After the Fire
By Sarah Rose Cohn Bennett
At eleven, I wanted to see God. I made a point to look around our synagogue, shaken every so often by eye floaters. These days, I look mostly at my phone, stuff jammed between tiles, or at my mother’s hands on her lap, like two perched birds awaiting flight. But in my mind are lapses, wisps of cotton in the air. I wait in the still-dark morning for sound from the other room, for some phantom spark in the corner of my eye. I remember sitting in the cop car on the way to C’s mom’s house, sky uprooting itself outside the glass like an exploding flower. I remember not the space where God was or wasn’t, but the stuff jammed between.
Sarah Rose Cohn Bennett is a writer and budding psychotherapist from Syracuse, New York. She currently lives in Lower Silesia, Poland, and teaches English at the Angelus Silesius University of Applied Sciences. Her work has appeared in Pithead Chapel and is forthcoming in La Piccioletta Barca. You can find her on Twitter @SRB926.