Adina Kastner
An aspiring author, Adina Kastner holds a Masters Degree from Columbia Teachers College in English 7-12 and has been teaching English Language Arts in Northern New Jersey for the last thirteen years. This is her first time being published.
Shir (Short Fiction)
Photo by Paul Rabinowitz
Our imma and abba accepted my sister Shir when she came out to them on Pesach at our Seder. They embraced her and told her they had known all along. Zman cheiruteinu, the time of freedom, had never felt so free.
Our imma and abba accepted my sister Shir when she showed up with a tattoo across her graceful, tanned collarbone. They kissed her cheek and told her it didn’t really matter. After all, their parents had been buried in Jewish cemeteries despite the numbers tattooed onto their arms.
But when my parents heard that Shir attended a pro-Palestinian rally in Tel Aviv, they texted her three words: “Don’t come home.”
The last time I saw Shir, before that rally, she brought me to a concert on the beach in Eilat. I had purchased a vape pen and cartridge off of a friend of a friend in school. I thought there would be no better time to get high than under the protection of my big sister.
A smirk played across her face. With her long braid flung over one shoulder, obscuring some of the words emblazoned on her clavicle, she seemed ephemeral, otherworldly. Like an elvish princess from a fairytale. She took the vape from me and put it in her purse. “I have something better for you, Sivan.”
She pulled out a bag of gummies.
“Edibles?” I asked.
Her smile deepened and her eyes crinkled in response. I devoured the treat, desperate for oblivion. For once, I wanted to avoid thinking. To lose myself in the ocean waves and the drumbeat. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, I could see a large bird standing next to my sister. It stared at me, unblinking. Puzzled, I tried to recall the name for it. Words were slippery in my blissed-out state. It wasn’t a seagull or a crane. Then it came to me. A stork, a chasida in Hebrew. An unkosher bird with a strange name. The root word of the name, chesed, means lovingkindness. Why would a bird that the Torah forbids eating or sacrificing have a holy name?
My seventh grade morah taught me that the bird cares only for its own kind. A selfishness hides within the bird’s good heart. What is the point of empathy if it is only for those most similar to ourselves?
As music poured from the stage, people around us danced and swayed. But my sister and the bird stood still, their large eyes on me, as if begging me to choose. And I could only choose one. I took my sister’s hands.
When she brought me home from the concert, she admitted that the gummies were just normal candy she purchased in Ben Yehuda. There was no way Shir would ever let her baby sister get stoned on her watch. I must have been dehydrated.
I haven’t seen Shir since. Once she went to the rally, my parents forbade me from speaking with her. She called, but I didn’t respond.
Then October 7th. A rave in the dessert brought back memories of that concert with my sister, though the beat of violence replaced the beat of drums. I texted Shir again and again and again. No answer.
She had been there, and they took her. Maybe they killed her. Or maybe we did.
She could be buried under rubble. She could be deep within a tunnel. She could be slowly starving to death. She could still be alive. But then what is she enduring?
When I close my eyes, I see Shir and the stork staring at me again, urging me to choose between them. Choose between worrying only for my own or caring about the other. But I cannot. My thoughts are like this war. There will be no easy resolution.