Light Fell by Evan Fallenberg

It had seemed like such a good idea for everyone. He spread his arms around them, pulled the huddle closer. “I’ll write you all the time, and send you pictures. And next summer I’ll be home and we’ll spend plenty of time at the beach together. This was lots of fun, wasn’t it?”
    When Rebecca came to fetch them he had already said his goodbyes. From a safe distance he watched them tumble into the station wagon and heard their cacophony of little voices shouting bits of information about their day to Rebecca. He lifted a hand to wave but caught only the sky’s reflection in the car’s window. Its tires spit pebbles and sand into the air as it sped away.
    Professor Gabison had been right to send him away. Joseph saw this as soon as he got settled in Cleveland. Teaching kept him tremendously busy and focused his mind. He, a native speaker of Hebrew, was teaching English literature to English speakers. Obsessed with forcing the right sounds out of his mouth, he used exact and appropriate expressions, becoming more American than the Americans. He graciously allowed himself to be corrected, and quickly discovered this endeared him to colleagues and students alike. He learned to spread his a’s wide and send them through the roof of his mouth like they did, picking up their shortcuts and saying ornjuice and cotta cheese , though he could never bring himself to tell people he taught litterchure . He was well liked and, as an outsider, nonthreatening.
    Before he even landed in America Joseph had decided to spend one hour every day on his children. This could be writing a letter to them or preparing bits and pieces of a package he would send. Sometimes he taped his voice, talking about what he was doing, what Cleveland was like, how much he missed them. He made up stories about the ducks in the lagoon at the art museum, described the view of the city and its lake and river from the Terminal Tower, collected veiny red and orange leaves from Sunday walks. He sent them maple sugar rosettes in the fall and red-and-white candy canes at Christmastime. In the spring he sent them Frisbees and baseball bats and tetherballs with instructions on how to play these exotic sports. And when the days grew longer and warmer he sent them a huge inflatable raft. He licked his lips for salt as he imagined them bobbing on the waves with him in just a few more months.
    He received in return two envelopes from Sde Hirsch over the course of the year. The first held a bundle of letters and bills, with several drawings of farm animals by Ethan and the twins. No note. The second, in spring, was a packet of Passover greetings that his sons had prepared in school, all but Daniel. When Joseph telephoned, the older boys were usually out playing or too busy to come to the phone. The twins always wanted to talk, or at least breathe into the phone, but he only managed to catch the older three a few times.
    Joseph set aside time that year for Yoel as well, time for reliving the relationship they had started to create, for imagining the press and warmth of his massive body. Joseph did not allocate an hour a day to Yoel as he did to his boys, but in fact he spent far more time than that with his dead lover, mostly in the quiet hours of the late night or early morning when he could shut out the day’s intrusions and give himself wholly to this one man much as he had when Yoel was still alive. He hugged his pillow and tried touching himself the way Yoel had, but those large prodding fingers had carried so much curiosity and sadness and love that Joseph merely made himself ache with desire for what he could not have. He cried sometimes, but mostly he stared at the dark ceiling in disbelief.
    Often he tried to picture the life he could have had with Yoel. He imagined them trekking the rim of a Norwegian fjord, his hand cupped in Yoel’s larger one, or buried in a deep sofa, barely touching, each with his own book. Most of his reveries included just the two of