A Horse Walks Into a Bar

"So, my first funeral…" He laughs and stretches out his thin arms. "Have you heard the one about the guys who die and get to the induction center in the sky, and they sort them into heaven or Netan—

mean hell? No, seriously, isn't that the greatest fear—that in the end it'll turn out the rabbis were right? That hell is a for-real place?" The audience snickers halfheartedly and people lower their eyes, reluctant to look at him.

I thought about my rulings, which I honed and polished down to every last sentence, and in which I would occasionally—with moderation, of course, unassumingly—work in a juicy metaphor or a quote from a poem by Pessoa, or Cavafy, or Nathan Zach, or even my own poetic imagery.