In Universes

by Emet North

It’s hard to hold all thirteen cards in my hand, but after a few rounds I win a game. “Who taught you to play so good?” my bubbe asks. She is a horde of muskrats, soft-looking but hardy. Your bubbe has survived things the rest of us can’t imagine, my mother has said to me, many times. I know she means Auschwitz, and in spite of the statement, I imagine my bubbe’s muskrats forced into cattle cars, shoved beneath the gates that say ARBEIT MACHT FREI. But, of course, my bubbe wasn’t a motherhorde then. Just a girl. My mother talks with my bubbe and zeyde about her childhood, about nieces and nephews and cousins I can’t keep track of. They switch back and forth between English and Yiddish. I look at the photos lining the walls, new ones in color and old ones in sepia tones. I’ve been told who the people in the old photographs are—my bubbe’s and zeyde’s parents, grandparents, siblings—but I can’t remember their names. All I remember is that almost everyone in these photographs is dead. In one photo, there’s a girl who looks just like someone from my kindergarten class. When I’d asked if she died too, my zeyde said, “Not died, killed. Shot by the Nazis.” My bubbe had hushed him, saying, “She’s only a little girl,” but he said that I needed to remember, that it was never too young to remember. But sitting in the kitchen, the dark pressing in on the windows, I want to forget.