(Context: Genesis 23:1)

“Hello, Grandmother.”

So it has come to this: after all these years, in the moment of my deepest grief, of my final betrayal, as my husband has led my only son off to die, a stranger has come to mock me.

“I am no one’s grandmother,” I say.

“No,” she says, “but you will be.”

“I have had enough of prophecy.” Sitting here on this low bench at the gateway to my home, I pull myself inward, away from those milk-white feet, clutching my knees even more tightly to my chest.

“This is not prophecy,” she says. “This is fact. Isaac comes back down the mountain, quite alive, and fathers sons, who father sons and daughters, and so on. I am indeed your granddaughter, seven generations removed. I am Miriam, known as the sister of Moses and—no, my brothers’ names will not yet mean anything to you. But I am Miriam.”

“I am Sarah,” I say automatically.

“Yes, Grandmother,” she says. “I know.”

“You say this as if this is history. Has the heart of time itself been broken? Has it flung me into the future?”

“We are still in your present time,” she says. “But I have stepped back into what, viewed from my lifetime here, is the distant past.”

“And why have you come here?” I say. “To confuse and to mock me?”

“I have not come to mock you,” she says. “I have come to take you home.”

“This is my home,” I say, “or as much of a home as I have ever had. Where would you take me? I lost my childhood home in Ur to fire long ago. None of us remain in the next city that we lived in, in Kharan. Abraham has dragged me all over Canaan and beyond, down to Egypt, up to this hilltop in Kiryat-Arba, and throughout all the rest of the lands that we know. His god told him to go for himself. He went. I followed. But since I was a child, I have never had a home of my own.”

The stranger’s feet step closer. “May I sit with you?” she asks.

I point to my right, “The bench is large enough,” I say. “Please pardon me, but I do not feel up to being a perfect host.”

“I understand.” She sits, and all that the corner of my eye sees is white upon white upon white.

I turn my head just enough to get a good look at her. She wears a robe of white linen, its hem faintly dusted and discolored by pale sand. Her skin is as white as the linen, and her hair even whiter than that. But dark eyes like mine peer out from behind pale lashes, and her features are like ours, not like those of the bleached travelers from the North.

“Tzara’at?” I ask.

She nods, tenses, waits, then relaxes. “You didn’t flinch away from me though you recognize the disease! I assure you, though, that this peculiar joke that God has pulled on me is not contagious.”

I shrug. “I am not worried. God’s joke on me was to make me young and keep me from aging. I no longer get ill, even from the most trivial or virulent of diseases. I am afraid that I may be forced to live forever.”

“Would it be a consolation to learn that you do not?” she asks.

“I suppose that it would.”

“Then,” she says, “I can tell you that you do, indeed, pass from this life eventually and rejoin the realm of souls.”

“When?”

She closes her eyes, tilts her head to the left as it trying to remember, frowns, tilts her head to the right and then upright, then opens her eyes and smiles slightly. “That is a surprisingly difficult question,” she says.

“So you are not allowed to tell me.”

“No,” she says, “I am allowed. But I only know part of the answer. As viewed by people here, you leave your life quite soon. But you should live for many more years elsewhere.”

“Where?” I ask.

She seems not to have heard me. “Tell me,” she says, “when you picture your life, the way that you wish that it had gone, what do you see?”

“Really? Other than having been dragged about by my husband’s missions and his god’s whims?”

“Yes. Try to remember who you were, and who you wanted to become.”

My eyes close, and I wait for ideas, for images. But all that I hear, all that I see is the jumble of my current life, all that I have endured, all that has exhausted me.

I feel the faintest of touches brush and then rest against my temples. I open my eyes and look into the stranger’s. Her voice seems to come not from her lips but from within my own mind. “Speak to me. Who are you? Where are you now?”

My sense of where I am dissolves as steam disappears in the path of a cooling breath. “I am indoors,” I say, “in a large room, in what feels like a very old building. This room, its walls, its floor are simple, solid, as are the tables and chairs. Threads of text are inscribed on all the surfaces, intertwining into patterns, symbols, diagrams that reveal more than the words themselves.

“Others sit in the room with me, in a circle. I am teaching them, learning from them, speaking of history, of art, of all the things that join us together, that make us who we are as people. Most of those in the room are my many daughters, and it feels as if all of them are. We all have been here for a very long time, though we are continually learning things that are new. There is a sense of stability, of warmth, of all the things that I have missed in my life.”

My breath catches. The image shatters, dissipates, propels me back, to my home, to this dusty gateway, to this low stone bench.

I pull back away from this Miriam, away from her gaze, her touch.”Why have you forced me to see this, to remember this? I had forgotten what my life could have been. I had almost grown happy with who I am.”

She smiles, takes my hand in hers, pale flesh surrounding dark. “I show you this because it is true. This is where I came from, where we are going. It is indeed a memory, not of your past, but of your future.”

“Where is this place?” I say.

“This is also a surprisingly difficult question. I can say where its entrances are, but the location of the school itself is an ongoing source of debate. We seem to exist in a different space, a different time, connected but not the same as here.” She pauses, releases my hands, and rises to her feet. “So shall we go?”

“Why should I believe you?” I say.

“Because your heart knows it to be true.”

And as she says this, I look deep into my heart, out beyond the world that I know. Time suddenly spreads out before me, not as a line but as a plane. I see the world through Miriam’s eyes, and know that I am to leave here, know that what we see will indeed be my choice, my destiny.

“But what of my future here?” I ask aloud. “How will Abraham and my Isaac continue without me? Will they come to hate me for abandoning them?”

“The stories say that you pass away here, soon, as or just after they come down from the mountain. None of us can step back into this world within the span of our natural lives. But once you pass away, we can return you here. They will find that you had died while they were away, quietly, at rest, at peace.”

“And will they continue well?”

“They will,” she says, “from what we know. You have set up your household to run well without you. Your friend, your servant Eliezer, will watch over them. Soon, he will find a bride for Isaac from within your clan, and generations will extend through Isaac as far into the future as we can see.”

Silence falls. I sit and Miriam stands in the fading light of evening. When my shadow has lengthened to the point that it darkens her pale feet, I, too, rise.

“So shall we go?” Miriam asks. “We have a long walk ahead of us.”

“What may I take?” I ask.

“Whatever you wish. Whatever we can carry.”

I step back into my house and look around. Though, like all our homes have been, it is a temporary shelter, it is cluttered, strewn with gifts and tokens that have accumulated in our travels and transactions.

Off in a corner, one item stands out, as if a different light shines on it: a doll, intended as an idol, I suppose. My father Haran carved it from the wood of an asherah grove. I had clutched it as my Abram saved me from the fire in my home, and kept it with me throughout all these years.

I walk to the doll, pick it up, and cradle it in my arms. I take a couple of favorite robes and scrolls of stories that I would like to remember and teach.

I turn to the door, then turn back again. Taking a reed and some blank parchment, I write a quick note to Abraham reminding him to complete our purchase of the caves at Machpelah. After what he has experienced and is likely to experience, he is likely to forget. And I do love that piece of land, and would like to be buried there.

I pause at the end of the note. Should I say goodbye to my husband and my son? No, better for them not to know that I left them. Better for them to believe that my passing was sudden, was unexpected.

I cap the inkwell and rest the quill beside it. Looking around for what I know is the last time, I try to engrave the image in my memory. Looking into myself to remember my feelings as I leave, I am surprised that where I expect to find sadness and resignation, I find excitement, anticipation, joy.

I turn again and step out of the house. Miriam reaches out wordlessly and takes some of the scrolls and robes to carry.

“Shall we go?” she asks again.

I nod. We start down the path, down this hill, away from what had been, for awhile, my home.

After we have walked for awhile, I realize that I have been considering a question for a while. “This place where we are going,” I ask, “does it have a name?”

“Not one that we know,” she replies. “But our group, our school, takes one on.” She looks toward me, the glow of her pale smile as warm as that of the horizon’s setting sun.

“We have always known that you would be be joining us. Even though you have not come to join us until now, we have always spoken of ourselves as the Sacred Sisters of Sarah.”

I stop, surprised, then quickly return to walking down the mountain. Yes, I am returning to the life that I was meant to lead. Yes, I finally am coming home.

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.

I come to consciousness here in this sealed cave each time (each day? I can no longer tell how much time a day contains, or whether day has turned to night outside). There is always air to breathe, water from the small stream that flows through my chamber, just enough of the simple mysterious food in this cabinet beneath my bed to keep me alive (by my sisters’ magic, perhaps, or perhaps the manna has returned), enough to let me continue here, silent as I always have been, alone with the visions in my mind, with the voices that I hear reflected off these smooth rock walls.

I remain here, remembering, dreaming, imagining. No longer upset that I cannot leave, I cherish the comfort, the safety of this prison, this womb. Each day, I stand and walk around this space. At times, I remember music and I dance, now that no one can see me, now that I can move, unembarrassed by my ungainliness. I even almost sing, but still find that I cannot bring myself to be heard, even by my own ears.

My voice still functions. I can hear it in my groans as I stand, as I move. (Have the groans become louder, more frequent over time? I can recall that there have been times when they have been softer, but, again, not the sequence of the times.) And though I still hear myself murmuring prayers as I awaken, as I fall asleep, before and after I eat, the prayers are so soft that they often fail to engage my voice at all, emerging as whispers.

It has been so long since I spoke with my own voice, so many years, longer than the lives of many that I have known. I was so young then, just barely no longer a girl. Now I am old, my hair white, my steps slowed, my body no longer informing me of the cycles of time.

After all these years, I find that I can feel the voices of my life returning. Perhaps this means that death is preparing to visit me, that soon I will forget to return from sleep, that after one dream ends the next will never come. I cannot say if I am prepared for this. Perhaps, when it comes, no one is prepared. Perhaps, when it comes, each of us finds that she is ready.

Or perhaps these memories return with the help of the angel, he who sits here silent, questioning, as his presence confronts and caresses my soul. I cannot know this. If I were to ask, he would not answer.

I cannot tell why this is so, why this is happening now. I can only feel my own memories returning to fill the places where the memories of others once had dwelled.

When my mind strays, I can find myself there, in the life of my memories, in those years long ago. It was a small life, in a small village, but it was all the life that I should have needed. I had family, parents, brothers, though their faces are now unclear, as if I no longer have memories of their faces but only memories of having had memories. I do recall my father’s scent as he held me, the striking red of my mother’s hair, contrasting with the distant green of the hills of Judea as my head rested on her shoulder. And there were sounds: dogs, water running in a stream, animals and blades in my father’s slaughterhouse, coarse laughter from where the men gathered, song and far more fluid laughter from where the women came together.

My mind falls back into my memories and I again am there, small, agile, innocent. The families make their crafts, tend their crops, their herds. The children huddle with the families or run freely in the town, comfortable, certain, as their parents are certain,that each person in the village will look out for each child as if it is her own.

And the soldiers… Yes, the soldiers, walking the village or standing guard, some with swords, some with horses, some speaking our language, some speaking the language of Rome or of whatever common homeland two or more of them might share. They are strong, strange, powerful and frightening. They are beautiful,

Where the soldiers live what was once a school. The teachers are gone. I don’t know where they have gone. I only know that the stories that the grown-ups tell of where the missing people have gone differ from person to person.

