Zoom Shiva by Dana Liebelson
Associate editor Hal Hulan on today’s bonus short: In a world that still feels dominated by social isolation, Dana Liebelson’s “Zoom Shiva” is a heartbreaking rumination on what it’s like to cling to cultural observances from the other side of a screen.
Zoom Shiva
You are in the bathroom creating a Wild West eyeshadow look. The taupe shade is called Laredo, but the makeup girl on YouTube pronounces it La-red-o. This is where you are when your mother texts you to say your magic uncle is dead. You are in southern Wyoming, 1800 miles from your family in Queens. You are in a railroader on the edge of a college town where homes deconstruct into prairie, then I-80. Outside your bathroom window, a magpie collapses in a snowstorm. Its feathers glint turquoise in the graupel. It reminds you how, during the last hurricane, your magic uncle grew fiddleheads in the dark. They curled around every fire escape on his street like nautilus shells, rendering apartments invisible to the wind. Your magic uncle speaks eighteen languages, including Yiddish and the forgotten memories of the old. Your magic uncle is the only member of your family who understands the concept of writing in Wyoming. Your magic uncle never says you should learn to code. You last emailed your magic uncle three days ago. You asked:
How can fiction ever explain 4.5 million people dead?
He wrote: I will tell you this weekend.
In the mirror, Ghost Town rusts all over your face. You text your mother: Texting is the wrong form of communication for this news. She is confused by your softness. By your age, 25, the women in your family, though they don't speak of this directly, already felt grief sliding from above like wet paint, tinting them the same gunmetal color. Your great-grandmother fled Romania for the U.S. During the Great Crash, your grandmother, as a child, saw a man shoot his jaw; a feeling of paucity never left her. Your saddle-tramp grandaunt, a journalist, bucked sexism to cover Vietnam. You heard she was magic too, that on the frontlines, no one spied her. She's been evanescent since before you were born, but you love her collection of faded dispatches. Your mother married a warman, a gentile who shattered a china plate on her face. Moshe went to the zoo that morning. He was happy, your mother writes. It is true your magic uncle loves speaking with the tufted puffins, though he once privately acknowledged to you this is extremely twee. You phone Adrien, your magic uncle's partner of thirty years. He was just walking in the zoo, Adrien exclaims. Since it's outside, he can buy a ticket, wear his mask, and take his usual route, up E. 72nd, left past the Frick and the statue of Balto the sled dog, through the Polar Circle to see the tufted puffins, then around to the snow leopard exhibit. He collapsed near the snow leopards. You ask: Are you OK? Adrien repeats the directions, like if he recites the words enough times, a riddle will be solved.
The Zoom funeral is Sunday. You have never been to a funeral, but you are sure this is worse. Mean wind mauls the window behind your laptop screen, forcing dirt through the seams. It settles on the sill like ash. The funeral is at the synagogue, though your magic uncle isn't religious. From where the camera is placed, you only see a row of black domes. Between bobbing yarmulkes, Adrien takes the stand in a black mask. He attempts a funny story about Moshe, but above the fabric, he weeps. You slam the laptop shut. The funeral is over. The bars in Wyoming, unlike in the city, for months have been open. You put on your Wild West eyeshadow look like trying on freedom. You walk to a bar you haven't visited in a year. Naked-faced people spray and shout. A bartender hangs an inflatable pronghorn. You turn around. The local pizzeria has outdoor fire pits; it is ten degrees. You shiver far away from two masked friends in the American history department. You tell your friends about the Zoom funeral, but they don't know how to conceptualize this as an individual as opposed to collective event, or they forget. Everything is terrible, they nod. Two double whiskeys later, they joke about music they'd play at their Zoom funerals. The Lumineers, says one friend. I hope I die first, says the other. You are laughing, then you remember Adrien's torqued face and you are crying.
You yell: No one knows how to talk about this.
The next day you sit Zoom shiva with your family arranged in a dim palette on screen. Adrien searches his square with a lost gaze. Your mother is in the lower-right corner with a photo of her brother. Do you remember when Moshe translated Names of the Lion over a weekend, a friend says. You should learn to code, a cousin tells you. A new person materializes, her square bright like her phone is on a tripod. This tiny woman stands by a first-generation Ford Transit, her long hair silver, her eyes two pools at the bottom of a gorge. A sandstone arch rises behind her, neon orange, and her rottweiler noses an ancient bone. You recognize the chin of this hummingbird woman, tough and pared to a point. She is your magic grandaunt. She waves her bronzed arms around, mouthing invisible words. You're on mute, everyone crows. You move your face closer to the screen, sure that your magic grandaunt, two generations older than you, knows what to say about Ghost Towns and freedom and china plates, this numb feeling draped over everything. She keeps talking with no sound, her words a mystery. The plateau signal wobbles; she disappears.
Dana Liebelson is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wyoming. Her fiction has appeared in Guernica, Hobart, CutBank Literary Magazine, and Cheap Pop. She attended the 2021 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and summer Tin House workshop. Originally from Bozeman, Montana, she lives in Austin, Texas, with a kitten named Tumbleweed.
