Dara Horn

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Before being born, his mother explained, babies go to school. Not a school like Boris’s, but a different kind of school, where all the teachers are angels. The angels teach each baby the entire Torah, along with all of the secrets of the universe. Then, just before each baby is born, an angel puts its finger right below the baby’s nose—here she paused to put her finger across his lips (could he see the blood under her skin, or did he only imagine it?)—and whispers to the child: Shh—don’t tell. And then the baby forgets. “Why does he have to forget?

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When he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come--the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it