In Mark Bryk’s “Gnats,” an extended metaphor reveals the speaker’s upsetting inability to make space for her family. Because this story is told in direct address to a unseen rabbi, the reader is plunged into the narrator’s voice and must see the world as she sees it. A powerful—and unsettling—experience.
A quick question, Rabbi. So I was back by my parents’ house last Thursday when a few gnats started to collect around the garbage can in the kitchen with the broken lid. My mother had left the screen door open while she stood on the porch to talk to the neighbors, and that’s when they must have flown in, tracking the smell of used lemon tea bags and a rotting banana peel soaking in the raspberry gel left over from the yogurt.
I said, “If you don’t mind, Mom, can you just close the door behind you next time?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t mind,” she replied. But the way she said it made it seem like what she didn’t mind was the door being open, the filth flying in.
At first they were hesitant, hovering in the kitchen near the window by the bin in the driveway. I should have clapped them dead while I had the chance, but I was busy kashering the kitchen—zapping the water in the microwave for five minutes, scrubbing the oven and running it on self-clean. I’d taken it upon myself to cook for shabbos, and the kitchen was nowhere near ready for me. God, it was awful. The oven was missing the button to change the time, the plug on the toaster was charred, the pans had lost their non-stick coating, the knives mushed the skins of the tomatoes and peppers, and don’t get me started on the rest of the house. In the basement, water came up from the floor whenever you stepped on a loose vinyl panel. And the toilet down there was broken because the dental floss holding the flush handle to the flapper valve had snapped and my father’s fingers are too flimsy to fix it.
I begged my mother, “Let me spruce this place up.” She was washing the lunch dishes by hand, because maybe the dishwasher was broken or maybe she never knew how to use it. “Let me work my magic.”
“No, Hannah,” she said, “you have your own life to lead.”
“At least tell me where the mop is. Do you still have a mop?”
She was putting the mugs back on the drying rack still tea-stained, the knives still coated in fingerprints. She caught me wiping them down and said, “Excuse me, but don’t you have to go daven mincha?”
I’ll admit, Rabbi, that I don’t always find time to pray when I’m back in New York, but that’s obviously not what she was getting at. When I’d started to get more religious a decade ago, I didn’t go about it in the most delicate way. The Chabad rabbi on campus had helped me notice so many compromises in our home, so much religious hypocrisy, like how my father used to grab forks from the drawer without considering whether they were dairy or meat, or how on ski trips, we’d drink uncertified hot cocoa and nudge the lights off on shabbos. He urged me to ask my family innocent questions—like, which of our community’s restrictions actually matter to us?—and to make more requests of them—like, can we start using red and blue sponges? But I failed to consider the nuances of repentance, how each person has their own gradual path back to God. Now my parents think that every time I’m trying to help it’s because I still hope to change them.
Anyway, I came back from Gourmet Glatt with groceries for shabbos and Chinese food for dinner, and in the time it took to open the pack of disposable plates I’d brought, three gnats got themselves trapped in the lo mein. I was the only one who noticed. I tried to pick them out with two chopsticks and rinse them down the drain, but I only ended up squishing them deeper, their legs melting into the noodles.
I’ve been wondering lately, is it better for people not to know when they’re committing a sin? After the first few bites, my father asked, “Do you think it’s a little crunchy?” And though it was technically kosher because the flies took up less than one-sixtieth of the dish, I lied and said, “No, Dad, the crunch is unremarkable.” I watched him take another absentminded bite, his gaze blissfully unfocused, his jaw swinging loose like a cow chewing cud, and suddenly, I don’t know why, I found myself distraught.
It was almost ten years to the day since his mother’s death, my Bubby Ida , who had lived in this house with us throughout my teens. I’d flown in for her yahrzeit this weekend, mostly because if I didn’t show up, I worried he’d forget to say the mourner’s kaddish. Dovid stayed in Cleveland with the baby, and when I FaceTimed him that night, after my parents went to sleep, after their space heaters clicked on in their bedroom, I tried to explain that what I’d finally realized was that my parents were next.
“You mean like dying?” he said. He was stretched out on our sofa, half-reclining on the seat with the flip-out footrest. His kippah was pushed forward, and his hair curled around it was sweaty and matted. “If so, maybe you should ship home all the things you have there? It doesn’t matter how much it costs. We’ll put them in the nook at the back of the boiler room, and if they don’t fit, we’ll buy a shed at Lowe’s and put them in the backyard.”
“I don’t mean like tomorrow,” I told him.
But once my husband gets an idea, he doesn’t let it go. One time I let slip that I was feeling distracted, and now he has me reciting psalms for half an hour every morning with the door to the study locked and my phone confiscated. He said, “I know, I know, but it’s now or never. The minute your parents die, God forbid, or even decide they’re moving into a nursing home, before you even fly home, Josh will be there to clean the place out, and don’t think he’ll stop at the ground floor.”
Because after my brother Josh’s wedding last year, he and his partner Brian came to the house and took the stereo system and the board games and all our old home videos to their new apartment in Queens, three cardboard boxes of unlabeled microcassettes with the cassette adapter you use to watch them in a VHS player. He promised that Brian had a machine at work that could digitize them, but when we texted him about it in advance of this trip, he claimed the boxes had been misplaced and then ghosted us when we asked for more details.
But never mind my brother. The main thing I wanted to ask Dovid was what I should do with the gnats. I suspected that he would have an effective solution. Apart from you, Rabbi, my husband gives the best advice of anyone I know.
The next morning, I followed Dovid’s instructions faithfully. I poured apple cider vinegar into a glass and mixed it with a teaspoon of dish soap, and left it out on the counter so the flies would be attracted to the smell and get caught in the suds. Then, I sharpened all the paring knives on the underside of a ceramic coffee mug. Finally, I went down to the basement to plumb the depths of the broken toilet in the guest en suite.
In my distant memory, this was Bubby Ida’s room, but more recently, it had been Dovid’s, when he would come for shabbos in the year before we got married. All Friday afternoon, I used to be down here vacuuming for him, making the bed, putting a little chocolate on the pillow and a mini plastic water bottle on the dresser with the towels and the toilet paper he preferred. Since then, though, it had been neglected. The bed had no sheets or pillows. The recliner below the transom window, where Bubby Ida used to read tehillim when she got on my mother’s nerves, was gone. And the bathroom had mildew growing on the wall of the shower, stagnant water in the toilet bowl, and a dozen dead gnats, little black dots floating in the tank. Or maybe they were eggs, I didn’t consider that they could have been eggs.
I’m sorry, Rabbi, I’m just thinking, how do they live like this? Is this Jewish, to just give up and rot? Every night in mine and Dovid’s home, we return ourselves to spotlessness. Weekly, I scrub the sink to a pure white. It’s partly out of necessity; we only have one sink that alternates between meat and dairy, so it’s important that the dishes don’t pile up. But my parents have lost all sense of restriction, and, pardon my language, but it disgusts me.
All day, my father lounged lazily in the living room, flipping through magazines and reading the news on his tablet. I asked him if he wanted any food, but he gestured toward his bowls of honey-roasted peanuts and red licorice bites. I offered to turn on the lights for him, but he muttered that the window—dust-coated to the opacity of lake ice—gave him plenty of light already.
Can you believe this used to be my life? I once thought this house would be my birthright; I looked forward to being the host of our family get-togethers. I think even Dovid worried that with everything I’d left behind—clothes and books and all the other relics I no longer need but never threw out—I was at risk of stumbling back into my childhood and out of our future. But now, everything was covered in dust. Nothing shone through. I flipped through my journals from childhood and couldn’t remember what it was like to have a romantic crush. I found my old camp t-shirts but I haven’t worn short sleeves in years. I filled two garbage bags with gymnastics trophies and school notebooks and textbooks and swept the shelves they were on and vacuumed the spiderwebs that have grown in the corners ever since I moved out. I took the bags out to the bins in the driveway, beneath the tree my parents planted the year I was born, and then lay in the grass above its unraked leaves, straining my eyes in the direct light, trying to feel like I was finally free.
Josh and Brian showed up at four p.m., only an hour or so before shabbos was due to begin. I was on the family computer in the den, printing out a copy of YU’s Torah Tidbits, though I was mostly distracted by the fly crawling across the browser window oblivious to the blinking cursor. When I tapped the screen, it skittered away, leaving microscopic tracks of fly footprints away from my thumbprint. When I flicked at it, it took off, dazed and distracted, wending its way toward the glass I’d been carrying around all day to collect the flies I’d already killed. I’m not sure why it couldn’t sense the danger. But I heard the door slam, and my mother heralded her favorite and only son’s arrival, and my father struggled up from his seat to help her contain herself. I checked the time and prayed they didn’t need to shower because that wouldn’t leave enough time for me to wash and dry my hair.
