Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

On Yom Kippur she vowed not to bad-mouth her brother. Lashon hara, one of the two most serious sins according to Jewish law.

He understands with vicious clarity why people strike bargains with God.

But what he really means is that he’d like to take this suspended moment—the new millennium already careening inexorably forward—and roll it back instead. Back, back through layers of time to a split second when things could have gone differently, if only they had known. There must be that second, bobbing and darting in the aliveness of their shared history, unmistakable, glowing like a firefly in the darkness.

that single word, that concentrated thought, she has some notion—she knows it’s magical thinking—that it will reach her son. That wherever he is, he will have the thought: It’s time to come home.

Memory, history—things that happened fifteen years ago, or fifty—are as alive now as if they had just happened, or are about to happen.

It isn’t misery that loves company—no, no. Happiness loves company, and misery—misery just wants to be left alone.

Maybe all of them are simply a chorus of souls, light touching light.

has become interested, too, in contemporary poetry. He spends hours each week at a small bookstore called Diesel, not far from Sarah’s house. He’ll send Theo an email with a typed-out poem by Marie Howe or W. S. Merwin.

With all her reserves, she hurls herself toward the light she cannot see.

were enveloped by that field of energy. It wasn’t exactly like time stopped; more that time had seemed to expand so that they

were a part of everything that had ever happened or ever would happen. She would never really be gone. This new knowledge

He once saw a photograph comparing the pattern of rings inside a tree with the pattern of a human fingerprint. The two images looked almost exactly the same.

each evening at exactly seven there is a symphony of banging pots and people leaning out from open windows to cheer in support of essential workers.

in cities and small towns across the globe.

The sunlight is dancing along the whitecaps. It looks as if the sea were filled with thousands upon thousands of flickering stars.

perhaps time is not a continuum, but rather, past, present, and future are always and forever unspooling.

number 18, Chai, the Hebrew word, also, for life.