by Dahlia Adler
Shai unbuckles the first strap, and they both watch the blood flow back into Tony’s arm, though his face remains white. “I did it, Devenzano. I made you feel the way that brand on your arm is intended to make everyone like me feel—everyone with less power than you in a world that rewards you for being a blank slate. I want you to remember that every single time you look at that number in the mirror, every time you tag someone’s car. I want you to think about everyone you’ll be terrorizing with that tattoo, everyone you’ll be making feel the same panic you felt today, everyone who’s unsure just how deeply you mean what your skin says.”
The second one is unbuckled, but Tony is unable to move, unable to internalize that he’s actually free. Finally, he rasps, “So now what? You didn’t get my tattoo, and you didn’t get your money.”
“Now you go home and tell your dad. You show him your tattoo. You tell him you want it removed or covered—I don’t care which. And I won’t know which, because I never want to see you in my face again. Do not come near me. Do not say a word to me. If you do, I will tell everyone every single thing that happened here today, right down to you desperately needing a change of pants. You hear me?”
Tony nods, and finally pulls his arm back to himself.
Shai takes a deep breath. “Go.”
Tony runs, barely making it outside before he pukes in the grass.
* * *
It’s only after everyone else is gone that Persia stands from the bench, having watched Raphael wrap up his tools and Bas beg off to go hide in his house and play video games until this entire afternoon disappears. Her outside demeanor is calm as always, but Shai sees the storm still surging behind her dark eyes, knows a part of her feels sick about this but a bigger part is glad to have played a role after staying in the shadows for so long. “Well, that went about as well as it could have.”
Shai smiles wryly. “Got the job done, I think. Thank you for playing your part so well. Let no one say Jews do not excel at theatre.”
“Raph was pretty great too. You’re lucky to have such a talented stable of cousins,” she says with a curtsey. Then her face grows serious. “Listen, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t.” Shai squeezes her hand. “You’ve got your reasons for hiding your Jewishness, and I’ve got my reasons for wearing mine on my sleeve. Or, more literally, on my head, I guess. We both know the world isn’t exactly kind to us.”
“No, it’s really not. I hate how grateful I am that my dad has the least Jewish name ever.”
“Well, you made good use of that here, and it was cool and brave as hell.” Shai grins. “Mi yode’ah im la’et ka’zot higat l’malchut?” Who knows whether you came to the kingdom for a time such as this?
“Did you just quote Esther at me?”
“Good ear.”
“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” says Persia, cracking her own smile. “Nice job, cuz.”
He doffs his kippah, and together they climb the stairs.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ’gainst the merchant there.
—PORTIA, ACT 4, SCENE 1
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There was never any question for me what story I would be retelling from the moment I conceived this anthology. One of the most notable things about The Merchant of Venice is its classification as a Comedy, which it earns due to its protagonists getting their happy ending, finding love, et cetera. Of course, for Shylock—the Jew—the story is tragedy upon tragedy, especially to those who see Shylock’s ultimate punishment through the same lens he does.
I originally read The Merchant of Venice when I was in (Yeshiva) high school, which was, in retrospect, something of a “safe space” for it. Certainly I wasn’t surrounded by people who bought into what might be the most enduring anti-Semitic depiction in the history of Western literature. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I would see its effects, and so, given the opportunity to mold the story in a different way—one that wouldn’t erase Shylock’s very real emotions of anger, isolation, resentment, and desire for justice, but would give him both more agency and more community—I leapt at the chance to rework it into a version that wouldn’t make light of either its consequences or its “villain.”
This isn’t to say that as a Jewish reader, I find no merit to the original; Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech is one of the most humanizing monologues in Shakespeare’s canon. But it is, of course, telling that Shylock is in the position of needing to humanize us in the first place, and it was just so biblically familiar that I had to mesh it with one of my favorite Jewish stories of complex heroism: the book of Esther, in which family and revenge win the day.
(With thanks to the Pixies for the title.)
A SONNET
HIS INVENTION
Inspired by Sonnet 147
Brittany Cavallaro
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
—SONNET 147
They drove down to Big Sur, down the California 1 from Marin. Sophie was eighteen then, a young eighteen; she counted horse farms out the window. Michael agreed to pull over halfway down the road to Pfeiffer Beach. Sophie fed a dapple gray her lunch, a comforting memory from one of her favorite childhood novels—The Secret Garden, maybe, or Little House on the Prairie. He leaned against the hood of his car, taking pictures of her with his father’s camera. She knew better than to look straight into the lens. Instead, she let her dark hair fall in front of her face, biting her lip as she stretched to pat the horse’s whispering nose.
Michael had met her at boarding school at the start of her final year. She had escaped her Minnesotan hometown with a scholarship, something he had guessed from the way she carried a purse to class, by her thin legs in knee-high socks, by the long braids she coiled around her head. When she spoke, her words were full of soft r’s and long o’s that hung sweetly in the air, and that voice and those braids left him with the confused sense that she was some sort of milkmaid, some mountain girl who’d found herself by accident in his Borges seminar. Though his friends made fun of her hick accent, he took every possible chance to ask her the time or what she thought of that night�
��s reading just to hear the strange cadence of her answer as she nervously crossed her legs.
He took her to California for the first time that winter during the long January between semesters. He had always had a girlfriend, and so his mother paid little attention to Sophie, even in the mornings when she would pour orange juice in sock feet, one of Michael’s shirts falling down to her knees. They kept to themselves in his downstairs bedroom, though they always had the house to themselves, as Michael’s mother was sequestered in her office on the top floor. At night, Sophie would look out at the lights from the bay spilling over each other down the cliffs to the sea. Michael was amazed that she hadn’t seen the Pacific before. He bought her pastries from the market down the street, a camel coat from an upscale store in San Francisco. He found her one night in one of the dozen chairs around his dining room table, and when he brought her back to bed, she asked quietly why they had so many seats for just two people.
His bed, too, was oversize, untidy, the sheets stirred up like foam under the silky coverlet. She scuttled away from him at night, her legs kicking uselessly in the immensity of the covers; even though he slept soundly on the far side of the mattress, Sophie couldn’t put her limbs to rest. One morning, her body exhausted, she woke to both his hands moving under her shirt, soft and skittish like birds. She stood up in a rush and walked quickly to the sliding door to the garden. Through the window, she watched Michael move fitfully in bed, then slower, slower, his face finally slack in sleep. He hadn’t once glanced after her.
She turned away from the house and, ignoring the ocean below, sat straight down in the daylilies. Her mother hadn’t wanted her to take the week off from work to come to California: Sophie who never sulked about long weeks of waiting tables in her family’s restaurant when she was home; who let her mother dress her in old German school uniforms, tall stockings, loafers; who wore one-piece swimsuits to the beach and wide hats in the sun; who never made the ten-minute drive into the Twin Cities on a Friday or Saturday night; who never touched even a neighborhood boy. Sophie who had won the money to come across the country to school. Sophie who escaped.
She went inside once Michael heaved himself up off the bed. He stood stretching in the center of the room, his feet buried in the soft chenille rug. He said nothing about that morning as Sophie slipped past him into his bathroom. As she stripped to take a shower, she could feel the heat from her body warming the cold tiles, clouding the full-length mirror behind her. This damp, rolling landscape, the fog, the open palm of the sky. At home, her family was all still in snow boots. Some mornings, after her mother came in from checking the mail, she broke the ice out of her hair in little sharp pearls.
Sophie set the taps to cold and stepped in all at once. Then she kept herself still for a long moment in the freezing water. All at once, she felt a welling in her mouth, the sudden desire to spit. She parted her lips and let a long bloom of blood spread down her chin and to the floor. Sophie touched her face with both hands and took them away warm and stringed with red. Outside, she heard Michael singing along to the radio. She stood with her mouth open.
* * *
They had planned the trip to Big Sur for this weekend, the last three days before they flew back East. Michael packed the car the night before with a picnic basket and cooler, three suitcases, his father’s camera on its leather strap. That morning, Sophie hurried out before him, wedging herself between the luggage in the back seat; when Michael came outside, she said that she needed to nap, that she hadn’t slept well the night before. As he pulled onto the 101, she pulled a tissue from her jacket pocket, winding it into a paper worm. She stuffed it between her lower lip and teeth to staunch the blood. In the shower, she had examined her tongue, the roof of her mouth, had explored the landscape of her throat until she gagged under her desperate fingers. She still bled, more slowly now, in long cords that crept out the sides of her mouth, but she couldn’t find the source of the bleeding. Now, in Michael’s car, it kept her from speaking as he tried to make small talk to ease that morning’s tension. She answered his questions with syllables instead of words, the blood hissing and pooling and hissing again with every sibilant sound she made.
Michael fell into silence in the seat in front of her as he searched for a radio station. Now and then, he tried to point out a town, a rock face; he took a hairpin turn quickly and waited for her to squeal. He stopped finally at a gas station in Monterey, intent on reassuring her face-to-face, but she ran past him into the convenience store and paid for cotton balls at the self-checkout. In the restroom, she spat hard, then pulled the balls apart and nestled them against her gums. She hesitated, then glanced in the mirror. Static from the car seat had pulled long, crackling hairs from her braids. No trace of blood showed on her mouth. She walked outside to the parking lot.
He had the fuel nozzle locked tightly into his car. He touched her face. “Are you okay? I can’t tell if you’re asleep or awake back there.”
She nodded, ducking her head so he couldn’t see the bulge of gauze in her mouth.
“We don’t have to talk,” he said, “but will you just come sleep in the front seat?”
“Okay,” she whispered, and the tension went out of his shoulders.
The rest of the drive wound through forests and breaks in forests, through pockets of towns in roadside pullouts, wound past stretches of cliff, massive arches crumbling in the water, rocks broken and mossy, licked by the surf. Sophie distracted herself by searching for signs of civilization: general stores and grade schools, station wagons strapped down with surfboards, farms for alpaca and for horses. In Minnesota, her family’s land backed up next to that of an elderly couple who kept ponies for their grandchildren. On walks in the summer, Sophie would sometimes stop to hold an apple over the fence for Granger or Sally, but both would stand suspiciously on the other side of the paddock, Sally flicking her dirty, white tail.
But the horses on the road to Pfeiffer Beach took her carrot sticks and even bits of her turkey sandwich. She had asked Michael to pull over, a tissue against her nose and mouth as if she were about to sneeze, but he was so engrossed in driving down the dirt road that he didn’t notice the flecks of blood she caught against her teeth. He snapped photos of her, hands cupped in offering to the horses’ quick lips, her shoulders wrapped in his gray sweater for warmth. He snuck up behind her and undid her braids with quick hands and snapped photos of her hair whipping loose against her face and neck, against the lens of his camera. He framed her leaning against the split-rail fence and snapped her again, now her hand to her lips, now his lips against her cheek as he held the camera high in the air to take the picture.
“We can get to the beach from here,” he said, hoisting his backpack from the trunk. “It’s just a minute’s walk. We can have a quick lunch and then check into the hotel.”
She caught her knapsack when he tossed it to her. Two dunes and a negotiation through bramble and grass and they found themselves feet from the water. Farther down the beach, two boys ran shirtless into the surf. Shivering, Michael pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt and sat down next to the smoking remains of a firepit. “I’m going to get this thing started,” he said, pulling matches from his bag. “You can go back to the horses if you want to.”
She nodded and turned away.
“Sophie,” he said, straightening. “Sophie, look at me.” When she didn’t speak, he groaned, and through her lashes she could see him drag his hands down his face. “God,” he said. “Right now, I don’t even think you like me, and I—I do so much for you. So much, Sophie. Don’t you know that?”
She shook her head.
“I can’t sleep sometimes, thinking about you,” he said, stepping forward. “Sophie. Look at me.”
And with that, he moved as though to kiss her, but she shied away on her long legs. He reached for her with both hands, but she turned to run, the same way she had run the first time he had chased her, across the long lawn at school on an October morning until he caught her in a t
hicket of trees and kissed her over and over, chastely, his lips pressed gratefully to hers. She did not want his mouth near hers, not today, not with all this mysterious blood pouring down her chin, faster now, thick and tin-sweet, blood he did not seem to see as he backed her against the fence, prying her mouth open with his.
TRAGEDIES
PARTYING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW
Inspired by Romeo and Juliet
Kiersten White
Why, such is love’s transgression.
Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast,
Which thou wilt propagate, to have it pressed
With more of thine. This love that thou hast shown
Doth add more grief to too much of mine own.
—ROMEO, ACT 1, SCENE 1
3:14 PM
Ben
Romeo
Romeo
Yo where u at Romeo
ur mom texted me
Wish that was a dirty joke but it’s not man they r worried
When was the last time u left ur room
Romeo
Romeo
BEN would like to videochat with you
ROMEO is not available for videochat at this time
Romeo
stfu
you woke me up
My dude its 3
How r u still asleep
Sleep is my only solace
Too many hours in the day
So many hours
Empty empty hours
Let’s go out
I’m already out
U r?? where, I’ll meet u
