"Israel must be wiped off the map"
- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
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We have mushrooms growing on our skyline.
Above us, stealth bombers clear their throats like speakers at college podiums and drop bombs that seem to be carried down to earth by squadrons of angels, guiding them with holy precision. The ground underneath our feet shudders and lurches and twists. It struggles like a prisoner of war on a torture rack.
Have you ever heard the whistle of a bomb as it drops towards a target?
Have you ever heard what a Jewish synagogue sounds like when a bomb takes part in a prayer meeting?
The sound is first met with silence and a few bowed heads.
And then screams and concrete bits puff out from underneath it like confetti in a ticker-tape parade.
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There was a strange kind of snow in her hair. It was was cold and ivory-soap colored, but when Adina touched it with her fingers it crumbled like chalk and made her hands look as if she had been playing with blackboard erasers.
The snow continued to fall, unaware that it was unorthodox.
Someone up in heaven was tearing up teddy bears and sprinkling their cotton guts all over Adina's city. Smiling, Adina lifted her face to the sky and felt the cotton-snow brush up against her face like the wings of doves cooing and strutting in synagogue squares. She spun slowly in a circle and her dress allowed the drifts of snow to take a peek at her legs.
It was so peaceful.
No more airplanes making artificial thunder in the sky.
No more bombs shaking the earth by it's hair.
Adina, still smiling, decided that seeing the town in it's new fur coat of cotton-snow would be a pretty sight indeed, and headed down the street. She walked delicately in her bare feet and tried to avoid the rubble spread across the road. In some places, she was forced to climb over chunks of concrete and asphalt with mangled rebar sticking out like the roots of uprooted garden weeds.
In some places, there were crumpled cars to dodge and climb around as well.
They all looked like cattle lying in butcher's yards with engine oil spurting out of slit throats.
At the edges, her dress became a little smudged.
Eventually, Adina came to her family's place of worship – a tired old building with it's windows bleeding soot and all it's insides scooped out like jack-o'-lanterns glop. Her footprints were left behind as she walked towards a bench in front of the synagogue but the wind came along in lukewarm, smoky bursts every so often and swept them aside like a chain-smoking janitor pushing a broom through the city. Adina laid on the bench with her face towards the sky and watched the cotton-snow flutter earthwards.
She had read in a book that children would sometimes catch snowflakes on their tongues.
When she tried this, Adina found the snow was bitter and tasted like cereal box cardboard.
This sort of snow was meant only for decoration, it seemed.
But she still loved it.
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We hold our children close to our breasts and smell their hair and whisper into their ears. In the skies, there is a traffic jam due to of all the prayers rising to God from the city like skeletal hot-air balloons. It is a wonder that all those bombers can fly through and around these airborne supplications.
Maybe all of our prayers are getting caught in the engines and spattering into the windshields of those airplanes like high-flying seagulls.
Maybe all of our prayers have turned into ground beef by rotors and propellers.
It doesn't matter.
We'll just keep making more.
Although as the bombs fall and turn us into ash plumes, we can't help but wonder if perhaps God needs to replace his hearing aid...
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The city has either had it's voice-box torn out or is suffering from laryngitis.
Adina wondered if she is the only person inside of it.
The idea was a romantic one and she decided to explore her new playground a little further. She waved goodbye to the slumped over synagogue with shadows standing in the doorway like homeless men using makeshift urinals and headed further down the street.
She didn't get very far though.
Because she discovered that she was not completely alone.
In the middle of the street there was a circle of people, lying in fetal positions and as still as Roman statues striking poses in city centers. As Adina walked closer, she saw that their skin looked like whale blubber and their clothes were stale-crust stiff and charred. It looked as if a doctor had come along and performed free abortions and had left all the leftover fetuses strewn across the road.
Adina knelt beside one: a woman.
Her lips were salt-shriveled snails.
In her hands there was a burnt copy of the Torah.
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All these nuclear blasts make the air chilly.
They also burn patterns onto the skin of any woman wearing lace, like henna tattoos.
We realize now that there is no chance of survival. We realize that we should have taken the hint when the Nazis loaded us up in concentration camps and baked us into neat little pots of ash and filled out lungs with mustard gas so that they looked like puffed up IV bags.
Now, Jerusalem is nothing more than a burn barrel.
All we can do is stand around it, warm our hands, and wait for death to tap us on the shoulder.
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Adina stood up.
She turned away from the circle of corpses and began humming a song.
Nothing could stifle her good mood, not even prune-shriveled neighbors with skin like black leather motorcycle jackets.
Because today it was snowing.
Today there was snowfall in Israel.
Let's see what we've got, shall we?
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