Free Jews vs Zombies by Daniel Polansky, Adam Roberts, Sarah Lotz, Ofir Touché Gafla, Rena Rossner, Shimon Adaf, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Anna Tambour Page B

only didn’t have the money but there was also that limit of ‘Hebrew’ students already reached in all the top schools. So he had to take that job Uncle Leo wangled for him, opening in January. Until then, after graduation from high school in a week (what a waste of science classes!) he was to learn the trade – designing for three dimensions with two-dimensional materials, under her. Not that this training came, of course, with an opportunity to look at or touch the goods inside these constructions.
    The first day in training  he successfully ran a Singer needle through his forefinger. It was a good lesson in driving speed on the newly electrified machine. After that, he surprised himself on the thing, finding that the more difficult the curves, the more fun he had making the turns, and he grew so skilled that his mother started trusting him with ever more mountainous jobs.
    The fittings were all done in her bedroom, and the clients looked nothing like, say, that blonde with manacled hands and the rayon full-torso breast-delineating underpiping but otherwise purely unsupportive cups fronting Terror Tales, September 1934. Most of her clients were, frankly, variations on the potato or a cubist painting, even with her expert foundations giving them shape. ‘Today’s woman,’ he said to her one day, ‘should thrust out rockets, not your matzo balls.’
    ‘So, Irving. This today’s woman? She tells you this?’
    Her son blushed reassuringly.
    ‘You fantazyor,’ she said, patting his cheek. ‘Your today’s woman is in the future, and she’s made of steel.’
    But to make him happy, she let him create two designs that were quite astoundingly shaped, giving body where needed he said, but always ‘up and outlift’. She hated wasting the canvas and thread, but kept that thought to herself. After he had constructed both models – impeccably cut and sewn, she was pleased to note – she offered them to her two youngest clients, having quickly to explain that it was just an idea. She almost lost both women.
    So instead, she asked Irving to tell her of his dreams while he sewed.
    It helped him to hear her sigh.
    The months passed more quickly than he imagined they would, and he was doubly sorry to see them go. His mother had always been a heroine to his way of thinking. One day he would find a woman like that, he thought when he forgot that he’d be a brassiere designer, something to laugh at. So embarrassed did he feel that he refused all comers, and with looks like his and his shy, thinker’s manner, he could have explored all he wanted, even the nice girls.
    December came, and with it, the Day of Reprieve.
    He was told that there was no way he could get into the Air Corps, so he went to the Army office across the street, but after interviewing him, the guy there wrote something on a piece of paper and sent him back across the street. And he walked out of that office signed up for a course, launching him into the Air Corps.
    With his new skills in map-making, he flew over Germany and then was stationed to Burma, where he learned to hate the English for their filled storehouses, meant not for the people who needed them, but for export; visited temples that he laughed to think about gracing towns in the US of A – the horror! And in this alien land he felt for the first time, the real things, if only stone; and after much encouragement and teasing, the real things with a real-life woman, who said she ‘love’ him, but she kicked his pet mongoose.
    He hadn’t been surprised that the stone women on the temples had matzo-ball breasts. After all, they were ancient, weren’t they? But this woman in the flesh – hers were something he had only imagined. She was soft and warm, but they could have been made of tin, they were so conical. They only confirmed, however, his thoughts that the woman of today would love to look like that if she could. Of course, she must have been a freak, a beautiful one but nevertheless a