The Girl on the Fridge: Stories

“Okay,” Uzi said. “Really. Okay. But for the past couple of months I’ve been feeling, I don’t know, kind of down. The spark just isn’t there. Not when I go in, not while I’m working, not when I go home at night. No spark. You know?”

They drank their third and Eitan said that was how it was, everyone feels that way sometimes

He just had to make sure he wanted to. He thought about it for a few seconds. Maybe in the general scheme of things he couldn’t find any meaning to life, but on a smaller scale it was okay. Not always, but a lot of the time. He wanted to live, he really did. That’s all there was to it

That night I dreamed that I was a forty-year-old woman and that I was disgusted with myself, with my life. With not having a driver’s license, with not knowing English, with never having been abroad. The blood that had dripped all over me was beginning to harden, and it felt like a kind of curse. Like my period would never end

In honor of my dad’s fiftieth, I thought about life for a second. About how it spits in your face. About how you’re always letting assholes have their way because they’re not worth the effort

Alone

He told her that he once had a girlfriend who liked to be alone. And that was very sad, because they were a couple, and couple, by definition, means “together.” But mostly she preferred to be alone. So once he asked her, “Why? Is it me?”

And she said, “No, it has nothing to do with you, it’s me, it has to do with my childhood.”

“So to this day,” she asked, “you don’t know what it was in her childhood that made her leave you?”

“She didn’t leave me,” Nahum corrected her. “We broke up.”

“Broke up, whatever,” Ogette said.

“It’s not ‘whatever,’” Nahum insisted, “it’s my life. For me, at least, those are significant distinctions.”

Where were we? Something to do with blue. Well, in the end it turns out she was making you a painting of the sea. No, the sky. Ah, sorry, now you’ve strangled your brother. Ah yes, we were just saying how much you can learn about a person’s character from a painting

Yordan remembered what Halamish taught him in basic training (before he was exposed as a mole for the Khmer Rouge): “Trust no one, not even yourself.”

God knows how you’ll get through the month. A hypothetical God, of course, because none of this actually happens.

—Why?

—Am I allowed to ask exactly why you left me?

—Don’t shrug your shoulders. Answer me. The least I deserve is an answer.

I don’t want to hurt you. Definitely not now. There’s no point in it.

—Hurt me, damn you, hurt me. It can’t be worse than what you already did.

Because you’re a nobody, okay? Because you’re a nobody. Because you don’t want anything. Nothing. Don’t want to know anything, don’t want to succeed at anything, don’t want to be anything. Just to sit on your ass and say how good we have it together. Good is doing things, trying to achieve something, but you? You don’t even know how to dream. You’re not a person, you’re nothing. The only thing you’re capable of doing is sitting on that balcony with your arms around me, saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” I’m not a teddy bear, you know? I’m not a Barbie. And unlike you, I have slightly bigger ambitions than sleeping in.

—Do you still love me?

—Do you love me a little?

—Did you ever love me?

—Hey, cut it out, don’t cry. I’m stopping. I stopped. Look. Go ahead and ask your questions.