Elisheva (Epilogue)

And now I am alone, alone except for my silent angel, who comes and goes in ways that I cannot understand. How long have I been alone? My sense of time has fractured, scrambled. I can no longer remember the sequence of events, other than by reconstructing patterns, believing that one thing must have caused another and therefore must have preceded it.

Elisheva (Prologue)

This angel sits here, silent, forever by my side. His head is bowed, but his eyes look up toward me, here as I lie on this soft stone bed of comfort. His wings, his feathers whisper without words in the gentle breeze that flows through this sealed room.

He says nothing. I can say nothing to him, cannot speak in my own voice. But his words emerge from the silence of his heart and hover in the air, at the archway of the doors between our souls:

Speak to me.

Who are you?

Where are you now?

The glimmers of myself that remain within my mind try to retain this little knowledge of myself: My name was, is Elisheva. I am the last of these prophets, of these women, the last of my kind.

I once knew other stories of myself, but they have drifted away, lost like a song hummed by a child in a meadow in the gentle rain. Now I only know my name, what people called me, in the time long ago when there were other people here to call my name.

But now my voice is silent. All that speak from me are the voices of others, of those whose souls have touched mine, have been parts of other souls that had included parts of mine. When I open my mouth to speak, I hear these other voices, speak with these other voices.

This angel sits here silent, listening, recording, remembering. Again he prompts me, and again: Speak to me.

I hold my voice in stillness until I cannot keep from speaking, until the voice of a life from another time, another world, forces itself through my lungs, my throat, my lips.

The angel nods in silence. Let the voice flow, his soul says to mine. You speak in safety when you speak to me.

I shudder, breathe more deeply, start to emit the sounds of speech after seemingly eternal silence, with a cough, a moan, a sigh. Speak to me, the angel says. Who are you? Where are you now?

I breathe in the angel’s silence, close my eyes, breathe forth the voices of ancient souls.

Serah

(Context: Numbers 26:46.)

They all died at sixty, all of them.

Those of us whose ages were greater than sixty when we crossed the Sea of Reeds did not immediately die: we lived as long as we would have lived otherwise, dying suddenly or gradually, in pain or in senescence, by injury, by disease, or by the silent decisions of our bodies that their lives had been long enough. But at sixty, the rest of them all died.

Now only the two of us old ones are left, Moses and I, here atop this mountain. He is one hundred twenty years old. I have lost count of my years, but they seem to exceed four hundred.

Terah

(Context: Genesis 11:31)

It has been too long since we have seen each other, too long since we have talked. But now, after so long, we are alone together. The house is quiet now. My son and what remains of my family have gone. They are finishing the journey that I began so many years ago.

Yes, we must talk again now, face to face. Here: if I hammer this thin brass nail down through your hair, along the fine wood’s grain, your head should stay on your shoulders for at least a while more.

Lot

(Context: Genesis 19:23)

He tells me that his name is Orpheus. He sits before me as I, too, sit, here at the base of of this mountain, on this plain that is cursed by fire, ringed with fire. As I sit, my back rests against mossy rock. His rests against nothing, supported only by his firm resolve never to look to the south again.

Adam

(Context: Genesis 3:23)

Snake stands tall beside me. His bronze scales reflect the steady sun as they glisten in this constant misting rain. My left hand rests on his strong shoulder, as his hand rests on mine. “So this is the end,” my thoughts say to him.

“The end of this existence,” his thoughts reply. “The beginning of the next.”

Around us, the garden is shrinking. All my life, it had extended throughout all that we could see, off beyond the horizon where everything grew vague. Now the garden has edges, and they are rushing toward us.

Seraiah

(Context: 2 Kings 25:18)

Fire — all around me — fire — wings of fire — tongues of fire — apparitions of angels and demons of fire. I rush through fire, through rooms of fire, halls of fire — through paths and patterns made unfamiliar by fire — until I pass through fire to the secret room — the home of God — the holy hall that only I can know —

Jephthah’s Daughter

(Context: Judges 11:40)

I am dead, dead to the world, dead to my father, dead to myself. Here, lying on this cold stone slab atop Mount Moriah, I have sworn to leave this world, to give over my spirit to my father’s god, to abandon this weary body and let my soul sink down into whatever fate this unyielding god has planned.

I have always been only my father’s daughter. No one calls me by my own name. I have only seen what he let me see, learned what he let me learn. And now I am to die, by simple trivial fate: He went to war. He swore to his god that if he won, he would sacrifice the first living thing that came through his gate toward him when he returned. I saw him coming home. I ran out to greet him. So now I am to die.

It is dark here, under this shard of the new moon, and nearly silent. The only light comes from the stars. The only sounds are those of wind, of distant frogs, and of a single repeating bleating from nearby.

I want to fade, to silence my mind, but the repeating sound keeps calling me back, holding me here. I try to silence it in my soul by breathing in its rhythm, but that makes it stronger rather than causing it to blend and disappear. So be it. I open my eyes, sit up and trying to find the sound.

Japheth

(Context: Genesis 7:10)

Reaching out, reaching high into the night to touch the sky, to touch your stars, I fall again to earth. Here, in the mud, the dust, the ash, I cry, cry out your name. Nothing echoes, here on this sodden plain that we once knew as desert. My voice fades into emptiness, heard only, if at all, by this angel and by the moon.

Each ray of light cast through the dark brush here paints shadows of your form, spells with images of branches the letters of your name. I close my eyes and see in my internal sky the grace of your dance, hear within whispers of wind the streams of your song, feel in the tracings of the rain your hands as you once touched my face, my tears as I heard you leave, the waters as they swept away what I dreamed would be our home.

But when my eyes open, all I see are bones, bones upon bones.

The Wife of Cain

(Context: Genesis 4:17)

I slide down from atop the man, feeling the damp earth for the first time, remembering how it will feel when I feel it again. The man and I are also damp, damp with sweat. I remember that his name is Cain. He is breathing heavily, eyes now open, smelling the way that I remember that men who sweat will smell.

After a while, his breathing slows. He turns his head to look at me. “Who are you?” he asks.

“I am your wife.”