Mezuzahs

The units of my late 40s co-op are adorned with mezuzahs on their door frames, tilted to announce a Jewishness left over from a previous generation: 5G has an ornate black and gold case, its Hebrew prominent and gleaming, 5C, a simple gilded dome, 5F has been painted over, its splinter calloused under the skin. According to law, you should not remove one, but after so long I question whether the parchment remains, whether these cases cling to their thresholds like cicada shells, shadows gripping bark—delicate, amber and empty. When I was eight I walked along the treeline at summer camp searching for their little bodies. A soccer team circled in the field praying, twelve evangelicals speaking to God hoping that this Jewish boy, who just wanted to play, would find his way back, join them in Christ’s light. I thought if I could only hold one between thumb and forefinger, I would feel what was missing, their shells, the only barrier to a fragile faith waiting to climb toward the sun. Now I am forty, a father in Queens, in this building of abandoned mezuzahs. My door opens on a slanted scar, a glossed white indent where a mezuzah once kissed the frame. Missing. God’s blessing, thin as parchment, hangs on the doorpost: you and your children may endure. I am what is left.