Fiction: ‘Smite’ and ‘300 Pounds’

David Librach

By

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

Smite

Padnos, old Jew, stands outside his junkyard’s office and smiles at the proceedings as if he were Ganesh, large-bellied, with big, floppy ears, which grow larger and hairier every year. He goes to synagogue on the Sabbath. When the rabbi says: Contribute to the building fund, he pulls out his checkbook and writes a big check. When the rabbi says: Don’t intermarry, Padnos is smug, because he married a Jewess who bore him six children and they are all Jews like him and work in the junkyard.

As with us, our enemy’s lives are ruled by ancient myth, so our brutal use of force should console, even as it smites them. As in the days of our forefathers, they are obliterated from the sky.

300 Pounds

You threw missiles at me as if you were a Gazan, and I was an Israeli farmer in my chicken house in the dead of night, lit by blue bulbs, stuffing live chickens into cages. So this is what we have come to, I said.

She was 6’ 2, nearly 200 lbs. I was a runt, 5’7 and too thin. I entreated her. She waved me off like a farmwoman shooing chickens with a broom. I was persistent. I herded her like an Australian sheep dog, got her confused and rattled as a sheep. I herded her to the altar.

You took over my life, you cried. You took everything that was mine and made it yours, and now a two-country solution is impossible, as is one country. You enclosed my soul with cinder blocks. You built walls, erected barbed wire fences between my past and my future. You want to drive me into the sea, I replied. You deny my right to exist

I’m still 5’ 7 and even thinner than I was, built like one of the rails of the pen my dog herds sheep into.

I’m lost in a narrow, cobbled street in the marketplace. Filthy merchants feel my breasts on the pretext of selling me dresses with bangles. My voice is a flute that no one hears.

She’s now close to 300 pounds and I spend my nights herding her various parts. Her huge breasts and buttocks, her broad hips, her thick legs and well-rounded arms are almost beyond my instinctual capabilities to manage.

No, your voice is like gravel, I say, and I will use it to pave roads through this settlement.

She dabbles in Weight Watchers, Nutri-System, the Adkins Diet and several more obscure schemes. Whenever I think she’ll run out of them, someone invents another. I smile to myself, knowing she’s doomed to fail.

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over a thousand of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad, including TUCK MAGAZINE. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net for work published in 2011 through 2015. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition.