The Girl on the Fridge: Stories Read Online Free PDF

shit and filth. And then, when you want to change into a clean pair of pants and some clean, dry underwear”—the sergeant moved over toward Bugamilsky’s bed, opened the rucksack, and registered a look of mock surprise—“you’ll discover it’s on account of your lousy vacuum seal that they’re sopping wet too. I bet you’ll be laughing then too, dickbrain, when you try to keep going with a ton of filth in your shorts, like some baby that made in his pants.
    “Bugamilsky didn’t take his vacuum sealing seriously, which is why he’s going to do two extra hours of guard duty tonight. Private, write that down. Anyone else here too smart to bother with vacuum sealing?” The sergeant scanned the platoon.
    Alon did take it seriously. Vacuum sealing was his only chance.
    That night, Alon vacuum-sealed his clothes. The more he sealed, he could tell, the more he got the hang of it, and he couldn’t help feeling proud as he studied his last vacuum-sealed undershirt. He was ready.
    He closed his eyes softly and started to vacuum-seal himself.
    During roll call, the sergeant was more short-tempered than ever, handing out punishments right, left, and center. When he got to Alon, he grabbed him by his shirt, leaned over, and shouted the same sentence in his ear over and over again. Alon listened to the drops of spittle shattering against the vacuum seal. Their frenzied rhythm reminded him of raindrops banging helplessly against a taut plastic awning. Not a single droplet hit him.
    That night, he had to crawl for fifty minutes, shouting “I’m a snake, I’m a liar,” because he’d assured the sergeant that his weapon was clean and the sergeant had found some oil in the assembly.
    When Schreiber rose to his feet, he was pleased to discover that not a single drop of dirt had stuck to him. The vacuum seal had done its job.
    Only once did Schreiber doubt the perfection of the seal. It was his Saturday off, two weeks before the end of basic training. She said that the army had changed him, had made him different, that he was avoiding her kisses, pulling away when she touched him. How could he tell her about the synthetic taste in his mouth, the fake, sticky feel of her body, the suffocation? For a moment he thought he’d heard the sound of air rushing through some hidden hole in the transparent seal. But it was just the murmur of the door closing behind her. He wanted to cry, but there were no tears in his eyes. Anyway, what’s the point of a transparent vacuum seal if you get yourself wet inside?
    He looked at himself in the mirror, at his shiny dog tag, at his neatly starched service dress, at the razor in his right hand. He drew the razor closer to the clearly visible artery in his neck. “Basic training is over,” he whispered. “Time to undo the seal.”

The Girl on the Fridge
    Alone
    He told her that he once had a girlfriend who liked to be alone. And that was very sad, because they were a couple, and couple , by definition, means “together.” But mostly she preferred to be alone. So once he asked her, “Why? Is it me?”
    And she said, “No, it has nothing to do with you, it’s me, it has to do with my childhood.”
    He really didn’t get it, the childhood thing, so he tried to find an analogy in his own childhood, but he came up empty. The more he thought about it, the more his childhood seemed like a cavity in somebody else’s tooth—unhealthy, but no big deal, at least not to him. And that girl, who liked to be alone, kept hiding from him, and all because of her childhood. It pissed him off. Finally, he told her, “Either you explain it to me or we stop being a couple.” She said okay, and they stopped being a couple.
    Ogette is Sympathetic
    “That’s very sad,” Ogette said. “Sad and, at the same time, moving.”
    “Thanks,” Nahum said and took a sip of his juice.
    Ogette saw there were tears in his eyes, and she didn’t want to upset him, but in the end she couldn’t resist. “So to this