Free The Girl on the Fridge: Stories by Etgar Keret

was so great. But she could do it when she thought she should. Another alternative.
     
    Then they’re in bed and she has that aftertaste in her mouth. Kind of salty-sticky. Something between pretzels and fish. He pulls her on top of him like he always does. Kisses her on the mouth. So he can taste it too. As if to prove that it isn’t disgusting.
    “What are you thinking about?” he asks.
    She smiles, thinking about the alternative. “Nothing,” she tells him, “nothing.”
    She wonders if there really is nothing afterward, or if there is something. Her intuition tells her there’s nothing. Because if it’s pretty much nothing now, when everything’s moving, then it would probably be the same afterward. But not necessarily. There is no “necessarily.” We have free choice. Nothing or not nothing. The alternatives are all in our hands.
    They say she’s gifted, but what do I know. I roam around her soul, and it’s like a deserted apartment. Like a house where the parents have shoved all the furniture into a corner because their son is having a party. Gifted at painting, they say, and writing, too. Creative, but quiet and slightly odd. And I say—she’s anybody’s guess. Nothing here is clear. Because of her, I feel guilty.
    I’ve always asked myself what girls think when they’re doing it. Not suicide, the sex thing. It bothers me. I always used to think that they thought it was supposed to bum them out, to humiliate them. I hoped that, if I could get inside her head, everything would be different, I’d get some kind of insight. Different, my ass. This isn’t why I became a writer.
    She looks up from the balcony. The sky. Iron bars and the sky. Her thoughts—not sharp at all. The whole thing’s kitsch. In the end, she’ll die, even though they say she’s gifted. She’ll go down on me and she’ll die. She’ll die and she’ll go down on me. In the name of free choice. In the name of the Movement for the Advancement of Women and Gravitation. And I can tie it all together neatly so the climax shows off my narrative skills. Or not.

Without Her
    What do you do the day the woman of your life dies? I went to Jerusalem and back. There were terrible traffic jams; some film festival was opening. Just getting from downtown to the highway took more than an hour. The guy I was driving with was a young lawyer and an expert in one of those martial arts or something. “Thank you all,” he mumbled to himself the whole way out of town. “Thank you to all the people who chose me, and especially to my mother. Without her…without her…” He always got stuck like that at “without her,” all three hundred times.
    Once we’d gotten out of town, and traffic started to flow, he stopped saying thank you and just kept staring at me. “Are you okay?” he asked every few seconds. “Are you okay?” And I said yes. “Are you sure?” he persisted. “Are you sure?” And I said yes again. I was a little hurt that he’d thanked everyone but me.
    “So how about telling me something,” he said. “Not any of that bullshit you make up, something that really happened to you.” So I told him about the extermination.
    My landlord threw in the extermination free of charge. He’d handwritten it in at the bottom of the lease without my even asking for it. A week later, a guy with a plastic jerrican and a Dr. Roach shirt woke me up. He did the whole house in forty minutes and told me to air out the place when I came back that evening and not to wash the floors for a week. As if I would’ve washed them if he hadn’t told me not to.
    When I came home after work, there was no floor. Everything was covered with a carpet of legs turned to the ceiling. Three layers of corpses. One or two hundred per tile. Some were the size of kittens. One, its belly covered with white spots, was the size of a television. They weren’t moving. I asked one of the neighbors for a spade and loaded them into jumbo-size garbage bags. When I’d