Free A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell

like streamsfrom a fountain. The Rebbe wraps me in an enormous towel that is toasty and warm. It smells like Sabbath bread and soon I am dried.
    “Gather your things, Chaimka,” the Rebbe announces in his piercing squawk. He fluffs up the feathers around his neck. “We leave immediately.”

THE COLOR OF POISON BERRIES

20
    The sun finally rises, staining the drifts of snow a salmon pink, the color of poison berries. The Rebbe circles overhead. I grab my winter coat and my rustic traveling sack, and off we go, out the courtyard and onto Noniewicza Street, deserted now in the early hours of this freezing winter day. The houses blindly witness our leavetaking through windows layered in icy sheets, their sills and eaves frosted with pale drifts. I clap my hands together for warmth and search through my pockets for my woolen gloves and a thick woolen scarf.Gifts from my Ester, she knitted them one summer when the doctor forbade her to leave her bed. Which child she was carrying, I can’t recall, but it was a difficult, an impossible confinement.
    High above, the Rebbe turns in a great wheel, leaving Noniewicza Street to soar above a crooked alleyway. I hesitate to follow him, glancing one last time towards the facade of my court, my shoes sinking into the snow. How small it appears from this distance, a flat rectangular box, no larger than a coffin. I walked through it, not an hour ago, but surely for the final time, its hallways creaking, its walls breathing softly, seeing it not as it is now, filled to the rafters with drowsing Poles, stacked high in their beds like cords of wood, but as it was then, years and years and years ago, when I first stepped foot into it. A bright and clear morning, that was. The builders had only just completed their work. I had commissioned the entire court, with its apartments and its storefronts to rent, saving the largest apartment for ourselves. I snuck in early to hang mezuzahs on the doorposts, to secure a blessing for the house. Every room was empty and expectant.
Here
, I thought,
we will live.
    Not more than an hour ago, before the sun was up, I removed the leather traveling sack from the closet near the front entryway and strapped it across my chest, like a rustic. I hesitated, not knowing what to carry with me. A thought occurs and I step, first in one direction, then in the next, until remembering the photos hidden in my jacket. These, I secure in a pocket of the bag. I worried that the blood might have ruined them, but they dried out quite nicely. Wrinkled,yes, a little frayed about the edges, but no worse, really, for the wear.
    In Ola’s room, I kneel against the bed, careful not to awaken her cousins who have claimed it. They sleep, the three of them, embedded in the mattress as deeply as the lice. Running my hand across the floor, I find in the valise beneath her bed, the toy compass and the broken spyglass, which she had so prized. I place them also into the sack. In the kitchen, I steal a loaf of raisin bread, left over from the mourners’ feast, to make a surprise banquet for the Rebbe. Fending for himself, he has surely grown weary of the seeds and worms and other staples of an avian diet. I wrap the bread in paper and, tucking it into the traveling sack, I remember the ledger book hidden in my office across the courtyard. So out the door and into the brisk dark morning, past the timberyard and bare gardens, to the big warehouse. Following its ramp into my office, I dig with my hand into the cushions of the daybed, finding nothing. I ransack the drawers of my desk, scattering their contents, tossing them wildly about, but the ledger isn’t there. A feeling of panic floods my nerves. I kick myself. I should have known better than to leave important documents lying about! I’m forgetting everything!
    Utterly dejected, I sit at the desk and notice how unpleasant the cushions feel. Of course! I had hidden the ledger inside the cushion of my chair. At the time, I recall, it