Felix — By Sara Siegel

artwork by Uzomah Ugwu

Maybe I had met him once before, when I was seven years old, in this place for the first time.

Maybe it’s Felix I recognize, or maybe it’s my grandfather, his brother, I see in his face.

Maybe he knows who I am, or maybe he never knew me, or maybe like my grandfather he knows me but has forgotten my name.

“She’s Sara,” Mary tells him in Hebrew. “Rachel’s daughter. Maurice’s granddaughter.”

Maybe he sees in me my mother, who was here when she was nineteen, just a few years younger than I am now. Or maybe he sees my mother’s mother, because we don’t look the same, my grandmother and I, but in old pictures she looks like my mother, and my mother looks like me, and we both get startled sometimes when we pass in front of mirrors and see our mothers’ faces.

Maybe Felix sees not me but my grandmother, not how he had seen her last, some years ago in New York or California or who knows where, but how he had seen her when she looked like me, when they were children both, on her wedding day, before they all fled from Cairo, scattered.

At the table Felix watches me silently, trying to see who I am, how I fit. How I could be in front of him, so young, while he has grown so old.

Sara Siegel is a writer and arts administrator based in Western Massachusetts. Her short stories and poems have been published in Wild Violet, Vantage Point, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, Cleaver Magazine, Bright Sleep Magazine, Fairlight Books, and Quail Bell Magazine. sara-siegel.com