The soldiers who are not on patrol (there is always someone on patrol) remain at the house, sleeping, drinking, laughing, exercising. Out in the yard, behind the house, they remove their clothes, then stretch, run, stress their muscles against the walls and ground, lift heavy objects, and wrestle. The grown-ups try to keep us from seeing them there, but we still sneak off and try to watch from what we believe is a hidden place.

When I can listen past the terror, the guilt, their images still can make me smile. Most of the memories are vague, unfocused, but details stand out, sharp as the edges of the stones in this room:

A soldier’s hand presses against the wall near where I hide. I can see the veins standing out with the pressure of exercise, the dirt under the nails, the scar that leads along the back of his hand, interrupting the fine hair, from the joint of his thumb to past his wrist.

Two wrestle on flat ground: one is almost prone on his stomach, his upper arms bulging as he tries to keep from collapsing completely. The other lies across his back. His nearer arm tries to knock the lower soldier’s arms away from the ground so that he will fall. His other arm wraps around the side that is farther from me, emerging from underneath to grasp the nearer edge of the lower soldier’s flat belly. Its fingers almost align with the ridges of the other’s tensed muscles. Trails of sweat erase the dust of the ground from each soldier’s pale skin.

Another lies on his back on a stone bench, his legs toward me, lifting an iron bar with added weights high into the air. His feet are planted firmly on the ground to each side. The setting sun shines through the hollowed circle of the weight bar, his chest, and his arms, His muscled chest blocks his face from my view, though I can picture the grimace that the soldiers wear when they lift the weights. His sex nestles between his thighs, inert for the moment, different from the few that I have seen of the village men and boys. (At another time – after? before? — when I ask my mother why it is different, she tells me that it is because he is not one of us, that he is not holy. At the time, I don’t understand how holiness makes that different, or how that difference makes men holy.)

And I remember knowing that over time, the fear of the soldiers has been growing. Grown-ups, and sometimes whole families, disappear from the village, and I hear that soldiers have taken them. The grown-ups try to shelter me, to keep the fear from me, but I sense that all are afraid.

My brother frequently comes and goes from the village, silently, always moving by night. He brings word of events outside the village, word that I overhear, much as they try to hide them from me. He speaks in whispers, in mystery, speaks of greater fear outside the village, of destruction in the cities, in Jerusalem. But I am told never to repeat what he says, never to tell anyone that he is here, never to tell anyone where he is going. Sometimes he brings other men with him. Sometimes they are wounded. My mother cares for them in secret, touches their wounds with herbs and gives them teas and blessings to help them heal. We return them to strength. They give us strength. But we never speak of them outside the house, never let others know that they are here.

So I wander through the village, silent in both innocence and knowledge. Sometimes I speak to the people of the town. Sometimes I speak to the soldiers, shyly, cautiously. There is one in particular, one soldier to whom I speak, stranger, gentler, even more beautiful than the others. His skin is pale, lighter than my father’s, more golden than my mother’s. His hair is a different shade of gold, like the hay that we feed to our animals, finer along his arms and legs as they are left bare by his uniform.

When I see him in my memory (faded as it is, though sharp now with many images that I wish would have dimmed), the settings, the images rush together, forming a tapestry. I can only bring together, once again, memories of memories of his face.

He would always stand away from the direct sunlight, not concealed by shadows but protected by them. When I first summoned the courage to speak to him, I asked him if he feared the sun.

He laughed. “No,” he said, “but I respect its power. The sun shines with less power in the land where my ancestors were born, and my people have this unfortunate fair skin. If I stand in the sun for too long, I burn.”

“Do you burst into flames?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but my skin feels as if it has. It turns bright red and becomes quite painful.”

“But I have heard that your people, the soldiers, do not feel pain.”

He laughed again, this time more ruefully. “No, we do feel pain, though we try not to let it rule over us. As with the sun, we approach it not with fear, but with respect.”

I sat for a while, there on the large stone at the entrance to the market, watching my soldier as he watched the people setting up their wares.

I was surprised when he spoke again. “May I tell you a story?” he asked. I nodded.

“Once, long ago, in that time from which only stories remain, my people had a beautiful princess. Her skin was so white that milk seemed dark when compared to it. Her hair was so fine, so bright, and so pale that it looked both like glass and like gold. Her eyes were the clear blue of a lake without waves, of a sky without clouds.

“But as beautiful as she was, the princess was also quite disagreeable and quite stubborn. Whenever anyone told her anything, she would behave as if the opposite were true – unless, of course, she realized that people were trying to fool her by lying to her with precise inversions of the truth.

“Ever since she had been old enough to understand words, she had been told that she could never stand out in the sunshine, that the sun would burn her. Her family, and the people in the castle who tended to her family, kept her indoors all day, and only let her walk outside after the sun had set.

“One night, however, the first night of autumn, the night before her twelfth birthday, she decided that she would no longer be kept out of the sun. She went to sleep early and awakened early, with the first glimmerings of false dawn.

“She put on her warmest coat and boots, and crept out of the back door of the castle. Moving like a silent cat in the darkness, she made her way to a hidden cove above the eastern shore.

“As the sun first peaked over the horizon, it saw her waiting there. ‘You must leave,’ the sun god called out to her. ‘You will burn when I rise.’

“‘I do not fear you,’ she replied.

“The sun tried to hold back. But even the power of the sun god could not stop the wheel of fate that forces the sun to rise.

“The sun god called upon the god of storms to cause shade to fall on the princess. The god of storms gathered what clouds he could to stand between the princess and the sun. But the power of the sun was too strong, and the clouds burned away.

“The sun god and the god of storms called upon the spirits of the northern wind. The spirits gathered and tried to blow the princess back into the shadows. But the princess held onto a great oak tree. The strength of her grip was as mighty as the strength of her will, and the wind could not blow her away.

“The sun god, the god of storms, and the spirits of the northern wind called upon the goddess of the moon for aid. She leaped across the sky, became full, and eclipsed the sun. But the world started to dissolve into chaos: the tides were confused, unplanned magic erupted in the light of the eclipse’s edge, and all the women in the world began to go mad. Soon the wheel of fate overcame even the goddess of the moon.

“‘Go home,’ they all cried. The sun god, the god of storms, the spirits of the northern wind, and the goddess of the moon all pleaded with the princess. ‘I do not fear you!’ she said.

“The god of storms, the spirits of the northern wind, and the goddess of the moon all returned, reluctantly, to their place in the heavens. The sun shone fully upon the princess. ‘You do not have to fear me,’ he said. ‘But you do have to respect me.’

“The sun god looked away as his rays struck the princess. First her hair, then her cloak, then her skin began to smolder, then burst into flame.

“The flames awakened the spirit of the oak tree. It reached down with its branches and enveloped the princess. It absorbed the flames and directed them into its own leaves, which dried and became the colors of fire.

“But the last of the flames reached deep into the soul of the princess, and, in an instant, turned her body to ash. The spirits of the eastern wind gently blew upon the ashes and scattered them along the shore. These became the seeds of the morning flowers, which open each day to greet the dawn, die in the afternoon, and are reborn again each morning.

“And ever since then, every year, at the beginning of autumn, the leaves of the oak tree turn the color of flame, mourning and celebrating the life of the stubborn little princess.”

My soldier smiled and looked down at me. “That is the story,” he said.

“It is beautiful,” I said, “but sad.”

“Such are the stories of my people. Beautiful, but sad. Can you tell me one of the stories of your people?”

I closed my eyes and thought for a while. “Once,” I said, “back before my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother was born, there were many more Jews in Judea. We were members of thirteen tribes, but all members of a single family, brought together by powerful kings.

“But the people of Judea did evil things, and we were banished from the land. All the people had to take a long journey to a place called Babylon. When they arrived in Babylon, however, they discovered that only a few tribes had gotten there. Ten tribes were missing.

“For years, nobody knew where the ten tribes were. But one day a wanderer came back with a story of where they had gone.

“Far to the east of Babylon, there is a river named Sambatyon. The ten tribes crossed the river, into a land that resembles the garden of Eden. Nobody goes hungry there, nobody cries, and when people die, they die gently, saying goodbye to their family and friends.

“No one can cross the river now. When all ten tribes had reached the magic land, an angel blessed the river. Six days of the week, the river churns with rocks. They spin and fly into the air, smashing together, killing anyone who tries to cross. On the Sabbath, the river turns to still fire, and anyone who tries to cross is burned alive.

“But someday, an anointed leader will guide the lost tribes back here, back home. Then we will all live here like they do there. There won’t be any more soldiers.” I looked up at him. “You would get to go home.”

“Yes,” he said. “I would like that. Though the weather is better here.”

“Except for the bright sun,” I said.

“Even with the bright sun.”

After that, we spoke frequently. He would stand there in the shade near the entrance to the market. I would sit on the rock. We would tell each other the stories of our peoples.

I can no longer remember how much time passed. Was it months? Years? I recall telling him stories in the heat of summer and during the winter rains. I feel like I knew him for what seemed, as compared to my then-short life, to have been a long time.

But then, one hot, awful evening, I heard the sound of soldiers, and of a person screaming. The sound grew closer, more fierce. A group of soldiers came over a nearby hill, dragging a screaming man, whipping him as they went.

Must I tell you this? Angel, must I remember? Is it for this that I get to speak with my own voice, only to remember, to repeat my pain? May I go back to the stories, return to speaking in the voices of the stories? Will this be the last story that I remember, that I tell before I die? Let me, please, tell you another story, any other story.

Of course, the angel is silent. All I hear in my mind is his insistence: Speak to me.

I am trying to remember the other stories, all the other stories of all the other voices, the other lives that have flowed through me. But they are gone. They have gone silent. The only voice that I hear within me is my own.

Angel, the men neared. The screaming man was covered in blood, staggering, trying to keep his feet from dragging against the rocks on the road. One was twisted unnaturally at the knee. The other had lost its sandal.

And then the man looked up, and I saw the face of my brother. “Ethan!” I called.

He turned his head toward me and screamed, “Elisheva!”

My soldier looked sharply toward me. “Do you know him?” he said.

“He is my brother!”

Suddenly, he clamped his left hand over my mouth so that I could say nothing more. With his strong right arm, he lifted me by the waist into the air.

“Be silent!” he whispered. “I will protect you.” He strode to the barracks, opened the door to a small room, stepped down and released me.

I tried to duck around him and go back outside. He took one step over and blocked the doorway. “You cannot go out,” he said. “Your life is in danger.”

“But my brother–”

“We can do nothing to save your brother. But you may be able to survive. Remain quiet. I will return.” He stepped out the door, began to slam it, then, stopping the motion, made it close quietly.

I sat silently, shaking, watching the shaft of sunlight that came into the room from the small window in the door, watching it creep through the room as the day wore on. Twice, from the village, from the direction of my home, I heard further screams, once a man and once a woman, each starting suddenly, then, just as suddenly, ending.

The room held little: the stool on which I sat; a wooden platform with a mat for sleeping; a small table, on it a few scrolls in a language that I could not recognize, a straight razor, a mirror, and some dolls that must have been idols of his gods. I held the dolls and talked to them. I tried not to think of my brother.

When the day ended, when the light of the sun through the window had been replaced by the light of the moon, my soldier returned. He looked in through the window first, signaling me to again be silent, then unlatched the door, stepped in and closed it.

