Free The Girl on the Fridge: Stories by Etgar Keret Page A

filled something like fifteen of them, the room began to spin. My head hurt. I went to open all the windows, corpses crumbling under my feet. In the kitchen, I found one swinging from the light fixture. The bug must have realized it was going to die from the poison and decided to hang itself. I loosened the rope, and the body fell on me. I almost collapsed; it weighed about seventy kilos. It was wearing a black jacket, no pockets, and it didn’t have any papers or a watch or anything, not even wings. It reminded me of someone I knew in the army. I felt really sorry for it.
    I took the others downstairs in the bags, but I dug that one a grave. I found an empty watermelon crate near the Dumpster and put it on the grave instead of a headstone. A week later, the exterminator guy came to spray the place again, but I whacked him on the head with a kitchen chair and he was out of there in a flash. He didn’t even stop to ask why.
    When I’d finished telling the story, we were both quiet. Then I asked him if it was true that a lawyer can’t inform on his clients, and he said yes. I offered him a cigarette, but he didn’t want one. I turned on the news, but the announcers were on strike.
    “Tell me,” he finally asked, “if it wasn’t for the festival, how come you wanted to go to Jerusalem?”
    “No reason,” I said. “A woman I knew died.”
    “Knew her for no reason, or died for no reason?” he persisted. Then came the Shalom intersection, and instead of taking a right, he spun the wheel left, straight into the median.

Sidewalks
    I arrived a week later, the way I always do. I never come on the actual date. I did go to the funeral and to the first memorial, but with all those people staring, the firm handclasps, the mother smiling at me teary-eyed and asking me when I was finishing my degree—I said fuck it. The date itself doesn’t mean much to me anyway, though it’s an easy one to remember: December 12, the twelfth day of the twelfth month.
    Ronen’s sister is a doctor at Beilinson Hospital, and she was on duty the moment your heart stopped. I heard Ronen tell Yizhar that you died at the stroke of noon. Like, on the dot.
    Ronen got all worked up about it: “On the twelfth of the twelfth at twelve. Do you realize what the odds are?” he whispered so loud that everyone could hear. “It’s like an omen from Heaven.”
    “Incredible,” Yizhar muttered. “If he’d stuck around another twelve minutes and twelve seconds, I bet they’d have issued a stamp in his honor or something.”
    It really is easy to remember—the date, I mean—and the street sign we stole together on Yom Kippur. And that retarded boomerang they brought you from Australia, the one we used to throw in the park when we were kids and it never came back. Every year I come and stand beside the grave and think back, remembering something else each time, remembering very clearly. We’d each had five beers, and then you did another three shots of vodka. I was feeling pretty okay that night. Tipsy, but okay. You? You were shitfaced. We left the pub for your place, a few hundred meters away. We were wearing those gray raincoats we’d bought together at the pedestrian mall. You were pretty wobbly, and you knocked into a phone pole with your shoulder. You took a step back and stared—bemused is how you looked. I shut my eyes, and the blackness of my lowered eyelashes swirled together with the dark vapors of the alcohol. I tried to picture you far away from me, in a different country, say, and the thought scared me so much that my eyes snapped open, just in time for me to see you take another unsteady step and tip over backward. I caught you just before you hit the ground, and you smiled at me with your head tilted back, like a kid who’s discovered a new game.
    “We won,” you told me, as I helped you up. I had no idea what you were talking about. Then we took a few more steps and you did it again, deliberately this time. You just let your