Mouth

He thought he should write it down, what he was dreaming, but he was dreaming, and when he woke up, he forgot everything but the need to remember what had happened in the dream.

He owned several houses, one of which was slowly being eaten by the Atlantic Ocean. He’d been trying to sell it for years. He stood on the balcony of that property now and watched the encroaching waves as he ate a microwaveable breakfast burrito.

He really wanted to remember the things he had forgotten, that he should have written down.

A seagull floated above him like a question, then a light bulb.

It had to do with his mouth, he remembered, but also, somehow, everything else.

And the Shofar Blew

From the days before Christmas through to the New Year, their mother liked to walk around the house and blow her shofar. She particularly liked to do it in the morning, in the doorways of her children’s rooms while her children were asleep.

When asked why she did this, she told her children, “To wake you up.” When they asked why, it was their vacation, she said, “Because you must.”

The shofar was made from a hollowed-out kudu horn and felt insect-like to the touch. Their mother had received it from a missionary couple that her Sunday school class supported.

“You should hear their stories,” she told her children. “The Yemeni are an ancient people. They are exceedingly brave. But they also must be woken up.”

Her children wanted to know if anyone didn’t need to be woken up, if it was even possible to be truly awake in the way their mother meant.

“Sometimes I blow the shofar in my bathroom, in the mirror, right in my own face,” she said.

But if you know you need to be woken up, doesn’t that suggest some relative amount of awake-ness? At what point does the constant work of waking-up become the being-awake?

To answer this question, she picked up the shofar from her lap and blew it right there across the dinner table, over the honeyed ham and potatoes and green beans.

On Christmas morning they opened presents. For the boys, socks and blue mugs with Bible verses on them. For the girls, dental floss and pink mugs adorned with a different Bible verse. Without their father, she couldn’t do much more.

That is, except (as she was about to do in praise and thanksgiving for this reunion of her beautiful children) blow her shofar. •



Calvin Cummings is a writer from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His work appears in Volume Ø, Soft Union, Blue Arrangements, SARKA, Haskell Industries, and elsewhere.

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