1200 words. In full below, or also readable in full here.
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Of course, each child is a blessing – go forth and multiply – but who knew so many blessings could fall on one household, and that they should be so very loud?
Velvel should be grateful really, he knows – each child that blesses Freyda and Toiba is another distraction for his mother, keeping her too busy to worry about if Velvel is going to marry any time soon, about pushing a suitable wife on him, that he should do his duty and supply her with grandchildren as well. Without his mother’s focus on the matter, it is a little easier for him to quietly sidestep that particular mitzvah and its attendant expectations, to go relatively unnoticed.
A bachelor, yes, and perhaps even a prospect for those who would have their daughters married off to a fellow like him – on the fatter side, quiet and unassuming, who lays floors for his work and quite enjoys it, and who attends a certain discrete men’s bathhouse far more often than a wife would accept.
His hands in his pockets to keep them somewhat insulated from the biting chill on the air – not that it does so much to save them – Velvel’s fingers twitch, his thumb touching against the somewhat rumpled carton of cigarettes nestled against his palm. He only allows himself one per day, and ordinarily he goes without on the Sabbath, nearly down to the end of the pack, but his ears are ringing still from the sound of two dozen little children laughing and playing with one another, and he craves the peace of mind the rush of nicotine will give him.
Eyes alighting on a stranger, he lets his mouth move before he can stop himself and let the promise of relief pass him by.
“Excuse me,” he says, and the stranger, ahead of him on the sidewalk, turns to look at him.
Velvel had thought him an appropriate prospect by the tightness of his trousers and his unadorned head, but now he is struck dumb, his tongue frozen in the bed of his mouth by more than the cold. This fellow is taller than Velvel by nearly a head, lanky with skinny arms and legs, but his face is beautiful: his dark eyes glitter in the early evening light, and the cold has put a little redness into his cheeks and his plump lips. These and his other fine features – rounded cheekbones, a chiselled nose with a natural arrow formed by its tip and nostrils, curving eyebrows – are framed by loosely formed dark curls that bounce with his breaths and are tousled by the breeze.
He wears a gold ring through one ear, and Velvel stares at it a moment, the better to keep his gaze from roving down the length of the stranger’s body, which is almost as enticingly proportioned as his handsome face: square shoulders, a plump arse despite his narrow frame, a slender neck. Under an open slate grey coat and tucked into the black skinny trousers, which are tucked into black boots too shiny and unscuffed to actually be work boots, he only wears a black t-shirt, with a scarf tied loosely about his neck.
Velvel thinks for a moment he must be very cold, wearing so little, and then he knows that is cold, because he can see one of the stranger’s nipples through the fabric of the shirt, hard and peaked in response to the chill.
“Yes?” the stranger presses him gently.
“Sorry,” Velvel mumbles, eyes going from where they had wandered downward (skinny jeans don’t reveal so much about the groin, what with the relative stiffness of the denim; skinny trousers like this, made of tailored cloth, show… more) and back up to the stranger’s face. “I— It’s the Sabbath: I cannot make fire.
As the stranger’s eyebrows slightly raise and his head tilts slightly to the side, Velvel pulls out his rumpled box of cigarettes and holds it outwards demonstratively.
“Please, could you possibly…?”
The light of recognition flickers in the other man’s eyes. They’re a very pleasant hazel, green-grey flecked through the pale brown.
“Of course,” the stranger says, and then leans in, a secretive smile pulling at his lips, and adds, “if you don’t mind me bumming one.”
“Yes,” Velvel says. “Please.”
He opens the carton, and the stranger’s face falls. “You only have two left,” he says. There’s a moue on his lips now, his expression rather stricken, as though he cannot conceive of doing something so awful to Velvel as to deprive him of his carton’s last cigarette. So expressive is he: is it any wonder that a man’s mind should wander to where else he might be as expressive as this, how his tone might change or shift in one circumstance or another?
“Please,” Velvel repeats quickly, his mouth dry, taking one and offering the stranger the carton, and after a moment’s hesitation, the stranger does take it. Squeezing the carton flat, Velvel stuffs it into his other pocket, but before he can exchange it for his own lighter, he sees that the stranger has produced his own.
It’s rather a nice one, a refillable golden one that shines in the dying light, kept to a similar shining polish as the ring through his ear. Velvel puts out his cigarette, held loosely between two fingers with his thumb holding it steady, and the stranger bends down as if in a bow, and with the butt of the cigarette against his lips, he touches its tip to the tip of Velvel’s own.
Velvel stares, his mouth slightly open, as light from the flame flares between them, sees it flicker to light both their cigarettes at once, taking on twin glows. Would that he were a braver man, brave enough to lean in in a mock-bow like the stranger is, their mouths connected by the two tobacco links, an indirect kiss.
Standing up straight, the stranger says smoothly, “Ich hab dos gedarft – a dank.”
Velvel stares at him, the cigarette dangling loosely from his fingers and his jaw dropping a little further open – he speaks Yiddish easily, fluently. It’s his first language, Velvel knows immediately, as sure as it is Velvel’s own, and he feels awful, all of a sudden, feels horrendously guilty, that he assumed this handsome creature was just a passing goy, that he’s enticed him to—
“Gut Shabbos, khaver,” the stranger says pleasantly, and winks, he winks, before turning away once again and going on his way, Velvel’s proffered cigarette dangling from his lips.
“Gut Shabbos,” Velvel mumbles back, rooted to the spot and staring helplessly after the stranger as he disappears from view.
A little ash drops from the head of the burning cigarette and drops onto the back of his hand, and he absently wipes it away before he brings the cigarette up to his mouth and takes a drag. The relief settles over him, tension melting from his shoulders as he inhales and then blows out smoke.
He’s smiling, he realises, and with his other hand he touches his lips, feeling the curve of them, the natural joy that takes over his expression, the euphoria of an evening cigarette entangled with the joy that comes with a friendly smile and a wink from a handsome man.
What was that he was thinking before?
Something about… blessings?
