The Dark One sighed. “Have you never seen this man before today, Yehuda Leib?”

Yehuda Leib shook his head. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

Yehuda Leib nodded. “Of course I’m sure.”

But the truth was that, as yet, he had not taken a careful look at him.

Softly, wearily, the Dark Messenger beckoned Yehuda Leib to move closer.

Now that he looked, Yehuda Leib thought perhaps he had seen the man before. There was something—something familiar.

“I don’t…,” he said. “I’m not…”

The blood had spread wide, a huge red halo beneath the horseman’s head, extending halfway down his rib cage by now, and Yehuda Leib was careful not to let it touch him as he came nearer.

That face.

Whose was that face?

“Who is he?” said Yehuda Leib.

The Dark One spoke softly. “Unknit the silver from his beard; smooth down the wrinkles of his face. Do you not know him?”

Yehuda Leib shook his head in frustration.

He didn’t.

But he thought he almost might.

There were two large patches of gray in the man’s beard. Despite his best efforts, Yehuda Leib couldn’t quite manage to ignore them, and so he reached up his hands to block them out.

And just like that, he knew.

His hands.

His little hands in the beard.

The ghost of a smell: wax and wood and sweat and wool.

Yom Kippur.

His little hands at the edges of his father’s beard.

His father’s beard.

His father.

This was his father.

“Oh,” said the Messenger of Death. “Oh dear.”

—

Nothing.

There was nothing else in the world.

His father—his father—the vacant face of his father, staring up at the scattered stars.

Oh, it hurt.

He had been waiting, every day, every day, every empty, boring minute of his stupid little life, to see this face split into a smile again.

And he had missed his chance.

He had run away.

Why had he run away?

It hurt.

Oh, it hurt.

The world began to bleed out now into a streaky wash of tears.

He had asked for help. He had called out aloud.

He—he—had asked for this. It was his fault.

His fault.

There was something in his chest, something hard and heavy that felt as if it would crack his ribs, and it reached up into his throat and took hold of him and squeezed, and it hurt, and he hurt, and he could hear a sound nearby, a wounded sound, an animal sound, and only when he began to feel a ragged ache in his throat did he realize that the sound was his own.

He didn’t care about the blood anymore.

He didn’t want to be careful.

He buried his face in his father’s chest, and he sobbed.

It hurt.

Oh, how it hurt.

—

But there are protocols in these moments; there are necessities to think of.