The Electrician’s Wife

The shoemaker’s children go barefoot. And the electrician’s wife squints in the dim entryway and nearly cracks her skull as she trips over her own two feet.

The electrician’s wife was tired. So tired, in fact, that the dark hallway made something in me snap. Yissachar was an electrician, you’d think he was capable of changing a lightbulb.

Yissachar was eating cold flounder from a plastic plate at the dining room table when I returned from Shifra’s apartment. He looked up for a second, said hi absently, then turned his attention right back to the papers in front of him.

He was nervous. I could tell just how nervous by the spidered plastic cups littering the dining room table. Yissachar didn’t even realize when he did it. His eyes remained glued to his papers as he ripped through those cups, neat lines, top to bottom, around and around, until the cup looked like an octopus and he pressed the round base down on the table and rotated it.