(Download) "Heaven is Full of Windows (Short Story)" by Studies in American Jewish Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Heaven is Full of Windows (Short Story)
- Author : Studies in American Jewish Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,Professional & Technical,Education,Language Arts & Disciplines,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 50 KB
Description
Had Gussie Panken looked up from her machine, a movement that could get her salary docked a dollar, she would have seen what the lazy Sadie Kupla saw in the window overlooking Washington Place. The late March breeze was causing the orange curtains to billow, the serrated orange curtains, though the open windows along Washington Place had never had any curtains. Then the wisps of orange turned into waves, a rumbling swell that poured over the sills into the shop, engulfing the bins of scraps, torching the bales of unfinished waists heaped atop the oil-soaked tables. By the time Gussie had turned to see what Sadie was screeching about--her shrieks echoed in a chorus all up and down the long rows of work tables--the fire was advancing like a mob of ragged hooligans. Gussie's first impulse was to do nothing; she was tired and this wasn't the first time she'd been the victim of hooligans--hadn't they driven her family out of their home back in Dlugacsz, forced them to cross an ocean to a rat-hole flat on Broome Street, where she lived with a crippled father and her bed-wetting little brother who must nevertheless be honored as a prince? She felt her charging heart secrete a poison that paralyzed her limbs, but only momentarily, until she too was swept up in the hysteria that harried her fellow seamstresses from one end of the shop to the other, like sticks in a box tilted this way and that. At the door to the Greene Street stairwell, which opened inwardly, the knot of workers rushing to escape was stalled, and unable to squeeze through the narrow gap, they began in the thickening smoke to claw and flail at one another. Then the crowd had reversed itself, stampeding through eddies of flame past wicker baskets combusting in horse-fart poofs, and Gussie found herself carried along in the tide. At the door on the Washington Place side of the shop, which was always kept locked by management for reasons known only to them, a burly fellow with a handlebar mustache hurled his weight against the metal plating, leaving it concave though the door never budged from its jamb. Others pounded the door with their fists, a shuddering that reverberated in Gussie's gut until she retched, sinking to her knees. From the floor, her eyes smarting, lungs beginning to wheeze in pain, she groped among the remnants on the table above her for a swatch of lawn to cover her face.
 "Heaven is Full of Windows (Short Story)" by Studies in American Jewish Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}