Avital Gad-Cykman
Education
Our parents, born in many different places—Poland, Austria, England, South Africa, Yemen, and Lebanon—feed us salty avocado spread over slices of dark bread, along with citrus fruit from our gardens or the Sharon area: oranges, grapefruits, and pomelos. On Fridays, we get chocolate cakes. They employ all the ingredients necessary for the formation of a chutzpah-oriented kid. A child who looks, sounds, behaves, and, eventually grows into a real Israeli, so long as our straightforward attitude stays out of our home.
We are blond, brunette, and black-haired. Our skin is always tanned, in a range of tones. The streets, fields, and dunes are ours. That’s where we can be strong and loud. Sometimes, we pick sabras off thorny cacti. We’re named after this fruit. Also, we know our birds: hummingbirds, pigeons, hoopoes, wagtails, and sparrows. The sparrows are called “Freedom” in Hebrew, but they are too many to matter.
In the garden my father grows petunias and roses for my mother’s sake, but he mostly plants fruit trees that have real purpose and a very long life. He teaches me the names of native Israeli wildflowers and makes sure they teach me more names at school. My mother worries until I’m back home, and yet, she sends me on school trips in the mountains, valleys, and deserts of the country. I should learn through my feet this land is mine.
My parents are different from me. Different. Not as good. All the kids know that about their parents. We are ashamed of our parents, their Yiddish, Ladino or Arabic, spelling mistakes, grammar, foreign accents and ancient manners from a world outside ours. We fulfill their expectations, grow thorns, and rise so high they can never reach us.
Rivers
Stepping into the shallow river made sluggish by drought, my feet sink into soft sand along its bottom. With my toes, I search for rocks and pebbles that tactile memory suggests are there. When the water has risen, the riverbed is swept clean. The river is always different.
Rivers are everywhere. Once, a frog went to cross one, maybe this one, and a hitchhiker asked for a ride on the frog’s back. “Sorry, I can’t take you because you’ll sting and kill me,” said the frog to the scorpion. “I’d be an idiot if I killed my lifeboat,” the scorpion said.
Promises.
My mother promised that her chicken soup would heal my poor lungs, my swollen throat, my broken heart.
My promises to my children, too, fade like childhood memories.
Possibly, mothers are scorpions. The frog dies in the end. The scorpion dies as well, because it can’t help itself.
Sure, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Each time you enter it, you’re different. Or the river’s different. Still, routine is routine. So I say let’s get the suitcases and tap our savings. The question of money is irrelevant. We can travel to postcolonial countries, where money is soft and toilet paper hard. In my own decolonized country, money is always hard, unless you earn it in foreign currency. The toilet paper varies.
If you are a frog and a scorpion, a mother and a child, you’re the river too. You never have enough money to keep your head above water, but you manage. Don’t let fables distract you. Simply go without a worry then sleep a whole night through because somewhere mother and child play sweetly, and a frog speaks calmly with a mate.
Send a boat in. My arms are open.
Avital Gad-Cykman grew up in Israel, lives in Brazil, and writes mainly in English. She is the author of the flash collection Life In, Life Out, published by Matter Press and the flash and story collection Light Reflection Over Blues, published by Ravenna Press. Her work has appeared in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Ambit (UK), The Literary Review, CALYX Journal, Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Prism International, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Other stories have been featured in anthologies such as W.W. Norton's Flash Fiction International, Sonder Press's Best Small Fictions 2020, Politically Inspired Fiction, and The Best of Gigantic. Her flashes have been twice listed in Best of the WEB, Wigleaf. She is the winner of the Margaret Atwood Studies Magazine Prize and placed first in The Hawthorne Citation Short Story Contest. Her story collections were finalists for the Iowa Fiction award. She holds a PhD in English Literature with a focus on women authors, gender, minorities, and trauma studies.