“My brother,” I whispered, “is he–”

“No. Yes,” he said. “Your brother is gone. A brave man. But gone.”

“My family!” I said more loudly. “I must go to my family!”

“No,” he said. “You can never return to –”

I leaped up, ran around him, and tried to open the door. My soldier grabbed me, lifted me in the air, held me close to him so that I could not run, my feet far off the ground, my chest to his chest, my cheek to his rough cheek.

From that height, I could see out the window. I could feel myself understand what I was seeing piece by piece, like a steady stream of cold facts: I see bright light. I see fire. It is a house. A house is burning. That house is where my house should be. My house is on fire. My house is burning.

“My house!” I cried out. “My parents!”

“Be silent!” he said. “You cannot –”

And then comes memory without sound, without feeling, a moment without thought, a moment of simple motion. He turned – we turned – and I saw the table come within view, within reach. Without my telling it to do so, my left hand reached down, reached the razor that rested by the mirror, grasped the handle of the razor – Angel, can we stop this memory? I do not want to remember this, all this that I had forgotten so well –

I pounded on his shoulder with my right hand. He looked down, away from my left hand.

And in one swift motion, without fear, without thought, I brought the razor up and slashed his throat, smoothly, cleanly, as I had so often seen my father do to the animals that he slaughtered.

My soldier showed no expression, made no sound. He stood for an instant, wavering. Then he dropped me and, bending at the knees, fell forward, to the ground, landing on me, crushing me, the weight of his chest pressing down on me, the blood spurting and streaming from his throat onto my body, onto my face, into my eyes, blinding me, drowning me.

I pushed up, pushed against him, but did not have the strength to lift him. Then I reached over with my right hand and pushed against his shoulder. There was no motion for an instant. But then, gradually, he slid off of me, slowly, heavily, his body, my body, made slick by the blood, his head striking heavily against the ground, splashing more of the blood against me.

I rose. I must have run from him. The memory of sound returns, but I am missing moments, and the moments start to lose their order. I am pressing against the door. I am standing outside the room. I feel the heat coming from in front of me. I run toward the heat. I am shouting, screaming, crying without words. My feet slide against the ground, still slick with the blood in which they have stepped. I brush my hands against my eyes, trying to clear the blood from them, only adding the blood from my hands to the blood on my eyes. I continue to run. I stumble against roots and stones on the ground. I run closer, almost reaching the flames.

Then I am lifted into the air, held by someone, someone that I do not know, someone who whispers words in my ear that make me calm, that make me relax. I feel the terror leave. My arms wrap around the person’s shoulders, rest against the strength and unexpected softness of the person’s back. Do I feel dense clothing? Do I feel flowing hair? Do I feel wings?

And then I feel nothing.

Time must have passed, but how much time I cannot tell. But after that time, I do know that I am with friends. I am with teachers. I am safe. I am here where I will spend the rest of my life, here in this school beyond the caves, here where so many women (and some few men) have come since the times of the great judges. Here we study, we learn, we are healed and learn to heal. Those who are blessed with appropriate gifts become prophets. The rest of us become teachers, healers, singers of song. Some stay in the caves. Some go out into the world to try to bring healing to it.

We have a name, as a group, but we rarely use it. As I try to reach for the name, I find that it, too, now is missing. Some outside the school call us “The Women,” or sometimes “The Daughters of Jerusalem,” or “The Daughters of Jephthah.” We let them call us whatever they wish. We know when they call for us, whatever the name.

My memories of the years when I grew into a woman are sparse. Most days were like any other days, and the memory of their order remains unclear.

But I do know that I was silent. When I would open my mouth to speak, I could not form words. Words connected to memory, and memory connected to pain. When I reached for words, all that I could find were images and memories of fire and blood and pain. My voice would emerge in wordless cries, slashing through the silence like fire, like knives.

But then a day came – or perhaps a night, since deep in the school we cannot distinguish day from night – when we were sitting in a class. A teacher was reading from a book of the chronicles of creation. She told of the end of the garden of Eden, of the day that we were banished into this world of pain.

The book told the story of God and the story of Adam, the story of what God said to Adam, the story of how Adam had placed all the blame for the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil on our mother Eve. The story spoke in the voice of God and spoke in the voice of Adam.

Then one of my classmates called out, “What of Eve? Why do we not hear stories of Eve? Where is her voice?”

I stood suddenly, threw my head back, looked upward, opened my mouth and let loose a wordless howl. Our teachers and attendants rushed toward me, certain that I would have one of my explosions, that I would scream and thrash until I could be calmed.

Then, just as suddenly, I looked forward, looked at my teacher, past my teacher. “Where has the beauty gone?” I called out. “Where is my garden? All I see around me are storms and dirt. Where rivers of life once were, I now see only death, death becoming torrents of mud. My world is turning to dust, to pouring rain, to shreds, to parodies of life. All I desire is my husband, and he has been stolen from me. All joy is stolen from my heart.” I looked upward again and howled.

My teacher rose and walked quietly toward me. “Elisheva?” she asked gently. “Can you hear me, Elisheva?”

“There is no Elisheva!” I cried out.

“Speak to me,” my teacher calmly said. “Who are you? Where are you now?”

“I am in a place that is no place,” I said. “I am – How can I say who I am? Who I am has been stolen. But my husband has given me a name. He says that my name is Eve.”

My teacher nodded, then gestured to the others. “All will be well,” she said. “Please sit. Sit and listen.”

She reached out to touch my shoulder. I pulled away from her touch. “Eve,” she said, “please speak to me. Where are you now?”

“I am standing on high ground. Around me, the red earth is seeping away in the pouring rain, turning to torrents, to torrents that carry life away, torrents that stream across the earth like rivers of blood.

“I am standing here, and my past is disappearing. The garden is retreating, and I can scarcely recall what green looked like. I cannot tell what came before and came after. In the garden all was one long day, a day of rest. Now time is moving. I cannot reach the garden. Between us stands an angel, an angel of fire, an angel with a flaming sword.

“I look around me. I see what is here now. I see what will be. I will have a life of pain. I will have children, and they will be born in pain, and they will bring me pain. They will take what new life I can bring to this world of death and throw it away. One will kill the other then disappear from my life. Then another will be born to bring more generations of pain.”

My teacher may have said something more to me, but I did not hear.

“Where is my husband?” I called. “Where is my friend? I desire my husband, though he betrayed me. I miss my friend the snake, whose life I destroyed, whom I betrayed. All this world is lost, all turned to death. I have brought death to the world, have brought evil. Though the snake has been cast to the ground, I am lower still. I am beneath the reach of goodness. I crawl beneath the worm.”

I looked down, placed my head in my hands and wept. I may have said more, or Eve may have said more through me. I cannot recall. After that moment of clarity, of transition, my sense of remembered time once again fails.

I know that many feared me, though that fear eventually turned to respect. I had no voice of my own, little sense of myself. But I would sit with the others and listen to the teaching of stories. Sometimes, without warning, I would erupt with unexpected voices, with the voices of people in the stories.

I could not recall whom I had been, what I had said. But others among us would remember the stories, would write them down. I would look at them, and know that the voices came from me, though they were never mine. Over time, enough time for me to grow from young to very old, they collected the stories, building a book of voices for those who might follow, for those who might want to read and to hear them anew.

All my sisters are gone now. Many died over the years, grown nearly as old as I am now. Our people have been banished from Judea to harsher lives, to lands with harsher names. Many of my sisters went with them, out into the wider world, to comfort and to heal, to advise and to teach.

No one will ever find our school again, not until such time as our world is healed, when the anointed leader will bring our people home, from this world of the mundane, from those blessed lands beyond Sambatyon, from beyond the walls of death and the veils of time. The mouth of the cave is sealed, our school invisible to the eyes of the world.

Now I alone remain, alone except for this angel, who sits here in infinite patience. Having listened to me speak with the voices of our history, of our stories, he has now drawn from me my own story, my own voice. I have no more words within me. I sense that it is time to go.

Lying here in silence, I feel my space disappearing from around me. The impenetrable walls that surround this room, the wondrous vaulted ceiling that had shown us not the sky but where everything is in the sky, all are turning to gauze, to mist. I cannot see beyond them. What they were and where they were is becoming steadily less clear. The floor, once carved with blessings and names of power, is shimmering, translucent. Lights and colors play beyond the nameable, the visible, as if this space is now detaching from the world.

I lie here on the soft stone table, waiting, alone but not alone. My angel rises from his seat, the feathers of his wings fluttering, whispering, in the wind, in the absence of wind. He leans over me, placing one hand on my forehead, one hand on my heart. I say to him the only words that remain: “Speak to me. Who are you? Where are you now?”

He looks into my eyes. His lips move, as if to form words, but then stop. He bends down, closer to me, touching his lips to mine in a kiss that seems to take an instant, to take an eternity.

I know who you are now, my angel, my Daniel, messenger of God, you who guide and protect us, you who move outside of time, saving us and blessing us. And I know who I am, who I have been, who I will be, in the past that lies before me, in the futures that I have endured.

In the moment that I know him, I know that he is gone. But we will meet again.

And I know, again, that I am not alone. To my left, I sense an animal’s scent, an animal’s heat. I turn my head and see a ram, beautiful, majestic, its perfect horns emerging from its mighty head. If played as trumpets, each would give a tone that would shake the foundations of the world.

The ram nuzzles its head against me then fixes me in its gentle gaze. Its eyes are infinitely deep, infinitely solemn, infinitely forgiving, the eyes of my mother, of my teacher, of my angel, of my soldier. I touch my left hand to the top of its head, and move it along the curve of its horns.

The horns have letters on them, words, raised in relief. It is the text of the final confession, the last words we say before death.

My hand moves along the horns, reading the words, speaking the words that my breath, my lips can no longer speak. My fingers whisper of acceptance, of confession, prayers for myself, for all those whom I have loved.

The moments of my current life pass before me one last time, not in a line, in any order of occurrence, but as clouds of connections, arranged, focused, on the instants that touched my heart, on the moments of change. My soul looks deep into the cloud, arrives at its center.

There I see my village, my soldier. I see myself allowing myself to be taken away, failing to die when my family died, surviving only because I had betrayed my family, my people, because I had seen an enemy as a friend. And on the other side of that moment, I see myself turning and betraying that friend, repaying his mercy by killing him, his blood staining my body, forever staining my soul.

I hover in that moment, that moment of definition, of betrayal, that moment that seemed to seal the meaning of who I was, who I was to be.

But then I hear a voice emerging, not heard with my ears but with my heart, the voice of eternity, the voice of the ram: “All these moments have passed before you. Yes, that moment was one of them. But no one moment defines a life. Your life, as with all the lives whose voices have spoken from you, feels as if it is focused on a single moment.

“But God weighs each whole life by the sum of all its actions. And in weighing this life, from the gentle joy that you brought to the world as a child, through that moment of pain and your labors of healing from that pain, into the light that you have brought to your sisters, to the world, by bringing voices to the people of your history, to the people of the stories, we must hope, must trust, must believe that you have increased the beauty in the world. Have faith that your life will be seen to have been good.”

The voice again grows silent. The words that my fingers read come to an end. I touch the head of the ram one more time, then bring my arm to rest by my side.

