Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 15 of a new online serial novel, Outside the Bubble, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week.  Click here for previous chapters.

Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications. 

Someone tugged him forcefully into the light. A dark-skinned face smiled at him. “Good, he’s coming to. You’re alright, aren’t you?” The Ethiopian paramedic measured his blood pressure and murmured, “Much better now.”

“What’s this?” Martin asked when a device was handed to him.

“A breathalyzer. Measure, please—do you know how?”

“I didn’t drink!” Martin looked around him. He was in an open-doored ambulance, based on what he could see. The ambulance was standing in the middle of a road, and he could see the streetlights from the open door. There was a big tumult outside.

“Makes no difference. Just do it.”

“And I wasn’t the driver!”

“These are the rules,” someone else, sitting on the bench that ran along the wall of the ambulance, explained. Martin looked at him and felt like he was sitting on the biggest carousel in the local amusement park in Sudbury. “You’re a policeman,” he said, and closed his eyes again.

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 14 of a new online serial novel, Outside the Bubble, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week.  Click here for previous chapters.

Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications. 

He had no idea when the bus from Modiin left to Yerushalayim, but Martin didn’t ask. He still wasn’t sure he wanted to go back. The bus had dropped him off near the right building and then drove off, and Martin looked up at the structure towering above him. “Sixteenth floor,” Rudy had told him the last time they’d met. Then he’d laughed. “But check first if I’m home.”

Well, Martin hadn’t checked, and he had no idea if Rudy was home. But if he wouldn’t be there, Martin wouldn’t wait; he would go straight to Efrat. Let the Israelis try to find him. As if the security forces were bored. Amidst all the super-important stuff they had to do in order to restore tranquility to this land, they had extra time to look for information about an innocent youth, whose only crime was that he was a bit too patriotic for them? Fools.

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 13 of a new online serial novel, Outside the Bubble, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week.  Click here for previous chapters.

Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications. 

“Martin? This is Rabbi Eisenthal. How are you?”

Martin’s muscles tensed. This was the first time he was being called out of a lesson for a phone call from Canada; no one had ever called him until now. He had been the one to make the calls, a handful of times.

“I’m fine,” he said blandly.

“Enjoying?”

“…You could say so.”

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 12 of a new online serial novel, Outside the Bubble, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week.  Click here for previous chapters.

Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications. 

Mali hadn’t been to visit Uncle Michoel in a long time. In fact, in recent years she’d hardly come at all. That’s how it was; her uncle didn’t even try to conceal the fact that he was on her mother’s side, or he at least tried to be objective. “Your mother is my only niece, and she is a very clever, warm woman. I think that you are mistaken,” he once said to her indifferently, the last time she’d tried to complain that he wouldn’t even hear her out about her difficulties.

“Difficulties? Go to your mother. I’m sure she can help you solve them in the best way possible.”

The dentist she’d been using for the past two years was a three-minute walk from her uncle’s house, but except for one time when she’d dropped in to visit, she never went there. Once upon a time ago, when she’d first moved to the dorm, Ima had suggested that she visit Uncle Michel every so often, to see if he needed anything and if he was doing alright. But she’d never actually gone.

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