“Toothache”, a short story; in Fiction on the Web, December 2022. Nominated for the PEN/Robert J Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Download.

Toothache is a fictionalized account of my father’s life — born in 1925 in Brooklyn to Ukrainian Jewish parents, he enlisted in the Air Force at 18, was shot down by the Germans over the Netherlands, and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. It didn’t help to have his dogtags advertise that he wasn’t Christian. He survived (physically) that POW camp and the death march that followed, as the Nazis drove their prisoners into the worst blizzards in decades to flee the approaching Allied troops. There was very little treatment for PTSD back then, and his self-medication with alcohol left my siblings and my mother and me vulnerable to his regular furies and delusional behavior. By the time he died, at 80, of an untreated dental abscess, he’d alienated almost everyone in his family.

A man I met back when I would only write non-fiction (and poetry) once told me: “Fiction can be a more effective way of telling the truth.” He taught creative writing to people in prison; I assume he knew what he was talking about. In this story, I tried to tell the truth of my father’s life. In its own way, writing that story was part of the process in which I came to drop that load of anger I’d been carrying all my life, through the Buddhist practice of metta, lovingkindness.

You can read the non-fiction account (just the facts, ma’am) in my piece “Metta for my abuser” in the June 2022 issue of Lion’s Roar, the Buddhist periodical.