The ram backs away into the vagueness of the mist that is contracting around me. He backs out of sight, pauses, then charges forward, running towards me with the hoof beats of a thousand armies. He bows his head, coming closer. He smashes into the stone table on which I lie.

The table disappears, dissolves. And I am falling, deep into the mist, into the infinite softness, into visions beyond visions, sounds beyond sounds, the scents of a thousand sacrifices, the taste of the sweetest morsels ever blessed. My senses unite, explode. I feel nothing. I feel everything. I am falling. I am falling. I am falling.

Time is ending. Time is shattering. Time is beginning. I am surrounded by all that I loved, all that I lost. All are one, alone. The room, the world, fill with darkness, light. I fall back past angels, past angels’ bones, into deserts, into floods, into storms, into gentle rains, into stories, into gardens, into all people, all people becoming two people, becoming one person, becoming beasts, birds, fish, the creatures of the sea, the sea itself, the waters below the land, the waters above, the heavens, the lights of the heavens, the moon, the sun, the land, the grass, the fruit, the trees, life, breath, into the words themselves, the words of naming, the words of creation, morning, evening, night, day, darkness, light, let there be, let there be, let there be, let there be this angel, this angel who has always been there, this angel who has never been there, this face, this face, this face of the waters, this face of the deep, this face of God, this breath of God, this breath that had breathed me forth into life, that will breathe me back from life, that dissolves my soul, that shatters my soul, that breathes me into the unformed and void, where all of us, all of me, all of you are one and our name is one, into this nothing, this everything. to which we will return, from which we all will return, return, return, return, return.

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.

(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.

Moses lies here on a flat rock, sheltered from the sun and wind that assault this desert, this mountain top. I sit beside him, playing softly on my harp. This has been my role over these generations, to play the harp, bringing comfort when people receive hard news, both news of sadness, and, as with my grandfather Jacob, news of joy that they might find as difficult as tears.

Those who lived most of their years in the desert came to accept death gracefully. When, in the first year, on the ninth day after the first full moon of midsummer, all those who had recently turned sixty died, the people were enraged, furious at God, imagining that a plague had struck. But Moses spoke to them gently, reminding them that all those who had died had died in their sleep, in peace. The people returned to their homes to mourn, but with less of the anger that they had originally felt.

Then on the same day of the following year, all those who had turned sixty in the preceding year also died, all in peace, all in their sleep. And again the people were angry, but less so, and more accepting of the sudden deaths.

In the third year, as the day approached, the anger began to build beforehand. But some of those who had just turned sixty gathered together and decided on a different course. On the eighth day of the month they had a party, with music, with dancing, with joyful recollections of their lives so far. As night fell and it became the ninth day, they sent their families away and slept in a group, there in a tent on a silent plain. They talked for a while, prayed for a while, then, one by one, fell asleep, the sound of human voices being gradually replaced by the voices of the creatures of the desert, by the voices of the wind.

In the morning, none awoke.

And, over that year, all accepted that this was our fate, that all would die peacefully on the same day of the same month of the year that they turned sixty. And traditions grew over the forty years that we rested here in the desert, here outside the outpost of Kadesh.

At first, all those about to die gathered for a party of remembrance on that day and died that night, and the survivors gathered to dig graves for them the next day. Then one of the suggested, mostly as a joke, that it might be more useful to dig the graves during the party, as people might built a settlement together, so that the mourners needed only to fill them in at the burials the next day.

And so, each year, we have gathered, and celebrated the lives of those about to leave us. Those in good health had helped to dig their own graves, and others sat and watched and directed as their friends and families dug them. If any were seen to be working alone, others from the community came to them and dug the graves for them.

When all the graves were dug and twilight approached, those about to die arose and dressed themselves in funeral shrouds of white linen. They placed in the graves mementos of their lives, things that they would want to bring with them if they were to be brought into some sort of future life. And those who were saying goodbye to them also gave them gifts to be placed in the graves, gifts by which those about to die would remember them. Then the families and friends would leave, and those that remained would lie down together, each in his own grave, and one by one would silently pass into death.

So it had been for forty years. But this year, everything changed. As always, we held the party; as always, we dug and decorated the graves. I was in my place, as had become the custom, at the center of the new section of the cemetery outside Kadesh, playing the harp for the community. Occasionally, some would come and sing the tones that I was playing. The rhythm of the digging mixed with the waves of voices as, at one point or another, almost all of the people would sing the tones.

Then the time of the last watch arrived. Those who were to lie down in the graves lay down. The others dispersed.

Then, when the sun arose and the roosters crowed, the sleepers awoke. All were confused, concerned. Expecting death, they were baffled by their continuing life. Some arose and walked around, not knowing where to go. Others continued to lie in their graves. Some of their families returned to the cemetery to fill in the graves, but, seeing people walking around, none came close, fearing contact with what they believed must be the walking dead.

For years, my tent had been at the edge of Kadesh. I rarely went into the center of the camp. People would come to me, to hear my music, to speak with me. Since I had lived for all these centuries, I suppose, people had come to believe that I had accumulated wisdom. Perhaps it was simply that, having a more relaxed relationship with time, I had developed a willingness to listen to them without needing to speak more than needed to be said. When they would come, they would bring me manna that they had gathered for me, would bring me clothing that I needed or that they believed would suit me well.

On the night that followed that morning, as I sat outside, listening to the wind, to the sand, and speaking with the stars, I heard sounds from the cemetery nearby, voices of confusion, voices of surprise and pain. I arose, answering what I felt to be a call. I had little fear, having played the souls of the dead into their next stages many times before.

This time, however, I found not the dead but the living. They asked me how this could have happened, how they could be alive, what they should do. I had no grand answers, but was willing to serve for them as a focus of listening.

In time, one of those in the field, one who had studied astronomy as a child with magicians who had come to visit Egypt from the city of Ur, spoke: “Perhaps our calendars are wrong,” he said. “Our study of the stars is inexact. We have seen, over the years, the times that the sun has lost pace with the moon, when we have needed to intervene and redefine the days so that they meet again. Perhaps we have lost track of the days, and last night was not truly the ninth of the month.”

I sat silently, then asked everyone, “Truth?” One by one, the people nodded and echoed, “Truth.”

Then another person spoke: “I will lie down again. Perhaps tonight is truly the last night.” And he went to his grave and lay down.

I watched as others did the same. Then I picked up my harp, played a chord slowly, repeatedly, and sang a tone from it. Others joined, breathing the same tone, a tone of release, a tone of acceptance and peace. Then, one by one, all lay down. I played them to sleep.

But again, in the morning, they awoke. Most were surprised, again, and even more surprised to find themselves hungry and thirsty. When friends came to my tent, bearing manna and water for me, I asked them to gather more and to bring them to the new cemetery.

“You wish us to bring food and water to the dead?” they asked.

“They may not be dead,” I said, “or do not believe themselves to be dead. Something new may be happening, something wonderful. We do not yet understand. But maybe we do not need to understand.”

And thus it happened for a third day, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth.

Then, on the seventh night after they first lay down, the full moon rose, unmistakably, inarguably. It was the fifteenth day of the seventh month. The pattern had been broken.

They came to me for answers, but I had none. But we knew that they were alive.

Together, we all walked to the center of the camp, to the tabernacle. I had put on the colored tunic that I wore when approaching the officially sacred. The rest walked alongside me, all dressed in their linen shrouds, all smiling, singing. The people of the camp came out to see our procession. They stood by the side of the road, letting us pass, uncertain of what was happening, but knowing that it was a moment of joy.

When we got to the tabernacle, the priests could tell us nothing. Even the high priest had no idea that we would be coming, had no idea what had become of the pattern that we knew.

So we went to Moses. When we got to the tent, he had already come out to meet us. “I have awaited this day. The time for which we had hoped has come. It is time for us to return to the land of our fathers, to Canaan.”

At the end of a year of preparation, a year of celebration, Moses stood before the people. He reminded them of all that we had experienced, all that we had learned. He let us knew what we might find, what we must do, and what we must not do. And he told us that his work was done, that he would not be leading us into the land that had been promised to us.

And on that night, this night, as I lay in my tent on the edge of sleep, I heard Moses’s voice calling to me from outside. “I am leaving tonight. Will you journey to the mountain with me?”

I rose, stepped outside, and looked at him. “A journey? And you are not bringing anything?”

He opened his arms wide. “I have everything that I need.”

I took my harp and walked with him, along the road, out of the camp, up the gentle path on the less-steep side of the mountain.

We came around to the cliff side overlooking Canaan. “Here we are,” he said.

“And now we sit?” I asked.

“And now we sit.”

We sat alongside each other silently for much of the night. Then, as the morning star rose, he asked me to play.

Now we sit. His head rests his head on my shoulder as he listens. With each note that I play, I feel him tremble gently, a different quiet shivering with each tone.

As the morning light grows, I feel his own light fade. He is speaking softly, saying things that I cannot remember, that I cannot understand. Some are words in the language of our people, some in the language of those who oppressed us, of those with whom he was raised. He speaks words of his brother and sister, of his mother, of dreams of rebirth, of dreams of reunion.

Now the sun is rising above the horizon. As the direct rays shine on Moses, rays of light emerge from his face to meet them. He has stopped speaking. He is gasping, repeatedly, slowly, shallowly.

“Moses?” I ask.

“My name is not Moses,” he says, in a high voice, a child’s voice.

“What is your name?” I ask.

The light from his face grows richer, brighter. “My name is –” he says. Then he sings a pure, high note, a note with the sound, the color of the rays of the sun.

I join and sing the note with him, clearly, joyously. Although it is impossible, every one of the strings of my harp resonates with this pitch and vibrates with it, a chord of every note that we know, shifting and shimmering with the slightest difference in the music, in our breaths, in the wind.

Then, from all around the mountain, we hear voices, thousands of voices, singing with us. We look down and see all the people who had died in the desert over all these years, their souls taking of the form of the bodies in which they once were clothed.

One by one, the souls rise from the ground until they are at our level, surrounding us, floating in the air. Moses looks at them and stands, as strong as he had been as a youth, glowing with rays so bright as to be almost unbearable. “No, we will not be entering the promised land. But all here may join me in traveling to the world to come!”

He walks forward, off the edge of the cliff, but he does not fall. Walking through the air, he embraces the soul directly in front of us, wrapping his arms around her and whispering in her ear. The soul moves even closer to him, merges with him, until it comes to share the body with Moses’s own soul.

The next soul moves toward Moses. Moses embraces that soul, too, whispers to it, and merges with it. Then the next comes forward, and the next, and the next, all the thousands of souls embracing Moses, becoming one with him. He shines ever brighter with each merging soul, the note that they were singing becoming purer, clearer, more powerful.

Then, again, we are alone. He turns, stepped back onto the cliff, and again opened his arms. “Will you join me?” he asks.

“Must I?”

“You may do so if you would like,” he says. “But it is not required.”

“I will stay, then,” I say. “I believe that I will know when it is time for me to leave. It is not yet that time.”

Moses nods. “Goodbye, Serah. Our souls will meet again, in time.”

Then he throws his head back and sings the one pure note, not just with his voice but with the voice of all whom he has embraced, all whom he has touched, has taught, has led. The brightness of his glowing, the power of his voice grow ever stronger, until I must shade my eyes and block my ears.

