Ben makes for an exit, from them and His fear, the scabrous heat piling piteously through the scaly, hairy rubble, the caddies assailing from the rear: His momentum knocking them to impalement on unframed window mullions, lepromatically ferruginous supports, squamous stang and transom, upended foundations studded with infecting nails of just rust, crushed by blocks in cinders; heads through what’d been the club’s kitchen and its service entrance in a vaulting slide over the meridian counter, banging Himself on the hanging pans and pots and skillets, on His way grabbing at the handles and knobs of bins and cabinets and pantries abandoned, looted empty of goods canned, preservativebalmed in case of Apocalypse or Sunday shortage, then out the door to flee the course entire; lunging over the fence at the rough’s rough edge, there falling into a neighboring yard, getting mired in a swimmingpool dry though filled with the pasttime of personal days — innumerable faked sick leaves’ worth of golfballs lost, fouled globes.
Ben’s clambering over the slippery mount, atop, near giving up, balls giving way bumptiously under His effort, the righting rump; then, a last, lumbering thrash, and He emerges to hurl Himself over the pool’s far ledge — on His gut, slit, a fish floundering fluke, the catch of last days to fin up onto dry land upon two legs now to fly through the house (its screendoor, open, its door-door, open); then, as if Friday’s first course belated, through the blessing of a family’s kitchen, around its middle countertop and there parents and kinder gathered in their service of Havdalah, meaning To make distinct, to keep kadosh, or segulah separate the mundanity of tonight and its tomorrow from that or the sanctified of another tonight, that of its sacred today — Havdalah the candled conclusion of the Sabbath with its Elijah arrived as Him, scaring the gehenna out of this newest Affiliate, Ima, Aba, their two point five kinder, upsetting their braid of fire to consume the cabinetry, to tarnish with smoke the cups for Kiddush, its wine inflamingly holy, to incense the box of spices at which we nose at Shabbos’ end, as if to revive ourselves after an illness.
