A woman whom Ima and His father who’s Aba call Wanda as she calls them Misses & Mister, called, and how now, with His newfound ability, He wants to wish her a Merry Merry with skills, a very very special whatever it is that she observes on this day today or tomorrow, the Erev of the true holiday, whichever was important, more so, was real and was theirs — tomorrow, He understands, which is also today, to be marked by His slicing, to be sanctified at the sharp of a knife; the day to become hallowed by tipsnipping, at the earliest hours then the dribbly, latening suck of the wound to stem the flow as they did to keep safe and healthy back then in the desert flawless and flowless, way before the very discovery of disease. In the days back when people had to die so that we could ever exist, fallen in the merit of our way a hell’s future: potential, Benjamin, promise, Benjamin, already He understands His own name, and His purpose, to live with this knowledge and for it — but Covenant, appointment, deposit on the rabbi who’s the mohel or no, and despite the caterer and famished phonecalls to guests, travel agencies, car rentals, area hotels the negotiation of a spare bed, between His legs, His foreskin now sheds on its own, a reddened wrinkly rainbow arcing a day early, too late; the partihued skin of a snake grown since His birth, it flakes again to the mattress, without knife or other sharp save that of the night in its freeze, then with a hiss goes gusted out the window opened to the suck of the wind. A plastic bag, a burger’s unwrapped, it’s shameful, embarrassing; though, as the gusts gust always impermanent, this condition regrettable, brutely unfixed.
As Benjamin would grow, so would the foreskin again (you want me to give a call, leave a message beeped with the relatives and the friends, set a raindate, kept snowlate, apologize and reschedule — every week, on the day, on the hour or no), it would grow back, Him as His being born again and again, every word of His first, every skin felt like His last ever flayed, such a pain — how its hollowness, a shell, a hull or husk, would manifest and make scarce of its own accord, and on it, as well, there founded upon its most sensitive tip surrounded with soil, a brilliant bloom from a roil of waste: it would grow only to fall, would resurrect itself then shed only to be risen then, regenerating all over again — and lost: out windows, and between cracks in the sidewalk and sofa, between the den, family, or livingroom, rivenroom’s cushions of couch to be left never found — to disappear itself, though, in only its form, not to decompose but to become different, be changed, sustained into what seems to be manna.
No steady hand involved either, no putzing nothing around, nu, problems He had.
God, Wanda thinks, look how we shake.
To think that eight burning birds would perch on His windowsill, then in the middle a stork landing to swallow them up.
Or that nine graves would combust in the cemetery just down the Parkway where His people are buried.
Or else, how there’d been not just one pillar of fire descendant, but eight others, too, each the distended sharp of a star — that would be how.
It’s tough — how miracles are only miraculous if they never come to be, only if they retain promise, remain to be prayed for, their granting made eternally late, postponed forever tomorrow.
In the beginning, it’d been Hanukah that Hanna had counted by, its candles lighting the week until His birth. Hanukah that newest of holidays, as if rendered sacred only by its secular proximal, Xmas — to the cynical, not to be trusted: the Festival of Lights, rededication yadda, those pellucid, Selucid nights; the holiday upon which Jesus wrestled the King of the Greeks, nude and greased, for eight straight days in the midst of the Temple defiled. 50 % off, two for the price of your firstborn, for a limited time only — a seasonal bonus for the boychicks departmented down in the kindled inferno of Marketing.
In observance, a question, what did the daughters receive?
