#humdinger

Careful to be quiet, he creeps from his room and finds his sisters already peering through the banisters on the second floor. Esther glances at him, her eyes wet, then back down into the stairwell. Emerald eyes follow to where their mother sits on the bottom step in just her slip, rocking their infant sister to the rhythm of her song. Hannah looks tired, small hands pulled to her chest and eyes barely open, her breaths too shallow and face too pale, staring up at their mother.

As she finishes the song, she strokes Hannah's cheek with the back of her hand. "It's okay," their mother tells the baby, her voice cracking, a gentle sob as the infant's eyes flutter closed. "Rest now, oytserl. Your father is waiting to greet you."

Hannah would never open her eyes again. She dies three weeks before Mordecai's bar mitzvah. 

The young tom feels culpability for Hannah's death. Could it have been avoided if he'd been more proactive, demanding better wages earlier? Should he have gotten a paper route in addition to his profession, just to bolster the funds? While his mother sobs on the stairs, clutching her baby's body to her chest, Mordecai obsessively runs scenarios and calculations, trying to find something he could have done to save his sister from a slow and suffocating end.

He's near madness when Esther sits beside him on the bed and peers at his scribbled notes, all numbers, numerators and denominators that only made sense to their architect. She sniffles, wiped her nose on a sleeve, then simply leans against him. In his right mind, he'd recoil from her the second bodily fluids got involved, but in that moment, he leans into her warmth and finally lays down his pen, the two eldest children silent in their grief together.

Hannah is buried on Monday, two weeks later, the week of his Sabbath.

Mordecai has technically been a man, both in age in action, for months by the time then. While it isn't unusual in their congregation to delay the ceremony for a variety of reasons, his mother's was pure prudence; barely two years his junior and due her bat mitzvah less than six months later on her twelfth birthday, Esther's coming of age created the need for another ceremony and celebration they simply can't afford. It makes sense to combine the two events. 

While Esther is upset she won't get an entire celebration in her name come her birthday, Mordecai truly doesn't care; he's been accepting the consequences of his actions for two years, a religious ceremony won't change that. With barely the time to study Hebrew and practice his maftir section of the aliyah, he's participating almost solely for his traditional mother, who has been excitedly planning a shindig since he got his first paycheck.

Now it's Wednesday and he walks home in the early hours, prayer book in hand and those same few words flowing from pale lips, brows knit in deep concentration. He might not care for the ceremony, but he certainly won't make a fool of himself or his mother in the midst of it. This means every waking second he's not preoccupied with work or sleep, he's practicing, reciting or learning.

Perhaps if he weren't so exhausted from working eighteen hour days, cramming Hebrew classes into lunch hours and repeatedly reciting his maftir for the coming Sabbath, he'd have seen the punch coming. Even if he had seen it coming though, Mordecai is uncomfortably aware he wouldn't have been able to dodge or fight back anyway. He simply doesn't have experience with physical combat.

As luck and perhaps some awareness of his surroundings - a shift of feet and clack of loafers on cobbles that were not his own - would have it, he looks up just in time to avoid his nose taking the brunt of the uppercut. The fist connects with his muzzle instead, a brutal thump and searing pain through his lip, snapping his head back, taking Mordecai off his feet and abruptly onto his rear, the momentum bringing the back of his head down into the walkway with a crack.

Dazed and pained, Mordecai blinks up at the smoggy black sky sluggishly, arms splayed uselessly around by head. His mouth is on fire, his head feels like it exploded, and his back aches from the sudden fall onto hard stone.

Just as his thoughts begin to clear and the black spots fade from view, rough hangs grab his biceps and hoist him back to his feet, depositing him on unstable legs. All the movement makes his head throb and Mordecai squints at a fuzzy shape looming over him - only vaguely registering he's lost his glasses - before having his arms unceremoniously pulled behind his back empties his mind of logical thought and he hisses through grit teeth.

Every congregation has a story; aunt, uncle, sibling, parent, beaten and arrested for being Jewish in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The initial charges were always minor, often fabricated on the spot, but once you fell into the custody of the New York Police Department it would escalate to some federal crime the bigwigs wanted solved. A beloved family member, turned into a statistic, all for their beliefs.