Then, suddenly, his light and his song have vanished, though I can hear fading echoes of his voice reverberating from other mountains nearby.

Moses is gone. The ground on which he stood, the mountain wall in front of which he stood, have all melted, run, frozen, turned to the sheerest sheets of mirror glass.

I look into the glass and see myself reflected. But I do not only see myself as I now am. Visions of myself as I was, as I will be, join my current image in a dance that spreads out in more directions than those for which we have names. There I am, an infant, crawling across the carpet in the tent of my grandfather, Jacob. There I am, receiving the harp from my great-uncle Esau, who says that he got it from a temple to Ashtoreth. I am playing the harp to still my grandfather’s confusion as he learns that my uncle Joseph is alive, to accompany the family as they move from Canaan to Goshen, to bless houses, to comfort the younger ones as their money fails and they are forced to live as slaves. And I play for so many births, and for so many, so very many deaths.

And then I have crossed the Sea of Reeds and am dancing with Miriam, then I am spending the years at my tent at Kadesh, then I am playing for those about to die, for those who do not die, and then I am here with Moses, here without Moses.

But the images do not end here. I see myself as I will be in the years to come: returning to the land of Canaan, playing the harp for Deborah, for Hannah, teaching my music to the school of women in the lavish caves in a valley among mountains, giving my harp away to a young shepherd in the fields of Benjamin. He touches it and immediately draws forth from it music finer than my own.

And that is all that I see. I do not know if that means that that moment is when I will die, or if I will carry on even longer. I will accept whatever happens. As long as I live, I will live. When I die, I will die. I am not eager to leave this life, but I have lived far more than most. When death comes, I will be ready.

The sun is now fully risen. As I travel around the edge of the mountain, I see that the cemetery is gone. Where it had been is now an oasis, rich and green, contrasting with the rest of the desert. I will walk through there on my way home. I may stop to pluck some olives and almonds from the trees.

And then I will come home, sit at the entrance of my tent, and hold my harp gently. I will listen for whatever might come next.

(Next: Elisheva (Closing).)

(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.

You were always my favorite of the idols, Marumat, ever since I first met you when I was small. Do you remember –yes, of course, you remember when I took you from your honored place on my mother’s altar and brought you to my playroom. Quite a party we had there, with my dogs, with the stuffed animals that my mother had fashioned for me out of leftover linen, wool, and beans. You stood regally as always at the center of the room. I bustled about, making sure all the party guests were happy, making sure that all the imagined guests were well fed. I had taken the plate of grain that sat at your altar as an offering and placed it before you there. I wasn’t sure how you would eat it, but I was certain that you would.

Of course, the grain spilled along the way. That was how my mother found you and found me. She slapped me and snatched you up from the floor. “This is not a toy!” she yelled. “We treat gods with love, with fear, with respect.”

“But I do love this god,” I cried. “That’s why I made a party for him.”

My mother picked up the plate of grain and stomped out of the room, looking back at me with an expression that was not quite a glare. I think now that she was trying not to smile.

She always did have that streak in her, that fierce brilliance of penetrating doubt that burned through the stories that we told each other, burned through to the truths that the stories both concealed and revealed.

There, outside of our house in the city of astronomers, we would sit on our blanket on a warm night and look up at the stars. “What do you see up there?” she would ask me.

I would lie back and look for the stars, the gods that I would recognize, in the sky, as one would look for friends in a crowd. “There is Nergal,” I would say, “red and low to the ground.” Or “There is Marduk,” or “Is that Ishtar? Hello, Ishtar!”

Sometimes I would ask, “Where is Nephila? His belt should be shining in the sky.”

My mother would tell me, “Perhaps he had to visit his children, the giants fallen to earth. Or maybe he was sent on a mission. Or maybe it’s just not time for him to be in the sky.”

“But why are gods sent on missions? Don’t they set their own times?”

“We don’t know why they are there when they are there, and why they are missing when they are missing. They come and go. But when they are not in the sky, we have their idols at home.”

“Why don’t we have an idol for my father? He was once here, and now is gone.”

She held me closer. “That is good thinking. But we do not have idols for people. They are only for gods.”

“Maybe we should have them,” I said.

“Maybe we should,” she repeated. Though, when we remembered this conversation when I was older, she muttered, “But not for him.”

I never knew my father. I knew that his name was Nahor, and that he, too, crafted idols, as I did, as did my sons. He sculpted you, after all, making this form to please you so that your breath would come down and inhabit it.

He died, or went away, too young. I named my first child for him. Nahor, my son, was the eldest of three, though the middle one, Haran, died too young, in the fire that destroyed our home. Nahor brought Haran’s daughter, Milcah, into his home and married her. My youngest son, Abram, ran into the fire and rescued the younger daughter, Iscah, whom he married, and their brother, Lot, who so often seems to need to be rescued. I rescued you.

I couldn’t bear to stay in our city of Ur, after my home was gone, after all my work was gone. All the other idols had sacrificed themselves to the flames, the wood burning, the iron melting, the stone crumbling, the breath of their lives returning to their greater selves.

Nahor had his own home, his own friends, business and responsibilities. He stayed behind in Ur. But we picked up what little we had and traveled toward Canaan, to the city of Kharan (no, not spelled or pronounced like my son’s name, though I liked to dream that it was the city of his memory). We were a tiny caravan: you, me, Lot, Abram, Iscah, and, as always, Eliezer, Abram’s servant, his constant friend.

You were broken by then. Abram had broken you years ago, though he never admitted it. I remember coming into the room where you always stood so proudly, there next to the iron idol of Nakhin. You were lying on the floor, your head snapped coarsely from your neck. (Perhaps my father should have taken more care in creating your body, should have crafted a more sturdy neck for you. Perhaps this fresh brass nail will fix that failure of design.) Grain was scattered across the floor. A small ax rested in Nakhin’s strong arms.

“What happened here?” I said aloud.

“They had a fight.” Abram’s small voice came from behind me. I turned and saw him sitting in the far corner. “I had put the grain out for them. Nakhin wanted more than Marumat. So he took the ax and broke Marumat’s head off.”

I sighed and looked more closely. Your neck clearly hadn’t broken from an ax blow. It looked like you had fallen onto the ground, head first. And I could see Abram’s small footprints in the fallen grain, where he must have kicked it around to make it look like the result of a fight.

“Now, Abram,” I said. “You know that that doesn’t happen. Idols don’t break each other.”

“But they can do so,” he whined. “They are gods. They can do whatever they want.”

“They can do so, of course,” I said. “But they don’t. Idols remain strong, remain silent, for us to worship.”

“Does the neck of a strong god break?” Abram asked.

“The neck of an idol can break. It is our job to make them strong, to help them be strong.”

“Why do gods need our help?”

“Gods don’t need our help. But they want our help. Just like they want our grain, to feed them, to worship them.”

“But they don’t eat the grain,” Abram said. “When we put it out for them, we just end up picking it up later and throwing it out.”

“They don’t eat it like people do,” I said. “I suppose that their magic takes from it what they need, like we separate the grain itself from the chaff. They can see the difference, even if we can’t.”

“Why do the gods take things?” Abram asked. “Why did they take my friend Farah? I was playing with him a few days ago, but now they say that a god has taken him. They say that they are proud, but I saw his mother crying when she was burning something at the temple.”

I stood silently for a longer time than I had intended. Then I reached down and took him in my arms. “The gods do what the gods do,” I said. I tried to say more, to explain how you worked, but could not put it into words that a child could understand, could barely have put it into words that I could have understood myself. “The gods do what the gods do,” I said again. “We cannot understand.”

Abram, too, was silent. I saw that he was crying. I kissed him, and he rested his head on my shoulder. And I thought that, beneath his tears, I caught an echo of my mother’s smile.

After he was asleep, I went back to the room that you shared with the other idols. I took the ax from Nakhin and swept up the grain. Then, gently carrying your head and body almost as carefully as I had held Abram, I took you to my workroom, wrapped you in linen, and placed you in a box to be repaired soon.

How many years ago was that? Certainly you know. Though this physical instance of you has been sitting in the box, listening, silent, for all this time, I know that I have been connected to your soul, as you have been in my heart. All my life, I have felt your presence, your love. All my life, I have told myself that I would repair you someday. But the time has never been right.

Now I am alone. We are alone. Nahor passed away some seven years ago. I have not heard from Milcah since then, nor from anyone else that I knew back in Ur.

And my family here all have moved on. Abram never was good at making idols, could never put his heart into it. But he proved good at business, at government, at making deals and treaties. In the way that so many children eventually must, he has become his own man, moved to a new territory.

He has even changed his name in the new country. I don’t understand why – perhaps it is the numerology – but he is now calling himself Abraham. What was once his pet name for his wife, Iscah – Sarai, “my princess” – has now become her official name, Sarah.

And he does not care for the gods. His search is elsewhere. His brilliance in his business has gone into his everyday philosophy. “The world that you live in is needlessly complex,” he says. “When you look at what people want in a transaction, what people want in their life, it always comes down to one thing, though that one thing can rarely be defined. There must be one desire, one principle, underlying everything in the universe. And someday soon we will understand what that is.”

Perhaps. I do not understand my world, do not understand my gods. But I do understand what gives me joy, what gives me comfort.

So here we are, you and me. And securing you here within this vise for the moment, driving this nail through your head so that you can be whole, I know that you are here with me, in your fragile wooden body, in your place within the stars, in the eternal world beyond the worlds. Laying my hands upon my tools, I know that this is what I do well: I make bodies for the gods. This is what I do well. This is what I do.

And for this knowledge, my idol, my comfort, for this, my god among the gods, I bow before you. I give you thanks.

(Next : Serah.)

(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.

I was alone, became alone on my path from the north across this plain, before I met this man, before our voices found each other, before we came to sit here before one another. He, too, was alone, became alone on his way across this plain. But when the sound of my mourning, of my wailing, rose from my voice and reverberated from the surrounding hills, it met the sound of his song, resounding with the same rhythm, the same feeling, the same wordless howl as mine, not quite in harmony but with a perfect dissonance that complemented and contrasted with my sound.  The pain exploding from each of us  made the cries of the other stand out, more stark, more clear, than either would have sounded on its own.

The echoes of our mourning drew us near to one another. Each of us saw the other at first as a specter emerging from the smoke, the haze, then as a shadow. Only when we were almost within an arm’s reach of each other did we see each other as distinct shapes, as faces that we could recognize as people. Only then did we know that we did not know one another.

We stood in silence.  In the time before one of us spoke, each of us heard the sound of his own labored breath, of the breath of the other, heard the sound of his own pulse within his ears, within his veins.

“You came from the fire?”

“And you?”

“Yes. And you, too, lost–”

“My wife. My love. My soul. I have lost–”

“Everything.”

Another silence hung there in the smoke. One of us sighed. One of us coughed. When a moment’s breeze showed us that we were on a spot of uncluttered ground, we each sank down into the charred grass.

“You were in the city?” That voice must have come from me.

“No, not the city,” Orpheus said. “We lived on the water. We lived quietly, lived well, until death took my beloved from me.”

“Yes, we too lived quietly, lived well, though my home became less a blessing than a fortress against those who lived around me. Then the flames came to the city, and destroyed it all.”

Another silence. Again, memory can not tell me which of us spoke.

“You lost her to the flames?”

“No, not directly. I thought I had lost her, but she reemerged. Then again I lost her.”

“Lost to the looking back.”

“To the looking back.”

“If I could only relive that final moment, if only I could try again–”

“We can not try again. We can no longer look back, even to the moment of looking back.”

And another silence, the paths of its passing time sketched on our faces by our tears, by the tears through the ashes on his face, by the salt of the tears on mine.

“She had died, was as dead as she had ever been alive,” he said. (I must have been he who spoke.) “But my gods, the gods of my fathers, showed what I thought was mercy. They allowed me down to the place where the dead gather, before their souls drift down to the river of fire, become the river that flows outside of life. They let me sing my song to her one last time. And as I sang, I felt her soul emerging from the flow, collecting around the strands of my song, as salt–”

“As salt?” I cried.

“–as salt gathers around a reed in a drying sea bed. Then I walked away, drew her away from the river of souls.”

“And she lived?”

“For me, for the moment, she lived.”

“My love lived also,” I said. “She was dead, seemed dead, as the fire from above took our city.  We waited perhaps too long to listen to the travelers’ warnings, that their god had run out of mercy and that the city would burn. She was asleep when the flames erupted, asleep when the flames burst into our home. I saw her there among the flames and ran back after her. Her robes had already begun to smolder as I lifted her from our bed and ran toward the pool of water that we kept near our house. I immersed her and awakened her. She screamed in panic, in pain, but I told her that we must be quiet, that we must run, that there was no time. And so we ran from the city.”

“And she lived?”

“For the moment, she lived.”

Another array of breezes blew past us, first clear, but then carrying the grit, the scents, of ash, then salt air, then ash again.

“And then…” one of us, or maybe both of us said. For a long time, neither wanted to respond.

Then the silence became more oppressive than the telling, and I spoke again. “We got outside the city, and kept running, pursued by the rumbling of earth and the rushing of winds. Then we heard an explosion, as if Babel herself were collapsing again. I put my head down, and screamed for her not to look. But she stood, and turned. And then there was the flash, like a sun god dropping to earth, And the searing heat, and the wind–”

“–and she was gone,” Orpheus said. It was a statement, not a question.

“Her soul was gone. Her body—where her body had been was a pillar, white as cloud, hard as her body had been so soft. I embraced the pillar, kissed it, but all that was left was the taste of tears, the taste of salt. I fell back–and I saw what I could swear was her soul spiraling upward from where her body had been, dissolving into the wind, melting into the flames of the sky, without warning, without a farewell.”

“Without a farewell…” Orpheus said. “Thus, too, my love came away with me from the fire, from the river of flame that roared below. I could not see her, but could feel her breath, her touch behind me. ‘I am with you,’ she whispered to me, and her presence was as comforting as the scent of spices, as maddening as the brush of angel’s feathers hovering just within reach. ‘I am with you,’ she said, ‘but do not look at me.’”

“And she stayed with you?” I said.

“She stayed, for as long as it took for us to travel almost this far. My love for her grew even stronger as the echoes of her breath ignited my songs. But as my love grew stronger, so did my desire, and as a flash that I thought was an explosion of my passion came from what must have been the city burning, I could not keep at last from turning, to see her, to touch her, to be with her.”

“And she was gone,” I said.

“If only she had instantly been gone,” he cried. “I did get to see her, to touch her–but only long enough to feel her shadow-body dissolve. She decayed in my hands as one does over time in the grave, but swiftly, over the course of a single breath, long enough to see her beauty melt away to sinew, muscle, bone. I saw that what I had loved was now indeed as mortal as any other person. In my greed to be with her forever, I had not been able to let her go, gradually, as each of us must let the ones that we had loved cease to be flesh and dissipate into memory. And now she was gone, without a farewell…”

We both fell to silence. Were there new breezes? We did not notice the gusts of the wind against our faces, feeling only the gusts within us of terror, of regret.

Again, one of us spoke. “And we are here.”

“And we are here.”

“What are we now? What do we do?”

“We are the lost ones now, those who loved the lost. We continue. We continue. I sense that the gods will not yet let us die—there is more for us to do, more for us to regret. We must fade into stories. When we die, after we die, others will learn the stories of our pain. Perhaps they will learn from them. I fear that they will not.”

And then, now, we sat here in greater silence, in a silence that summed together the absences of all that had come before, each thinking of the other’s words, each drowning in his own despair.

But now the shadows are lengthening and growing less distinct. We know that it is time to move on. At the same moment, we each stand.

“I must continue, back toward the sea,” Orpheus says. “Will you come with me?”

“I cannot,” I say. “I know that my daughters escaped the fire before me. We have arranged, if disaster struck us, to meet in a cave just up the mountain from here. We keep there clean water, warm blankets, and wine. There would be room for you.”

“I cannot,” he says. “We must continue, each on his own path. Perhaps we will remember each other, sing of each other.”

“Perhaps.” We look into each other’s eyes for a brief moment, but neither of us can stand seeing the pain for long, seeing the pain of loss in each other’s eyes, each seeing the pain in the other’s eyes reflected from his own. Each of us steps aside then forward, past the other, losing the other swiftly in the darkness, in the acrid mist. Neither of us dares to look back.

(Next: Terah.)

(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.

Beyond them, I can see dusty ground with infrequent, stunted shrubs. Clouds, at once both pale and dark, hide the sun and sky. Shards of lightning flash between them, as if sparks of heaven are shattering, exploding above the land. An endless curtain of heavy rain pounds down. The shrubs, defeated, are crushed even closer to the earth. The dust becomes mud, smears, runs, into gullies and puddles that make the ground look even more treacherous, even more grim.

“What happens now?” I think to myself.

“Do you really want to know?” Snake replies.

I turn my head to look at him. “Do you know?” I ask.”You know the future?”

Snake does not turn his head. He stares more fixedly at the garden’s edge. “Some. Not enough.”

“Did you know what would happen—”

“When I did what I did? When I… gave you that fruit?” His mind becomes clouded with pain, with memory, with flashes of guilt and anger at our God.

I shift my hand from his near shoulder, sliding it gently along the scales of his back, until it embraces his far shoulder, drawing him closer to me.

His mind clears, the pain replaced by sadness, heavier, dense. “No.” He sighs. “I thought I knew, thought that the fruit, the knowledge would bring you joy, instead of… this… God told us that it contained the knowledge of good and evil. But all that we have come to know now is how much we do not know. Everything—the garden, the world, the future—with just that one taste of that enticing fruit, everything has changed.”

“I had—I thought I had loved God,” I think. “How could he have done this to us?”

Snake’s mind darkens again with another inverse flash of anger, of pain. His tongue lashes out into the air in front of him, slashing through and disrupting the misting rain. “This God fooled you, tricked you, though when those who come after you tell the story they will call me the Trickster. They will come to hate me, to fear my children.”

“I could never hate you, could never fear you, my wisest friend,” I think.

“No, but only you will ever have shared my thoughts, shared my heart, you and Eve. The others, your children, will only know second-hand of who I have been. They will only know the thing that I will become, the mute, hissing, slithering serpent that will haunt their dreams. They will only know that once we could communicate, that once I was this God’s pawn, his instrument, as he forced you out of this garden into the harsh world that rushes in toward us. They will hate me for the pain of being pushed into that world. Some will even blame me for the pain with which your children will be born into that world, pushed through blood and screams and tears from the warmth of their first home into the harshness of the world of the rest of their lives.

“And I will never be able to speak to them again, not even to explain, not even to apologize. My kiss will kill them, and they will crush my head beneath their heels. I will be forever on the move, forever on the run, forever leaving my skin behind and starting out anew, but never able to escape the hatred that they will feel, the guilt and the regret whose embodiment I will forever have become.”

The storm, the sodden desert, are closer now. Standing in silence in Snake’s embrace, I can feel drops of colder rain, wisps of harsher wind biting through the barrier, slicing into the garden, lashing us with hints of what lies outside.

I look up at Snake and wonder whether the streaks of denser water on his face are rain from the impending world or are tears. “Must all my chidren hate you?” I ask.

“Some may come to worship me,” he replies, “to build icons of me that glisten in the sun as I do now. But that worship will come from fear, not love. Some will dance with my children, or will play music that forces my children to dance. But they will do so out of daring, of bravado, to try to convince themselves that they do not fear me.

“Some will come to handle my children in worship of this trickster God, believing that their faith in him will protect them from my children’s kiss. And as my children whisper in their ears, mix their sound with the music that your children find holy, new languages will break forth that our children will not understand, will completely understand. Together, they will break out past words and return to this communion that we now share.”

“And, one by one, our children will join together, toward a world we can share in love?”

“No.” He sighs and lowers his head, his scales brushing against my skin. “That moment will end, and they swiftly will forget. They will return to their battle, return to their hatred.”

“Forever?”

“I do not know. The future that I can see ends sometime, though I do not know when, and I cannot see what lies beyond it. Perhaps all is destroyed, all is for naught. But perhaps…” He pauses, closes his eyes.

“Perhaps all will be healed someday.” He speaks slowly, tentatively. “Perhaps your children, perhaps mine, perhaps this God will find some way to put things back together, to put things right. Perhaps what we have come to know from eating that fruit is not the end of knowledge but its beginning. Perhaps we are being sent out of the garden to learn, and when we have learned what we must, we might return to the garden. The garden might return to us.”

I look down, then look up at Snake, and see that he is, indeed, crying. I turn and embrace him fully. He holds me in his arms, as I hold him in mine.

Then I hear a massive, terrifying, rushing sound. I look down and see the edges of the garden a long stride away, an arm’s length away, a step—

And then the ground drops from below me, one, two hands’ breadths, and I fall into a puddle of mud where green grass had been. I hold Snake more tightly within my arms, but feel his skin collapse, hollowed. I roll to my knees and kneel. The harsh rain pounds my head without mercy. Flashes of lightning and explosions of thunder surround me as I kneel, helpless. The clothes that we had fashioned from the leaves of the garden are thrashed by the rain, shredded, peeled away, until I am again as naked as I had been for most of my life.

I kneel in silence, not knowing what to do. Then I feel something writhing against my arm. I open my eyes. It looks like Snake—it is Snake—but small, crippled and diminished. He has no limbs, no arms, shoulders, legs, just a long body that moves in an ever-changing line against the ground, against my arms.

“What can we do now?” I think to him. And I realize that he can no longer hear my thoughts, that I can no longer hear his. My mouth opens and tries to speak aloud, but I have no language, no words.

The small Snake slides up my arm, faces me, strokes my lips with his hissing tongue, and I understand what he means: I will need words now to speak. I will have to create words.

Snake slides down to the ground, to his former skin, now inert beside me. With his fangs, he grasps the underside of where his head had been and pulls down, slicing an opening past his arms, his belly, his legs.

I know what he means me to do. I stand and slide my arms into the skin of his arms, my legs into his legs, pull the skin of his head over mine. I look out, protected from the rain, and see Snake slithering away from me.

At the nearest shrub, he slides upward, wraps himself around a limb, and shakes it. Fruit, hidden by the spare leaves while on the tree, drops to the ground. I look at the fruit, wonder if it is forbidden or not, then shrug. I am already in the harsh world. I will eat what I can, what I want.

