend. They’d groped on her bedroom floor while Sarah played Bell Biv DeVoe’s Poison, and her parents, downstairs, watched American tanks plow through Kuwait. She had a Magic Eye poster on her wall, but Fishbein could never make out the hidden picture. 

“You know,” Sarah said, “Greg is a little jealous of you. You were my first kiss. I had to dare you. Remember?”

“I was an idiot, I’m sure.”

Sarah slowed her foot. “Do ever think about Mark?” 

Fishbein nodded. An aura folded the edges of the café into medieval walls. Mark was fifteen, a freshman, when he stepped off the rocks in his favorite flannel shirt. 

Sarah’s phone dinged and she swiped her cracked screen. “I just wish he’d had some friends,” she said.   

*

The synagogue’s bridal suite had been down the hall from Fishbein’s seventh-grade Hebrew school classroom. Yichud, the suite had read in Hebrew, with Braille dotted underneath. The suite’s door had always been locked with its window blacked out. 

“They do it in there,” young Sarah had said.

“They don’t do it in there,” Mark said. “They give gifts in there.”

Mark was taller than the rest of the class but remained uncoordinated despite his muscles. Puberty had rendered Mark’s face a topographical map of pimples and whiteheads. The rush of testosterone only exacerbated Mark’s wrecking-ball-like awkwardness. In gym, he smashed tennis returns over the back fence, and whiffed at approaching soccer balls. 

“How do you know what’s in there?” Fishbein asked.

“Rabbi J told me,” Mark said.

Fishbein hung out at Mark’s after school. Mark had a killer comics collection; since Mark’s father died, Mark’s mother let him subscribe to multiple titles. His mom worked full-time, so groceries cluttered the kitchen counters. A Ball jar collected orphaned McDonalds Monopoly pieces, and, out back, the unmowed grass folded over itself. 

Tongue-wrestling Sarah, Fishbein often imagined Dawn, Mark’s older sister, a high school junior in ripped jean shorts and a black choker. Dawn colored her hair a new shade every week. When she wasn’t home, Fishbein snuck into her room and amazed over the posters depicted skinny male singers with stringy hair and haunted, hollow faces. Mark didn’t listen to music. On his Commodore 128, he programmed fractals, patterns you could zoom into and see the same patterns, the same pools of color at every depth. Fishbein didn’t sit with him at lunch, and made him promise to keep their afternoons a secret. The only time other people noticed Mark was in band class when he played his clarinet solo from Peter and the Wolf. His lip curled, his cheeks puffed, and as his fingertips moved over the holes of his horn, the room swelled with reedy hurt.

“Which X-Man would you be?” Mark asked Fishbein after school. 

“Wolverine,” Fishbein said. “Duh.” Fishbein envied the hero’s healing ability, and how Wolverine’s adamantine claws extended from nowhere. Snikt! 

“Gambit’s the best,” Mark said.

“Throwing cards? That’s gay.”

Fishbein wanted to remake Mark, to save him from being slammed into lockers, but Fishbein himself barely swam below the feeding depth of bullies.  One afternoon, Fishbein found a worn manilla envelope under Mark’s bed. It contained magazine cutouts of naked men and women. 

“You’re not supposed to see those,” Mark said over Fishbein’s shoulder.

“Where’d they come from?”

“It’s secret.”

Fishbein and Mark examined the pictures and rubbed their waists against the floor. Then Mark reached over and the two touched. Fishbein squeezed his eyes shut and listened to Dawn’s stereo from across the hall—guitars sparking like downed powerlines, amps crackling with feedback—and gave over. 

*

Tuesday morning, back at Good Earth, Fishbein traced a finger along the Subaru’s scratch. Then he knifed the opposite side of the car. In the garden center, he made a path to the lavender plants, and after checking that none of the early-morning customers were watching, he emptied a travel bottle filled with bleach into the plants. Try to relax now. 

Fishbein’s eyes watered and he held back a sneeze. April produced thick chains of pollen that blanketed the sides of the road like roadkill. Fishbein was programming an App to link pollen count and barometric pressure to the onset of migraines. He hadn’t been sleeping even before J’s re-emergence: he worried about Jason tripping on rabbit holes; he worried about another beltway sniper; he worried about coding errors. Maddy called Fishbein’s obsessiveness ‘monkey-mind’, and Fishbein imagined a marmoset jerking branch to branch inside its mesh enclosure. His obsessiveness made him a good engineer, but most of his engineering projects, despite functional technology, were never implemented (and surely, his digital security net involved too many jurisdictions). His security clearances were only good for bureaucratic (and physical) headaches, and a fear of being flagged.

“Finding everything alright?” came that sing-song voice.

Fishbein dropped the bottle to the stone floor. J stood so close; his eyes sharp behind coarse whiskers.

“I’m fine,” Fishbein said. “Yes.”

“The hydrangeas are on special,” said J. Fishbein smelled coffee on J’s breath and spotted a stain on J’s collar.

