Free The Pinch by Steve Stern Page A

pantry. I used to declare with Stephen Dedalus the wish to wake up from the nightmare of history, but nowadays I had to struggle just to rouse myself enough from The Pinch to take notice of current events. Not that I struggled very hard. I was thus straddling two worlds when Rachel Ostrofsky came back into the 348 all alone.

4
A Local Apocalypse
    Until the earthquake, when North Main Street rippled like a beaten carpet and rolled like a wave, things had been relatively quiet. Of course, owing to Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya and his followers’ infernal tampering with the cosmos, there had been instances of what might be deemed the miraculous. But such events had been minimal, a mere trickle compared to the flood that followed the quake—which events included, incidentally, a flood.
    But on the day that Jenny Bashrig was discharged from the St. Joseph Hospital, all that was yet to come. Muni had not visited her during her convalescence, and it was with shame that he watched her hobbling on crutches through the door of Rosen’s Delicatessen. When they’d tumbled together from the rope above the alley, the girl struck the ground first with Muni landing on top of her. He’d heard the bone snap and seen the leg’s unnatural angle as he rolled off, shaken but unharmed, onto the gravel, convinced she had deliberately broken his fall. While she lay moaning and convulsed in pain, Muni cried for help, alerting Mrs. Rosen, who hastened in her billowing nightclothes to fetch Dr. Seligman. The bathrobed doctor, after a swift inspection of her injury, phoned for an ambulance to come and haul her away. Attendants lifted her onto a stretcher and Muni averted his glance from her sloe-eyed stare and the bandy state of her splintered limb beneath the rumpled blue gown. He dodged Dr. Seligman’s questions as to how he happened to be abroad at that hour in a torn nightshirt, and avoided what he perceived as the accusatory gaze of the blind fiddler on his corner. To say nothing of the neighbors who’d begun to poke their heads from their second-story windows. That was the last he’d seen of Jenny until he glimpsed her a week later from behind the plate glass of Pin’s General Merchandise, as she was being helped by Old Man Rosen from the rear of the Argo Electric ambulance.
    He couldn’t say exactly why he hadn’t gone to see her in the hospital. Of course it didn’t help that, since the “accident,” he and Jenny had become the chief topic of gossip in the Pinch. And the more people talked about them, speculating on the nature of their relationship and shushing one another when he came into view, the less Muni felt disposed to communicate with the girl. The intimacy he’d experienced with Jenny that night on the wire was an anomalous event; it had occurred almost entirely outside his consciousness and therefore beyond his control. The thought of it frightened him, as did the intense desire he’d felt when he held her pliant form. Having only recently reclaimed a kind of impromptu identity for himself, Muni was not yet prepared to make that self susceptible to the devices of another. The sensations the girl evoked in him were disturbing, and if he weren’t careful they could shatter the fragile peace he’d fashioned for himself since coming to North Main.
    “You’re a cruel lad,” judged his aunt Katie, who was not ordinarily meddlesome. The remark stung. He admired his aunt for her playful nature and comely looks, though he seemed to have arrived just as those looks had begun to fade. Before his eyes the blush of her high cheeks had turned from ripe to raw, and her dense auburn hair was recently knitted with silver. All her handsome features had entered their autumnal phase.
    Muni was also aware of his uncle’s unease over her aging. Didn’t Pinchas protest overmuch in his running commentaries that his Katie was the same girl who’d rescued him decades before from a common grave? It was a tale he told at the least opportunity: