Anat was seated on the couch in her Upper East Side penthouse, thinking about giving birth. She knows she’s a little older than most pregnant moms. That didn’t scare her. She was thinking about her grandmother. Whether the baby was a boy or a girl, it would be named in her grandma’s memory. Once again, she thought about how her grandmother got her hooked on dried fruit. Especially raisins. She remembered when she returned to Stanford after the funeral, and a platter of it was waiting in her room from her grandma. Obviously, it was sent before she had that awful fall. Anat was dreaming about when she rubbed the fruit all over herself. But she also thought back to her younger years.
She remembered eating dates with her grandmother on Rosh Hashanah. Her grandmother came to the US from Israel a few years before her daughter and son-in-law, Anat’s parents did. Grandma quickly assimilated. Her kids did not. She wasn’t surprised. Anat remembered when her grandmother asked her to eat the dates and say a blessing. She did and ate some raisins, too. She loved raisins. On another note, Marc had a friend who was into raisins. But for different reasons. He also had a friend who was into reasons. That’s another story.
Back to Anat. She munched on raisins all the time as a little girl. One day, she almost choked on them. She coughed it out and was fine. She was a little scared. She had some water. She heard her parents fighting in their bedroom. They were loud as usual. She went to her front stoop and sat. She was feeling better. She saw a few little girls skipping. She wanted to be friends with them. But they shut her out. She started breathing heavily, and her throat felt weird. She fell down the steps off the stoop. No one saw her. She skinned her knees. She got up and, opened her hands, and reopened her eyes which closed when she fell. She felt her hands feeling thick and weird. They were red and bleeding. She went to the hose to wash her bloodied hands and knees. She cried when the water was turned off. She decided she would go into the kitchen to clean up. As she walked up the steps, she opened her hand on the doorknob and noticed her hand was discolored, probably from the fall. She shut her eyes and squeezed her hands. When she opened them, raisins and dates flew out. She was confused. She went into her kitchen and washed her hands.
Over the next few weeks, the dried fruit continued to appear. Anat learned how to shoot them as projectiles.
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