“Let me show you.” J started through the aisles, and Fishbein, to his surprise, followed. Despite the hitched stride and stooped back, J still commanded a Newtonian pull. Fishbein remembered J’s hand guiding the yod over the vowelless script of the Torah. As he followed J, Fishbein fingered the knife in his pocket. 

J stopped where a group of young shrubs exploded in blues and pinks. J lifted one of the hydrangea blooms. “Lacey cotton candy. You almost want to eat them.” The automatic sprinklers clicked on and offered the plants a thin, apologetic spray. “Not many people know that you can control their color,” J continued. “It’s all in the pH of the soil.” Blue to pink. Pink to white. White to blue. “It’s not as complicated as it sounds,” J said. “They love the morning sun, but not direct afternoon sun, so just plant them beside the house. Maybe in the back, beside a deck or porch.” J rubbed his beard and looked skyward as if considering the divine. “You need good drainage. If the hydrangeas have growing space, they don’t need much grooming.”

Fishbein pressed the open knife to his leg. Grooming. What J performed wasn’t a shampoo or trim; J wanted to clone himself in Mark. One Saturday, soon after Mark shared the photos with Fishbein, Mark led Fishbein into the synagogue’s bridal suite. The boys had snuck away from Jewish history lessons and Fishbein imagined himself Indiana Jones discovering a secret passage. The door was unlocked, and the actual room was quite spartan. It smelled like sandalwood (from the unlit candles on the room’s small table), and someone had painted over a single window. A blue and white bedspread covered a twin mattress, the bedspread smoothed and tucked with military precision. On the bedspread, equilateral triangles alternated sizes to form the snowflake fractals from Mark’s computer. An oil painting above the bed depicted Monarch butterflies, the butterflies’ long, bent legs invading pink flowers. Then J stepped inside. The rabbi closed the door and clicked the door handle, locking them in.

“You don’t remember me,” Fishbein told J, pressing down on his knife. Pools of color bloomed behind Fishbein’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” J said. “Have I helped you before?”

Fishbein chuckled. He fired missiles from his eyes. 

“What’s so funny?” J said.

“I know you from synagogue.”

J nodded. “I go to worship. I try to practice.”

“Practice makes perfect, Rabbi.”

J stepped back and Fishbein considered the most tender place on the man’s neck. 

“You need to leave,” J said. “Now.”

“What kind of service is that, Rabbi?”

“I don’t…I’m not that anymore.”

“Don’t be modest. You’re a T-V star.”

“No.”  J’s hands shook. “You’re wrong. That wasn’t me.”

Fishbein stepped forward. “I will change the water of the Nile into blood. I will send a plague of frogs on your country.”

“I’ll call someone,” J said.

“Don’t worry, Rabbi. I’ve already called. They’re on their way.”

*

That night, Fishbein treated the cut on his thigh with alcohol and Neosporin, but when the house slept, he peeled off the Band-Aids and teased his fingers over the wound. 

Botox involved thirty-one needles to the head and neck. “They’ll feel like little pinches,” Maddy promised. And Fishbein didn’t mind the pain, only sitting still with a face-full of needles. He felt like a horror villain preparing for screen time.

On Wednesday, he called The Olney Gazette and walked the reporter through the story, directing the guy to the TV clip. “Fuck me,” the reporter said. “I remember this.”  The article would appear two days later in The Gazette, then The Post. Rabbis and ministers would debate the issue on message boards:

Look what happened to the Canaanites when they abandoned God. 

Should he be the sin offering, our Azazael goat? 

In the meantime, Fishbein slept in Jason’s bottom bunk. “He needs me in there,” he told Maddy. The neighbor’s beagle howled, searching for a response.

“I miss the bunnies,” Jason said from the top bunk. Jason had a halting way of speaking, pausing before each word, hoping to complete a perfect sentence. 

“It’s safer this way,” Fishbein whispered back. 

Fishbein had clipped one of Jason’s nails to the quick and broke the skin. Jason didn’t scream or cry, but the whole next day, he cradled the hand to his body.

“Kids are resilient,” Maddy told Fishbein.  “Go easy on yourself.” Then she saw the cut on Fishbein’s leg. “What happened there?” 

“Weeding,” Fishbein said. “It was an accident.”

In the yard, the owl heads spun and cast red light from their eyes. 

“Fish, you need to get rid of those. Jason’s terrified.”

“So are the bunnies, Mads. No more digging.”

“I miss the bunnies. If we get enough bunnies, maybe we won’t have to mow.”

“I like mowing. It relaxes me.”

