“Barbara, Detroit, 1966,” by Peter Orner

Fiction faculty member Peter Orner was recently featured by the New Yorker. Read an excerpt of Orner’s short story, “Barbara, Detroit, 1966,” below:

Barbara, Detroit, 1966

That’s Barbara in the third row from the back of the sanctuary, the one with the sunglasses holding up her tangle of orange hair, see her? Hair like a nest of copper wiring? The one slowly rocking? Both hands beneath her belly as if she were holding a large salad bowl; she’s more than eight months pregnant. It’s February 12, 1966, and Barbara’s in the new Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, six exits away from Chicago Boulevard, Detroit, where the old synagogue used to be. It’s still there, actually. Now they’ve sold it to a Pentecostal church. It’s been four years since the congregation decamped to the suburbs, and the new place still gleams. The fresh paint smells like vanilla, and the triangular point of the roof inspires as it juts out across the freeway like a plane taking off. At the moment the place is jammed, more than seven hundred people, not a seat is empty. It’s hot, and Barbara’s woozy. All she wants is for the service to be over so she can go home. She’s here because she didn’t want to be at home. The circle of life. From one place we don’t want to be to another.

And still the rabbi talks. The renowned, beloved, silver-tongued Morris Adler, “the most quoted rabbi in America,” intones, expounds on Abraham Lincoln in honor of the sixteenth President’s birthday. Barbara’s paying no attention.

She’s forgotten her regular glasses (what’s there to see in temple anyway?), and, for no reason she’ll be able to explain later, she slides her sunglasses down onto her face. Everything goes darker as her hair collapses to her shoulders.

Rabbi Adler’s voice tends to slow when he’s nearly finished—son . . . his . . . own . . . flesh—and so there’s hope that this could end, and Barbara becomes, incrementally, more awake. The rabbi’s words are like shapes, and she imagines them raining from the skylights like fat white drops of light, plopping one by one on her head and on the heads of all the others, the ones who’ve been listening and the ones who’ve been dozing, exploding with a little piff that only Barbara is attuned to hear.

Read the rest of this story here: https://www.newyorker.com/books/flash-fiction/barbara-detroit-1966?