Looking farther from where I stand, I see that there are breaks in the clouds, spots of drier land, places where the sun shines down. And in one of the drier spots, not far away, I see another person seated beneath a tree, the only other person, the one that God had named Eve. She is safe, unharmed from when she ran screaming from me, from Snake, from the knowledge of good and evil, from the knowledge of what we had done.

I know that that knowledge has followed us now, that it did not die when the garden disappeared, and I know that we have much more to learn. I will have to communicate with her, to let her know that all may be well.

For that I will need words, will have to build language, with have to give names to things. I have few words, but I know those that God used in building these worlds.

I test my breath, my lips, my tongue against these words, give them sound. I speak these words, at once sacred and mundane, and know that with these words my new life begins: Light. Day. Night. Heaven. Earth. Ocean. Life.

(Next: Lot)

(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 —

Here at its border — the edge of this secret room that only I can cross — there are no markings — all gold and brass that had been here has been taken — all curtains burned by fire — all wooden forms consumed by fire — and yet I know that this is the edge — know it as clearly as if I were standing at the edge of lake of fire — standing at the edge of the physical world. Only I can enter — only the high priest — and only on one day of the year — two months and one day away — I can sense the date’s approach — as clear and as far away as a storm of fire across the ocean — and I can only enter when prepared by prayer — when cleansed and anointed by the other priests — all gone — or by the Levites — all gone — all taken or dead —

And today I am unclean — unclean — having run through filth — having carried the dead — and I cannot enter — cannot cross this final wall of fire — yet I must. The word of God — the very stones on which God himself carved his words — carved with fire — with black fire on white fire — are here — and I must save them — must save them from unholy fire — strange fire — from fire that might burn them — might release them into the hands of the unclean — those even more unclean than I — into the hands of Babylon — of those who speak what words of our God they know with spite — as jokes — as curses — with hearts of the unclean — tongues of the unclean — tongues of the serpents who spit venom — the poison that kills — that burns like fire —

God — you who saved my fathers — I cross this line — the one that you ordered us not to cross — to save what we have of you — I cross this line — disobey you to honor you — I — distant son of Aaron — knowing what happened to the sons of Aaron. If I live, I live for you — if I die, I die for you — the merciful and compassionate — who determines who shall live — who shall die — who by water — who by this fire —

I cross this line — walk with fear — without fear — through the wall of fire — eyes closed — then speak the most secret name of God — the most secret name that I know — open my eyes —

And there is silence. Here, there is no fire. Expecting to feel the smoldering wood of the floor, my feet, amazed, feel damp grass. On my head, on my body, soft rain falls. I look around me, and see that I am in a meadow, a paradise.

“Have I died?” I say, and am surprised to hear my voice, not to hear it drowned out by the sounds of fire, of roaring flames and buildings collapsing in fire.

In front of me, I see what must be the ark, the small cabinet with the mighty cherubim seated upon it. I am comforted, but then, again, surprised. The cherubim, forged from our finest metals, should not be here. All the ornaments of the temple had been given over to the Babylonians, in an attempt at appeasement, to avoid the destruction of which our prophets had warned. “No, not the statues.” I hear two voices, male and female, in unison, speaking these words. “We really are here.”

I look up, and see the cherubim are now standing, wings outspread, one hand of each on the shoulder of the other. “How?” I say. “I had never seen you alive in the temple. Are we still in the temple?”

“No. And yes,” they say. “The temple on earth is gone, is burned. This is the greater temple, the temple that no man can destroy.”

“And the tablets? Have they been saved?”

The angels part and step to the sides. There, on the ground, between them, sits what appears to be a small, clear cabinet, protected from the rain by the cherubim’s outstretched wings. I cannot see its walls, save for the way that the image of what lies beyond them is bent by the light passing through.

And there, in the cabinet, are the tablets of stone with their sacred writing, the two complete tablets sitting among the rubble of the stones that Moses broke. They are tilted at an implausible angle, resting against the ark’s now invisible walls.

“What will happen to them?” I ask. “Do they stay with us, with the priests, with the people of Israel?”

“No,” the cherubim say. “They will remain here, in the safest of places, in the Garden of Eden, until the end of days, until the world is healed and Eden and your world of actions can again be one.”

“But how can we live? How can we survive without the tablets? The children of Israel are dispersing, and the temple is burning. Where will we find what we need to keep us whole? How will we find and worship our God?”

“Did you ever wonder how Abraham worshipped?” they ask in return. “Or Moses before the tablets appeared to him? Remember that there have not always been priests or a temple. Remember that all that exists on your world is temporary. When you had many people in one place, it helped you to have a temple. Now the people are leaving the land. Many, though not all, will return. And all need to be able to worship the Lord.”

“But without a temple, what do we have now?”

“What you have always had, what only people have had. When it was time for the first people to leave this green place, God blessed them with words, with the power to speak, with the power to give names to the things and ideas of your world. You now have these words, and with them you can carry the tablets within you, as you always have.”

“What words are these?” I ask. “All words? Any words?”

“All words, yes, and any. But most particularly, you must remember these.”

And the cherubim bend do to human height, and each whispers a sentence in my ear. Not the same sentence—in this lone moment each speaks different words.

And as I hear the sentences, each in one ear, they combine in my mind. And in their combination, their collision, their clash and their harmony, I find that they have collected all knowledge, everything that I have ever known.

They stand again, as one, the edges of their wings brushing my shoulders as they pass. They wait, silently, as I recover from hearing their words.

After a while, they speak again, as one. “We must leave you now. You must leave us. This world must fade for you. You must return to your own.”

They gesture around themselves. In the distance, beyond the almost infinite green, fire is rushing toward us, contracting toward us, the flames of my destroyed world pushing in towards this sacred place where we stand.

“Will I survive this fire?” I call out. “How will I live? Where will I live?”

“You will live a bit longer,” they said. “And though you will be martyred, you will die quickly, with honor, without pain. But you must tell these words to all who you meet. All to whom you tell them will live to tell them to more people, and those people will tell them to even more. And over time, all Israel will hear these words, and perhaps all mankind. And in these words, you will find life.”

I look around, and see that the green around me is almost gone. The flames are rushing toward me, the furnace that had been the temple almost returned to bring me to certain death.

I fall at the feet of the cherubim, try to grasp at the tips of their wings. But the softness within my grasp dissolves like dreams, dissolves like smoke. “Please — do not leave — do not make me leave! How can I live without the presence of God?”

“The presence of God is all around you, is within you,” they say together, their voices now faded, now obscured like light beyond smoke. “As it always has been. Look, listen, open all your senses to the world outside yourself, within yourself, and you will find that you are in the presence of God.”

I look up and see the fire rushing toward me, surrounding me. The roar of the flame merges with the rush of the cherubim’s mighty wings. They are ascending, drifting upward toward the sky, out of our shared reality. I see them get quickly smaller, more swiftly than mere distance would imply. Their voices ring out, almost inaudible in the noise, but clear within me. “You must speak our words to all that you see. But now — stand — and prepare to run!”

And all around me — the green world gone — flames rush to me, engulf me — I stand — I run in the arbitrary direction that I am facing — through walls of fire — past pillars of fire — and am not consumed — surrounded, protected by steam — drenched with the gentle rain of Eden — not blinded — not burning.

And then screaming — I hear screaming — crying — from before me — to my right — by my feet. I look down — into a pocket of the absence of flame — a space beside, below an altar, where the flames have not reached. There — surrounded by fire — protected from fire — two children huddle — a boy and a girl — trapped — terrified — alone. I reach down — through flame — into the pocket of air — scoop them up — one under each arm — protected by the dampness of my robes. Again I run — through the temple — what remains of the temple — out of the temple — out of the fire — out to the open air beyond the reach of fire.

I set them them down on the ground. They are stunned — no longer crying — terrified into silence. “Are you an angel?” the boy asks.

“No,” I say, “but they sent me to save you.”

“What do we do now?” the girl asks.

“Someone will find you. You will be safe,” I say — surprised that I know that — not knowing how I know that.

They nod, but do not move. “I need you — the angels need you — God needs you to do something. Are you willing?” I ask.

Again they nod.

“I will tell you each one sentence. You must say it to everyone that you meet. Tell them that this is what God needs them to know.”

I kneel down — embrace the boy — whisper in his ear the sentence that the male cherub gave me: “Listen, Israel: The Lord our God is the one God.”

The boy closes his eyes — looks like he is thinking — hard — then repeats the sentence back to me: “Listen, Israel: The Lord our God is the one God.”

I kiss him on the forehead — relax the embrace — shift over to the girl — take her in my arms — whisper in her ear the sentence from the female cherub: “Don’t do to anyone else what you would want him not to do to you.”

She furrows her brow — cocks her head — looks at me — says, “That’s all? That’s simple!”

I smile — look her deeply in the eyes — say, “Yes, you can still believe that it is” — kiss her, too, on the forehead — let go — stand up — say to them, “Now run together back to the other people. You will be safe. And tell them what I have said —- what the angels have said — what God has said.”

They turn from me — look back at me — look ahead — join hands — then run off — to where other people still live — to where they can tell their sentences to the other people — where the sentences will combine in the people’s hearts — where from the simplicity of the combined ideas will rise the complexity that will sustain their lives —

I look at them — see them run off — around the fire — past the fire — until they are obscured by the fire — by the smoke — until I can no longer see them —

I know that I have work to do — know that I do not have long — know that soon I will be captured — soon I will die —but that there will be time before then — all the time the world needs — time to spread these words — to those who will survive me — who will spread the words to the heart of the world —

Then I turn — face back into the fire — hear further voices calling faintly — calling from in the fire — and I run back in — to save them — to save the people — to help God save the people — to help the people preserve the memory — the glory — the beauty — around us — within us — all that exists — all that is all — all that is the presence of God.

(Next: Adam)

(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.

I look to my left and, despite my grim heart, hear myself laugh. Yes, it is a bleating. There, in a thicket, a ram is caught, the brambles tangled with its fleece, its horns. Yes, a ram, here on Moriah where another ram, long ago, had appeared for Isaac. I laugh again, stand, and walk over to it.

It looks at me as I approach, silent now, great dark eyes comforting and pleading at the same time.

“You would like to be free now, wouldn’t you?” I say, and, improbably, it seems to nod. “So would I. But it seems that you must be free first.”

I reach down carefully into the thicket, grasp a bramble at a bare spot without thorns, and pull it free of the ram’s wool. Some strands tear away from the ram as I pull. They hang in the breeze as if an absent-minded spider had abandoned its web there. I pull another branch, then another, becoming bolder with each tug, as with each loosed bramble the ram becomes free of the branch, the branch becomes free of the ram.

Finally only the horns are tangled. I grasp the bunch of branches that are holding the left horn (some thorns scraping my palms, but I do not care). I slide them carefully toward the end of the horn. “You have to move your head down,” I say to the ram. It does, and this somehow does not strike me as odd. “Now left… now up…”

Together, we free its left horn, then its right. It rises to its feet, steps out of the thicket, and stands to my side. It bows its head and butts me very gently, in seeming thanks.

I pat it on its head. “You are free now. You can go.” It nods its head again, but, rather than leaving, settles down onto the ground. I look at it for a long moment, then return to the slab and lie back down. I try to give myself permission to drift toward death.

Time passes. I remain alive, remain almost awake, though with the images and phantoms of the realm between waking and sleep drifting through my mind.