But they were stories, weren't they? Mordecai never thought it would happen to anyone he knew, let alone himself. As he awaits the cold click of cuffs around his wrists and his rights - the few he's permitted - read aloud, he berates himself for walking around with a prayer book, as obviously as wearing a kippah beyond the synagogue doors.

A calloused hand snags his chin and forces him to focus on the man before him, even though Mordecai can only see an interesting mixture of poorly defined features by squinting at them. "Next time ya get some big ideas, you pass 'em on to me." Even through a headache, Jimbo's poorly enunciated English is recognisable. He then pinches the tom's chin so tight, Mordecai gasps. "Go over my head again, a fat lip'll be the least of your problems, kike."

A second later and he's shoved onto the cobbles along with his discarded prayer book, rough stone scratching up hands as they break his fall. Mordecai stays there a long moment, catching his breath and allowing his heart rate to slow down, palms stinging in time with his throbbing head. Tentatively, he brings the back of a hand to his mouth and wipes his lip, breath shaking as it comes away warm and wet, the black fur coated in a thin sheen of fresh blood.

It might not have been the police, but he's still shaking as he feels blindly around for his pince nez. Thankfully not broken, he places them back on, gathers up his books and gets to his feet. He doesn't go home though, too afraid they'll follow to enact further retribution, if they found his family. Instead, Mordecai shelters under the awning of a nearby communal building, knees pulled to his chest and tail curled around his calves, waiting for morning just to be sure his assailants have left.

There, after years of carefully masking his weaker emotions, alone with his thoughts and fears, the mask finally slips.

Once the tears start, it's difficult to stop them. Every tragedy and hardship he's endured in his lifetime - the sudden loss of his father, the slow decline of his sister, the house falling apart around them, the hatred and scorn simply for who he was born as and what his family believes, his very Jewish name - all of it floods out of his saturated adolescent body and soaks into his sleeves, right through to his fur beneath.

He feels as far from an adult as he's ever been then, lost in self pity and despair. By the time the tears dry up, the sun is peering through the fog as a new day dawns. Mordecai's lip has swollen up, the back of his head is matted with a thick clot of blood and his hands feel tight and painful to bend. It's a chore to make himself get up, but he does so knowing his mother would be beside herself with worry if he wasn't home when she got up to prepare breakfast.

Mordecai slips inside the house silently. Leaving his shoes in the hall, he makes straight for the bathroom at the rear of the first floor and gets to work disguising last night's attack; he suds up his head first, flinching as he kneads soap into the tender spot to wash away the blood and disinfect the cut at once. Once content the water is running clear, he pats the spot dry carefully, then turns his attention to his face.

The relatively small lip wound has swelled almost comically, creating a gumball-sized, raised bump on his lower lip. He's not going to be able to disguise or hide it, so he decides on a cover story instead; he tripped and went to the hospital, which took most of the night to process and discharge him with minor abrasions on his hands and face. Work paid, he'll say, to ease his mother's concerns, then avoid any additional questions until leaving for work.

With a story prepared and looking presentable, the adolescent cat gets ready for work once again, dressing, flattening his hair, affixing his tie. With the routine comes a sense of control, a return of his sensibilities and an irrational anger aimed primarily inwards; he chose to follow a dangerous line of work, and yet is woefully unprepared to deal with the unsavory characters with whom he interacts daily, as if they would act like normal, rational people.

Mordecai frowns at his reflection as he knots his tie, the motion slow and thoughtful. If anything happens to him, his entire family will suffer. Income vanished, his mother and sisters will have to fend for themselves, and he won't be there to prevent the worst from descending on them. It's an outcome he won't permit while he lives, and will make damn sure he's not going anywhere anytime soon.

With that logic in mind, he doesn't have to think twice; the tuxedo delays heading down for breakfast to open the top drawer of his desk and extract the family's only heirloom. A silver letter opener, the tip sharp enough to draw blood with the lightest of pressure, rarely used to preserve its keen edge. The tom removes it from the leather sheath and holds it up to inspect it in light, then tucks it into the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket.