Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

But if we don’t miss something, what do we actually have? If we are defined by what we have, then your situation is very bad, but if we are defined by what we’ve lost, then congratulations, you’re at the top of the list. And if missing something is like a bite, like skin infected by a parasite that has penetrated it, why does she scratch it so passionately, the smell of garbage and the smell of food, the smell of the earth and the smell of Asum? She walked faster. Went into the trailer and lay down on the mattress. Stop it. Stop it. But they kept coming, the smells. And so did the tastes, the colors, the faces. But worst of all was when they stopped coming. When she suddenly realized that she no longer remembered the name of the boy who had lived three shacks away who used to cough all the time. That she could not recall the song men used to sing after all the other songs had ended. She lay in bed and remembered, then lay in bed and didn’t remember, and gradually felt the tastes, the colors, the faces, leave her body, felt how every moment she was here, something from there faded, was wiped away. Then she heard the women on the mattresses next to her whisper: “Listen, Sirkit is finally crying.”