Ori Fienberg

Fair Passage

The cave, they said, led not to hell, because it did not have the
dusty dryness of the caves in the village. Nor did it ascend into
mountains, weaving its way towards hazy angels. Instead they
believed it to be a direct passage to a man's heart.

The cave was kept open. Children often played around the outside
and the few who ventured within described comfortable warmth
and a moist rumbling.

Conflating other adages every evening women would toss in savory
baked goods and small sweet fruits, and though they were unclear
exactly whose heart the passage in the cave reached, in the morning
the food was always gone.

Flotsam

The mattress is going out to sea; it is the last to go. It waited so long on the
sand dunes in the wind that the blankets got twisted and itchy and stiff with salt.
They headed up the beach to the road, and huddled together, before being saved
by a truck heading inland.

The end tables had tumbled, as best two cubes can, crushing sand castles and
shells, polishing sea glass, and disrupting the chattered contemplations of sea
gulls, before belly-flopping into the water. Their contents: k-y jelly, a diaphragm,
scrunched clusters of unused Kleenex, a few photos, spare change, dead erasers
on pencil stubs, and melted kisses, all are lost without their home and sink into
the shallows.

When all the rest have gone the mattress glides down the beach and into the
shallows where it rides indecisively back and forth on the tide. The water laps
gently at the floral print and splashes over the top, pooling in twin molds.

Ori Fienberg is founder and captain of the NWP Bowling Kings in the Lone Tree Men's League. His work has been accepted in the Diagram, McSweeney's Online Tendency, and Slurve Magazine, to name a few. contact

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