We hate hide-and-seek. Grind our teeth at night. Dream about running and running. Dream about our parents dying. Wonder, if we had to choose, who would we save. Scold ourselves when tired or hungry or cold: This is nothing, think about what our grandfather suffered. We sit facing the door in restaurants. Save the smallest bit of leftovers though our fridges are always full. And though later in life we will regret not committing to memory every detail, we give each other the here we go again look when our grandmother, during dessert, for the hundredth time, in the same voice she uses to describe her trip to the supermarket, tells us how she almost got hanged in Auschwitz for picking wild blackberries.
Alisha Kaplan holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe Fellow. She is an Associate Editor for Narrative Magazine and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, DIAGRAM, Carousel, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. Alisha splits her time between downtown Toronto and a farm in Hillsburgh, Ontario.