After Mark’s funeral, Fishbein had helped Dawn attack the family’s yard. They had to start with shears and hedge trimmers as the grass was too long and thick for any existing mower. Dawn, in college, had begun a Tori Amos phase and sported electric-strawberry hair with matching lipstick. Fishbein had avoided Mark for two years, ever since fleeing the bridal suite and immediately quitting Hebrew school. “It’s too much,” Dawn had said, dropping the shears into the ground. Inside the house, she fixed them stale Cokes, and they sat on the prickly living room rug. Fishbein saw Dawn’s bra under her damp, white t-shirt. Baddie power, her shirt read. “Come,” Dawn said, and they lay together, spooning, the coarse rug burning Fishbein’s side. His erection pressed against Dawn’s ass, and she rose to tug off her shirt.

Fishbein scheduled Friday Happy Hour with Sarah at a Connecticut Avenue curry house. They sat outside under a red umbrella while commuters emerged from the Metro’s long, vertiginous escalators. Sarah ordered two Kingfishers. Fishbein touched his finger to his nose, then to the foam in his glass to help the suds recede.

“So that’s that,” Sarah said.

The articles came out that day, and Beth Shalom immediately cast J from its congregation. 

“Except J can find another temple,” Fishbein said.

“Not in Maryland or Virginia. And his parole keeps him here.”

“He can’t leave.” Fishbein didn’t say it as a question. “I forgot.”   

“Right.” Sarah brushed foam off Fishbein’s lip. 

Dawn had gifted Fishbein Mark’s comics, which Fishbein kept as he moved through the years. The issues were worn and musty (no resale value), and the characters’ dialogue was dumber than he remembered—I will do what must be done!—but the drawings by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee leapt off the page. The previous two days, waiting for the article on J, Fishbein had unearthed the comics and massaged the low rumble in his temples. Sleek heroes conjured energy from their fingers and laid waste to mountains. In ‘Uncanny X-Men #266’, the first appearance of Gambit, Fishbein found green-tinged, underexposed Polaroids. He didn’t recognize the kids (he could barely look), but he recognized the butterflies in the background. Fishbein placed the photos back in the comic book, which he slid in an envelope marked Taxes. 

“Greg’s still at work,” Sarah said, scooting her chair closer to Fishbein’s.

The patio tightened. Government workers migrated early from their dull-yellow landmarks, and the swarm of lanyard-wearing suits swiftly descended on empty tables.   

“He’s not going away,” Fishbein said. And the engineering plan formed.

“What do you think?” Sarah asked, tapping her foot.

“I’ve got to go.” Fishbein shot up, downed his beer, and dodged through the maze of chairs. “I’ve got an errand.” 

He stopped home for the envelope, then headed to the garden center and the unlocked Subaru. Fishbein snuck five X-Men comics under the passenger side floormat with one corner of one issue peeking out. He hit up a gas station and called the police from a burner phone, informing the operator that a bearded man working at Good Earth had tried to show his son pornography. “I saw the license plate. My son says that the old guy opened a comic book and the photos were there inside.” When the operator asked for Fishbein’s name, he hung up and deactivated the phone.

“It’s awful, Fish,” Maddy said back at the house. “You need to see.” 

She led him into the backyard, around the owl statues and Jason’s playset to a bloodied mass nestled in the clover.

“Take care of it,” she said.

“You’re the doctor, Mads.”

“Come on, Fish. You’re in charge of the yard.”

The owls swept red light over the blood-matted fur. Frayed, exposed tendons joined the rabbit’s back legs to its body. The animal struggled through short, shallow breaths. 

“Shit. It’s alive,” Fishbein said.

“Thank god Jason’s asleep.”

Maddy rubbed Fishbein’s shoulder and retreated inside the house. The sun sank below the neighbor’s house, leaving dark purple streaks. The neighbor’s beagle must have attacked the rabbit but failed to finish it off, and, somehow, the rabbit dragged itself into Fishbein’s yard. Fishbein circled the house and retrieved a shovel from its neat garage peg. Then he stood over the rabbit. He measured where the cutting edge should strike its neck for a killing blow, then raised the shovel up over his head and counted to three, then ten, then twenty. The rabbit stared up with one blotchy eye, and Fishbein watched its labored breathing, willing it to die. The rabbit hung on, even after all color drained from the sky.

“Fine,” Fishbein said. 

He picked a spot by the back fence and drove the shovel into the earth. His arms lightened with each lift of dirt. The beagle whined and clawed at the other side of the privacy fence, and when the hole felt deep enough, Fishbein scooped the rabbit up in the shovel blade and lay the animal in the fresh hole. It still managed shaky breaths.

“I’m sorry,” Fishbein said. 

He dropped dirt back into the hole. He patted the ground even and returned the shovel to the garage, to its exact right peg. He aligned all his garage tools, and then, back in the yard, he switched off the owls. Come fall, he’d seed the disturbed ground. Now, behind the bedroom curtains, Maddy removed her earrings and opened dresser drawers while Fishbein lingered in the yard, rubbed his leg, and looked through the dark.   

Mathew Goldberg’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Shenandoah, and American Short Fiction, among others. His short story collection placed as a finalist for the Iron Horse Literary Review Book Prize, and he received a Special Mention for a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife and son in Missouri.