Kristine Uyeda
2009 Flash Fiction Contest finalist
In the earliest days of what would become The War, God was a German who whispered out of earshot. But who could believe him? The details were as vague as any proper revelation, but lacked the requisite trumpet call and cymbal quake. The general feeling was that, without the high drama, one could not expect to be taken seriously in matters of prophecy. There were standards. Take the sea apart at its seams, let the lovely assistant walk through in her corseted ensemble, arms raised. Let a curtain of locusts descend to applause.
Even so, the voice found a home in the ear of a family. Perhaps their standards were not high or they preferred subtlety. In any case, they left without appearing to leave. They took little: a satchel of documents, a coat for their daughter. And one of them carried the violin.
Channah: her arms full of sleep’s weight, a few pieces of the family jewelry stitched into the hem of her underskirt. Asher: the satchel over his shoulder, violin in one hand, pocket lining clenched in the other as if he always went out into the night this way.
The wedding portrait, a comb, the holy books, the cat—the things that would give them away—they studied over their shoulder as the door was closing and bedded them down with the axe handle of a sigh. Everything else was lost.
There were days when they saw their own foolishness laid out before them in an odd parade of miracles: the open mouth of a child whose clothes grew bigger each morning, the repeating path they wandered through the black heart of a forest that kept bleating: turn back, turn back.
But in France, first, then America they would come to marvel at the slippery magic of their God; to be awestruck by how deliverance depends upon a conjurer. And a magician’s handwork—producing the unseen in a space defined by how the story’s told, how a body’s held to the light—would pluck them from the collapsing birdcage, the saw’s tooth, the glass coffin filling with water.