Guardians of the Rift

Be'eri. September 29, 2023. 7:14 a.m.

The jasmine was doing something ridiculous. Sarah stood at the kitchen window with her second coffee going cold in her hand, watching the vine climb the fence post in the early light, and she thought: it's going to pull the whole thing down. The post was old. The wood was soft in the middle, had been since the winter before last when they'd had the flooding, and she'd been meaning to ask Gideon from the maintenance crew to look at it but she hadn't and now the vine was three times the size it was in June and the post was leaning six degrees to the east and Mendel would notice and say nothing and she would have to ask him if he'd noticed and he would say yes, of course, I was going to ask Gideon, and she would not say I asked you about that post six weeks ago. She would not say that. She put the coffee mug down on the windowsill. She would ask Gideon herself.

Daniel was still sleeping. She knew this without checking because the house had a particular quality of quiet when he was asleep — heavier, somehow, like the air was holding its breath. Eleven years old and he slept like a man who had been working since before dawn. The way Mendel slept. She had noticed this in the past year and had not said anything about it to anyone including Mendel. There are things you notice about your children that you keep. Not because they're bad. Because they're yours.

Maya had been up since six. Sarah had heard her in the hall, the specific shuffle of wool socks on tile that meant Maya was navigating by sound, the way she did when she was trying not to wake her brother. Thoughtful child. Too thoughtful sometimes. Sarah had told Nira once, at the Thursday morning coffee that four of them kept loosely, that Maya sometimes seemed like she was already doing the emotional work of someone thirty years older, and Nira had said don't be silly, she's eight, and Sarah had said yes, probably, and finished her coffee and thought: you don't live with her. You don't watch her watch people.

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Maya was sitting at the kitchen table now, eating her bread in small deliberate bites, her feet not reaching the floor. Daniel had taken his bread and disappeared back to his room. The house was doing its morning thing — cooling off from the night, the walls releasing whatever they'd held. A tractor somewhere on the far side of the kibbutz. Birds. The sound of sprinklers coming on in the field to the north, that specific percussion, rhythmic and ordinary, the sound of something that expected to be here tomorrow.