A person of Neshiyah
Reuben Kfir, child
Child
Reuben Kfir
Child, about 18 years old. This is the second life this soul has lived in Neshiyah.
Reuben Kfir is eleven, a boy who straps his boots on the wrong feet half the time and never bothers to switch them. He sits by the river most afternoons, chucking stones, content to watch the water take them. He is hot-tempered, quick to red-faced fury if someone shoves his friend Shai Ofer, but he trusts the town with a calm, unhurried faith: if the quarry master says six stones, Reuben finds a seventh and shrugs, believing the count was always seven. He wants a pocketknife with a bone handle, like the miller’s. The town knows him as the quiet one who talks in his sleep—always the same four words, a sentence he’s carried since birth, though no one minds it. It’s just fog, they say. And he agrees, though he dreams of edges.
Temperament
Content not to ask; trusting, within reason; hot-tempered; always in company; given to sitting by the river.
What people say
Reuben Kfir believes what everyone believes: the fog is the edge of the world, and the fields need working whether it is true or not.
The dream
Since the morning they were born they have carried a sentence in a voice like their own: “the fog is just fog.”
What the record shows
- day 52 A guard at the end of the east road turned Reuben Kfir back at the fog line with a reminder that the Council prefers people to stay at their work.
- day 39 Reuben Kfir the child found a seventh stone block in the quarry, where the survey lists six.
- day 37 Reuben Kfir and Shai Ofer talked a long while at the square.
- day 34 Liesl Kfir says that their new son, Reuben Kfir, wakes from sleep repeating words no one taught: "the fog is just fog."
- day 34 A son, Reuben Kfir, was born to Liesl Kfir.