Fiction Friday

I thought I'd try something different this Friday. I've got nothing worthy of sharing about my own life at present, so I thought we could look in on someone else's....

Something major was ending, but she didn’t know exactly what. Her 91-year-old great uncle was dead, that much she knew. Obviously his life was ending. But it was more than that, much more, although she couldn’t, at present, put her finger on it. It was more of a core knowing that something monumental had changed. A nagging feeling, something akin to dread, that led her to believe that her life, and those of her family members, would not carry on in the same manner as they had before.

Her dad was already acting differently. Scratch that. Her dad was not acting at all differently. She was stunned by how little he seemed to be affected by his uncle’s passing, even though it was the closest thing he’d had to his mother for years, and he'd spent hours with him almost daily, speaking loudly to him in Hungarian, so that he might hear at least some of the conversation. She didn’t understand why her
father had left everything to the chevra kaddisha--he was a physician for Christ’s sake (yes, she’d said Christ), he could have at least been a shoemrim himself, staying with the body for some length of time.

She wasn’t even sure if her father had seen to it that the traditional handful of Israeli earth was included in Nagybáty’s casket. He’d simply carried out the death rituals in the most perfunctory of ways, then gone off to work the next morning as if nothing had happened.

But something had.

And she aimed to find out what.