Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander

rumbled, but he wasn’t about to leave his post beside the door. Eve was probably inside, waiting for him to leave, so she could run out and flee.
    Pathetic.
    Or she was outside, waiting to run in.
    People were the worst.
    What was Ezekiel bread anyway?
    Kugel was famished. Ordinary bread would cause his stomach to react violently, but he was starving now, and hoped there were no glutens in Ezekiel bread. Everything else in the grocery was gluten-free, he thought, why would Ezekiel bread be any different? He tore off the end of the loaf, and hungrily chewed it. He moaned with contentment and leaned back against the house. He tore off a second piece.
    Fucking Ezekiel, he thought. How difficult could it be to be a prophet, anyway? Predict the absolute worst horrors you can imagine—persecutions, atrocities, fires, floods, famine—and odds are pretty good they’ll come to be.
    I see misery and suffering. I see pain and anguish. I see gnashing of teeth and desperate prayer but no help will arrive.
    Really?
    You think?
    Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel—each one foresaw more misery than the one before, and what did that abject pessimism; that supernal, sorrowful, suffocating cynicism get them? It got them their own books in the Bible, that’s what. Not little ones, either—fifty, sixty chapters a piece. You know who didn’t get his own book in the Bible? The guy who said,
It’s going to be okay, folks; honestly, I think it’s coming around
. Nostradamus was no idiot—if he’d predicted peace, calm, and sunny skies we wouldn’t know his name today.
    The combination of the midday heat and his now-full stomach caused Kugel to grow sleepy, and he yawned, leaned his head back against the house, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.
    When he awoke some time later, his face was covered in a fine mist of sweat. He had no idea how long he had slept, but his insides were burning like the sun above; pain shot through his abdomen and stabbed at his belly. He groaned, winced, and doubled over in excruciating pain.
    Fucking glutens, he grunted through clenched teeth. Fucking Anne fucking Frank.
    He sat back up, and noticed a young couple on the porch beside him, standing together in front of the property listings.
    They looked at him strangely.
    They were quite tall.
    Glutens, groaned Kugel again, forcing a smile.
    The man put his arm protectively around the woman’s shoulders.
    Kugel, still bent over, did his best Adenoid Hynkel: Ah, the glutens, he said, shaking his fist. The glutens, the glutens.
    The couple frowned and turned back to the listings. Kugel didn’t like tall people, and these tall people were tanned, which made it even worse, the kind of tan that only comes from very intentional tanning; it wasn’t that they had been out cultivating their garden, or even engaging in some mindless outdoor sport; no, these two had set out together, with single-minded determination, to become tan. Let’s become tan, they had agreed, and after much struggle and sacrifice and aloe, they had at last achieved their goal.
    Assholes.
    It felt as if there was a furious rodent burrowing through his core, ripping his insides apart, desperately trying to get out, clawing at his flesh: an explosion of pain, first here, then there, subsided for just a moment before slowly building again somewhere else.
    The woman’s arm was around the man’s waist, his arm was around her shoulders, and every time one pointed out a house to the other, they read it together and hugged and kissed.
    If Kugel hadn’t immediately disliked them so much he might have told them about the arsonist, might have warned them about Eve’s duplicity. But he didn’t like them, so he let them keep hoping. Besides, he desperately needed to get to a bathroom, and was concentrating as best he could on not allowing his bowels to move on their own; he couldn’t fault his body for reacting so violently to what it regarded as poison, but it was a survival instinct that overrode any