I could see the tears that streaked her cheeks. But it was Raizel who came through the door. I had been constructing caravans of animal carvings and sand dunes of shavings like some macabre reenactment of the flight of the Jews from Egypt-an animal Exodus. gesture of preaching, and head covering that looks like a yarmulke describe the body of. I drew my knees to my chest and hid in the corner, on the floor where I had already been sitting. Samuel Weber and Henry Sussman (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins. I was shocked to find the door open soon after. He didn’t seem to mind my presence and it was the one place I knew Masha would never find me. I excused myself with a stomach ache and escaped to the asylum of Uncle Eli’s loft. One night after a supper that had been particularly horrible, Aunt Masha fawning over Rav Nosson like he was the next Messiah, ingratiating Raizel to him by having her serve him, pour for him, wait on him, coddle him, it was more than I could take. “Upstairs!” Masha would cry, pointing an immaculately lacquered fingernail at the stairwell, as her other hand trembled with unspent rage. But she was always slipping between everyone’s fingers, and then getting smacked across the face by Masha’s fat, stubby ring-bedecked hands. I never knew when and how she managed to steal those things. She climbed trees, tearing her white knit stockings, and played elaborate hide-and-seek games in the woods behind the house, dressed in Masha’s best table linens. Expensive jewelry became fairy tributes, and bottles of perfume would nurture roots in the hope that they’d grow to produce fragrant fruit. When we were younger, she’d paint with Aunt Masha’s makeup, parade around the house in her heels, beads and scarves, trailing them in the mud of the backyard and leaving them scattered about the grass. 37 for a couple of weeks, Florida ranked eighth among the states where coronavirus was spreading the fastest on a per-person. Raizel always found her way into everything that was prohibited- much to Aunt Masha’s dismay. She would takemy hand in her small pudgy right one (all the while, never taking her left thumb out of her mouth for even an instant). She was younger than I was, but she was the only one who dried my tears with the blanket she carried with her at all times, tucked under her arm. A tiny thing, with hair that went every which way, at three years old, Raizel took care of me.