While Brian brought the bags upstairs, Josh came to the den alone and waved to me from the threshold. We haven’t hugged each other in years, though it’s not because it’s forbidden. It’s revenge. Since I can’t hug his partner, now he won’t touch me either.
“How are you?” I asked. “I’m looking forward to spending more time with you both.”
“We’re good. We’re fine.”
“It’s really nice to see you,” I said, composing an earnest smile. “You look good.”
He had grown out his hair and tied it up in the back. His cheeks were scruffy, but his lips beneath the beard looked soft and unchapped. There were no bags under his eyes. I realized, as I often do when I see him, that this was my face, too—we looked so much the same. That’s the thing with family, that no matter how far you split off, there’s still someone back in New York walking around with your face. But he wasn’t looking at me, and he didn’t return my smile. He muttered, “Okay,” and turned away.
I lit the shabbos candles around five-fifteen, and then we waited an hour and a half until dinner. This used to be the most tranquil part of childhood, when my father took Josh to shul and my mother and I stayed home and played Rummikub or Rack-O on the carpet. Now, though, Josh hadn’t prayed in years and my father claimed he wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t say kaddish tonight. Sorry, Bubby Ida. So it was all five of us crammed onto the two couches in the den, the four of us plus Brian—who I don’t dislike by the way. He’s a little more out there than my brother, with the earrings and the shaved edges and the chest hair in everyones’ faces, but my mother’s always telling me about his volunteer work which has something to do with the homeless, which means he’s kind-hearted, and he makes my brother happy, so it is what it is.
But my point is, we were awkwardly reading and waiting in the den when I saw Brian sneak out his phone to check the time. My parents said nothing, though I’m sure they noticed, and my brother, of course, didn’t care. I was surprised, Rabbi, sure, but I held my tongue and went into the dining room to read my booklet in the sanctity of a technology-free space. And as soon as I left, it seemed like they all broke out in conversation, as though I was the schoolteacher and they were murmuring children. You know, I was hoping this weekend that we might begin to reconcile, not all the way but at least a start, but how was I supposed to do this when they wouldn’t even talk to me?
Do they even know how delicate Dovid and I were about the whole situation, how we spoke to you beforehand and you explained that we could have all the love in the world for our brother, and we could know that whomever he falls in love with is surely a great person, too, but that we’ve decided to live our lives in a way that forbids us from celebrating that love, and that considers a kosher relationship as something fundamentally different than whatever he has? I remember telling him, We love you, Josh, and we are not ostracizing you and we are not cutting you off—it’s just your relationship that we cannot condone. It’s a line that we are unable to cross.
This continued over dinner, with nobody making eye contact with me. My father had mistaken the fly trap on the counter for apple juice and that got Josh talking about how they’d finally watched one of the home videos they’d taken from the house, in which he was seven years old and peeling apples for the Pesach charoset when he snuck a few gulps of the red wine my father had left out on the counter. Suddenly he was running around the house butt naked while my father chased him with the video camera, laughing and begging him to put his pants on. And I remembered that afternoon too, because I’d spent the rest of it with my mother cleaning their mess. But I didn’t say anything; I just sat there quietly, staring at the gnats all around us, flying into my father’s gaping nostrils, getting caught in the webbing of his nasal hair, circling in front of my mother’s face. It felt like I was living in a totally different world.
What I’m trying to say is that all dinner, I was working myself up in my silence and life-long grievances, and even though Dovid always tells me to take the high road, I just wanted to defend myself and say, It’s not like we didn’t come to the wedding! It was just the ceremony that we didn’t take part in—we just didn’t want to stand underneath a false chuppah and celebrate a false marriage because how would we ever defend ourselves and our way of life to our children if we did, and this is what I was thinking when I finally slammed my hand down on the table to begin the speech I had not fully formed but was unable to deliver, because when I raised my palm, I realized that there was a dead fly smushed flat under it. And I was just wondering, Rabbi—was this a sin? Is it forbidden to kill a fly on shabbos?
Mark Bryk is a writer, teacher, and amateur t-shirt designer in Ann Arbor, MI, where he recently completed his MFA and currently works for the University of Michigan’s Hopwood Program and Detroit River Story Lab. He can be found online at markbryk.com and @notmarkbryk on Instagram. This is his first published story.