The Celestial Gate by Avital Dicker (red white royal blue txt) 📗

Yam orders a vanilla cone with chocolate syrup and sprinkles while Mommy orders a coffee for herself. He’s licking his cone when Mommy suddenly hugs him hard. So hard that ice cream gets on her top, but she doesn’t even notice.

“Daddy hasn’t been here in a very long time. He’s missed you so much and really wants to see you, if it’s OK with you,” she says.

Even though the cone is really delicious, Yam throws it down on the sidewalk.

Mommy doesn’t get mad. She just strokes his hair and tells him it’s OK to be mad because he’s probably missed his daddy very much. And she stays she’ll stay with him the whole time and if he gets bored even a little, she’ll take him away.

On the way to the playground, Mommy talks about how she’ll soon become a lawyer and they’ll find a place to live for just the two of them. Yam isn’t sure if he wants to live without Grandma and Grandpa, so he doesn’t say anything and only makes sure not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk.

At the playground near home, there’s a humungous slide and it’s connected to a scary rope bridge high, high in the air. Yam climbs up to the slide and Mommy sits down on a bench.

He’s managed to get almost to the middle of the bridge when this really annoying kid starts rocking it really hard. Yam loses his balance, but at the last second, he manages to grab the railing, right when Mommy calls to him from below.

He looks at the man who’s now standing next to Mommy. The man looks exactly like the picture he has at home, except now he has a beard. Mommy motions him to come down. Suddenly, Yam is confused and lets go of the railing, loses his balance again, and starts to fall, only this time he doesn’t manage to grab anything at all. Seeing the ground rush up at him, Yam screams really loudly, but at the last second, the man with the beard catches him. “Hello, Yam,” he says and hugs him hard.

It took some time for Yam to calm down and feel safe enough to tell Amalia that she could leave. By this point, he wanted to be alone with his father, and his dad took him to the beach and taught him how to skip stones over the water. Afterward, he got Yam a hamburger and French fries and told him lots of stories about faraway countries. Yam ate, giving his father sidelong glances, thinking that his dad’s nose and his own were exactly the same. On the way home, he got sleepy, so Daddy picked him up and carried him in his arms the whole way.

At home, Dad put him to bed, tucking him in and giving him a sloppy kiss on his forehead. Before he left Yam’s room, he asked him if it was OK with Yam that he see him tomorrow and the day after, until Yam got sick of him.

Yam said that he didn’t think he’d get sick of him, at least not soon. Daddy laughed and tucked him in again, promising to return the next day.

Anise

Anise woke up drenched in sweat. She’d had that strange dream again. She turned on the flashlight she kept next to her pillow, sat up, and carefully touched her toes to the freezing-cold floor. In Jerusalem, the floor tiles are always cold, even in summer, and it was winter now.

She walked silently down the dark hallway, opening the fifth door on the right. Walking in, she found Mor sleeping diagonally across the bed, as usual, taking up all the space, his head under the blanket. Anise smiled to see bits of messy black hair peeking out. Mor had a lot of hair. Maybe that’s why he always had tangles and hated the comb.

Mor was her best friend in all the world. He always watched out for her and hit anyone who was mean to her at kindergarten and made her laugh when she cried. She was going to marry him when they grew up. Mor’s dad was the Italian consul or something like that, and her mother had told her what an important job that was.

Mommy also says that Theo is nice, but Anise thinks he’s much scarier than nice. And he isn’t nice at all to Mor, who is his kid. They’re nothing alike. Mor has straight black hair and coal-black eyelashes that look painted on. He looks a lot like the woman in the picture inside the silver frame that stands on the desk in Theo’s study.

Mommy says that she and Mor are both her children, even though Mor hadn’t been in her tummy. Anise doesn’t mind sharing her mommy, because her mommy has lots of love inside and because Anise loves Mor more than anyone in the world.

Her mommy is in charge of maintaining the whole consulate building and works lots, but she always finds time for Mor and her. Except for the nights, when lots of guests in fancy clothes and smelling of perfume show up. Anise hates those parties. The food is always icky and she and Mor have to dress nicely and be quiet.

Anise pushed Mor aside so that there’d be room for her too and climbed into bed. Mor opened sleepy eyes. “Did you have your strange dream again?” he mumbled and immediately fell asleep again.

In the dream, she’s barefoot, running through a forest, branches scratching her arms until she bleeds. In the distance, she can see an opening. It looks like the entrance to a cave and light is shining out of it. Anise knows that that’s where she must go. She runs as hard as she can. Jackals are howling all around her, she’s running out of breath, the earth beneath her is shaking with hoofbeats. In the dark, Anise cannot see who’s chasing her, but