Then I feel a bumping against my side and open my eyes. It is night (again? still?). The ram has walked over to me and is butting me again, gently, though less so than before. “What do you want? You are free,” I say. “We are finished.”

It raises its head and looks deeply into my eyes. Then it looks down again, and, pressing its head against my side, gives a sharp shove.

I tumble off the slab and fall to the ground. “Why did you do that? What do you want?” I ask, standing.

The ram walks a few steps to the north, looks down the mountain, and bleats, twice, three times. It then walks back to me, walks behind me, and once, twice, butts me forward.

“Do you want me to go somewhere?” I ask. It bleats, again steps north, and looks back at me.

“Well, it seems that you will not leave me at peace here.” I sigh and follow.

We walk for a long time, the ram usually by my side, though occasionally scouting ahead. Sometimes it pushes me onto or away from a mountain path.

We end up deep in a valley, by the steep rock wall of another hill, sheltered by the darkness, the branches of an asherah grove. “What now?” I ask the ram. “This is the end of the path.”

The ram nods toward the rock wall, as if gesturing for me to continue walking, then settles again onto the ground. I sit alongside him and stare at the wall.

As the dawn brings more light into the grove, onto the wall, I look more closely. There is no way past it, around it, over it. “Why have you wasted my time?” I say to the ram. “I have no reason to be here. You should have let me die on the mountain.” I stand, turn, and prepare to head back the way we came.

The ram leaps to its feet and runs in front of me, blocking my path. “Let me go. Now.” I say.

The ram lowers its head, paws the ground, its muscles tensing.

“So this is how it happens? You use your horns to ram me now, to kill me?” I don’t understand how this god could want this, but then, I have never understood this god at all.

I stand tall before him and open my arms wide. “Then do it now,” I say. I close my eyes then open them, glaring into the ram’s eyes. “I am not afraid.”

The ram backs up the hill, pauses, then, with one long, loud bleat, rushes toward me. I see him coming, catch my breath, tense my muscles then release them waiting for the impact. But at the last moment, the ram dodges to the right, darts around me, and heads straight into the rock wall. I spin around, looking, listening for the collision, the viscous crash of flesh, horn, and bone against the rock.

And right at the point of impact, at the moment that the rock should have stopped the ram, I hear a rushing, see a shimmering. The rock shudders, becomes smooth, becomes a mirror, becomes glass, becomes water, becomes air. The ram passes through into the dim darkness behind it.

Then the shimmering fades, and the wall is once again silent stone. I walk up to the wall, look closely at it, slap my palm against it. Nothing changes. In confusion, in despair, I rest my hands softly against the wall, rest my forehead against the cool stone.

And I, too, feel myself falling forward. Instinctively, I step forward with my left foot and feel it pass through what had been rock, feel it rest against a flat smoothness, not grass, not dirt, not sand. With its unbraked momentum, the rest of my body follows, and I am inside.

It is dark, though not as dark as it should be, in this silent room surrounded by rock and earth. The distant walls appear to have high windows, though I see nothing through them other than streams of a moon-like light. My feet feel the floor as cool, dry wood. The air has the slight chill of morning, warm enough for comfort as I wear my simple funereal robe.

In the center, I see a simple stone table, similar in shape and size to the stone slab on which I had recently lain. And a body rests on it, as still as I was, in a robe like mine.

I step toward it gingerly, afraid of where I might be, afraid of what I might find. As I get closer, I see it is a woman, ancient, still, her breast rising and falling in the rhythm of sleep.

And then she speaks: “Yes, I am alive. And yes, you, too, are still alive.” Her eyes open, and she slowly shifts until she is sitting up. Her white hair glistens in the apparent moonlight, her green eyes seeming to look deeply into my soul.

“What time is this?” she asks.

I frown. “It is—Outside it was just past dawn.”

She shakes her head. “What year is this? What era? Who is king in Israel?”

“What year? I am seventeen years old. I don’t know any other way of counting years. And we have no king, nor do I think that we ever have.”

She nods. “So these are the years before Samuel, before Saul. What is your name? What is your father’s name?”

“My name is Sheylah,” I say. “Or at least it was. And my father’s name…” I pause, find it hard to think of him, hard to say his name. “My father’s name is Jephthah.”

“And your father has not yet—” She stops suddenly.

“Killed me? No, though he is to do so soon. It is my fate.”

“And you would let him do this? Would it not break his heart to have to kill his daughter?”

“I am resigned to death. No reason remains for me to live. And he would have less pain in killing his own daughter than in breaking a vow to his god.”

She sits silently for a while. “Good,” she says, “this is good. You are still alive, and are here. The story cannot be changed, but all is not lost. Give me your robe.”

“My robe?” I say. “But—”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “Not yet.” She stands, turns, and rests her hands on the stone table. It shimmers in the dim light and becomes a wooden cabinet.

She places her hands under the lip of the cabinet lid and slides it back. Reaching inside, she pulls out a neatly folded robe of simple white linen.

I take it from her, look around to confirm that no one else is there, then quickly remove my old robe and put on the new one.

“Give me your hands,” the woman says.

I reach out to her, palms up. She takes each of my hands in hers and touches my palms where the wounds from the brambles remain. Each of the wounds, painlessly, begins again to bleed. She rubs my hands together until each of my palms is covered in blood, then, picking up my fallen robe, presses them to its cloth.

She releases my hands and the robe drops again to the ground, two fresh palmprints of blood bright against the dark fabric. I look at the robe, then at my hands. The wounds have healed.

The woman slides the lid on the cabinet closed then knocks on it. The sound echoes quickly in the emptiness of the room. The ram emerges from a dark corner.

She folds my old, bloodied robe into a small bundle. With its cloth belt, she ties it to the ram’s neck. She leans down in front of the ram, whispers to it, then playfully bumps her own forehead against the ram’s.

The ram nods to her, then to me, then walks over to the wall through which we came. It calmly walks through the wall and disappears.

“The ram is headed to your father,” the woman says. “Wben he touches the robe, he will believe that you are gone, will have the memory of having met you at Mount Moriah and sacrificed you as he had promised. This is the story that he will tell, the story that people will believe.”

“And what of me? Do I continue to live as if dead, alone?”

“You are not dead. And you are not alone. You remain here, with me. I teach you what I know of time, of magic, of prophecy. And more will join us: this day, on which you are said to have died, becomes the women’s holiday. For four days each year, your friends, then their friends, then women from across all these hills and deserts leave their towns to be alone, to be together, to remember who you were and who they are.”

“Do I join them?”

“No. You do not get to leave this place. But each year, some women depart from the crowd. The lost, the lonely, those who feel that they cannot bear to continue with their lives as they have been, walk away to sit, to live, to die in silence. And the ram listens for them, finds them, and guides them here.”

“Will this continue forever?” I ask.

“Not forever,” she says. “Traditions do fade, and are forgotten over time. But by that time, we will have become a community, a school, the place where women come to learn to be teachers, to be prophets, to work wonders and to help to heal this broken world.”

I nod. We stand still, looking around, until the silence is broken by my stomach’s growl. Startled, embarrassed, I look away.

The woman laughs. “Yes, you would be hungry. We must have food.”

I hear myself laugh, too. “There is food here?”

“Not yet,” the woman says. “We must bring it into being. We have incantations to do that: the same words that function as prayer in the outside world, function as incantations here.”

She reaches into a pocket of her robe and pulls out a scroll with brief writings on it. “Can you read this?” she asks. “Have you been taught to read?”

I shake my head. “I have never been taught much at all.”

“Then you will soon learn. There is much to read.” She gestures around us. I suddenly realize that the smooth wooden floor is full of inscriptions, in complex patterns that I cannot yet understand.

She rolls up the scroll and puts it away. “All wonders, all wisdom,” the woman says, “begin by blessing the Lord.”

“I am to bless the Lord?” I say sharply. “The same god who fated me to die? How would I bless a god, and why?”

“The Lord did not condemn you to die,” she says, speaking as sharply as I had just spoken to her. “That was your father. The Lord does not demand the lives of those who believe in him. And,” she says more softly, ” as you may have noticed, you are still alive.”

I look down at myself and nod. “Yes, alive,” I say.

“Good.” The woman smiles. “And now we will bless the Lord, because the Lord needs to be whole, needs to be loved, as we need to believe that he loves us. These are the words that we speak.”

And I listen carefully and repeat after her, feeling the first glimmers of a slim, healing thread of love begin to form, flowing from me, flowing from this god, from the Lord, who could have taken my life, but has kept me alive, has brought me to a new life. “You are blessed, Lord,” we say, “our god, ruler of the world, who brings forth bread from the earth.”

I close my eyes and breathe deeply, and smell the scent of fresh bread. I look down at the top of the cabinet, and see a pitcher of water and two simple loaves. The woman and I each take one loaf, tear off a chunk of bread, and place it in our mouths.

And I feel my soul return. Apart from fate, distanced from what that person had promised to this god, hoping to feel what the Lord has promised to all people, I fall into, absorb, am absorbed my the simple warmth and sweetness of the bread upon my tongue, of the fresh robe upon my body, of the smooth wood against my feet.

“Yes, I am alive,” I say aloud, again, to the woman, to this god, to myself. “Yes, alive.”

(Next: Seraiah)

(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 bones are my life, my destiny, my never-ending job. These fragments of things, of people, litter the landscape, take the place of all that had once lived (a year ago, an eternity ago), take up the space of all that must now live again. I try to keep them abstract, to think of them as simply trash that must be burned. But some are unmistakably human (a skull, a jaw, a hand), and each of these has paralyzed me with momentary grief, with overpowering terror, that they might have been what my heart seeks, that they might have been part of you.

But now, then, this morning, as I made my way over these hills and down toward the meeting of the rivers, I heard what I had never heard before in my wandering: a human voice (a voice that I thought was human) coming from beneath the bones of the giants that lived here before the catastrophe. And as I grew closer, I grew more sure that it was real, more sure that it could not be real, that my mind had truly been taken. For the voice was calling out the name that echoes forever in my heart, was calling out your sacred name: “Istahar!” the voice called, rasped, whispered, sang, cried, “Istahar!” over and over, not breathing, not ceasing, “Istahar!”

I ran to the bone pile and began to pull it down, straining with the weight of the bones (each not only longer than those of a man but far broader and more dense), pushing them off the pile one by one until the morning light revealed a face.

“You are alive!” I cried.

“No,” it said, then “well, yes. Alive… if I am to be as you are than I am alive. It appears that I cannot die. So yes, I am alive. Are you alive? Are you from the ark?”

“Yes, I am alive,” I said. “And yes, from the ark. But how did you know of it?”

“Back when I could fly, I traveled over your land, and saw Noah building the ark. Are you Noah? No, too young, you must be… a son?”

I nodded. “Yes, a son. They call me Japheth. I haven’t heard anyone call my name in a long time. But I still am Japheth. And you?”

“I am—I was Shemhazai,” the face said, “Though I have not heard my name in an even longer time. I have been lost in another’s name.”

I did not respond, did not want to acknowledge (to myself, to him) that I knew the name that he had been calling. I continued pushing the bones off the pile, watching them roll down, hearing their dull, hollow ring as they caught the wind and struck the ground.

As I got to the bottom of the pile, down to where he lay, I saw feathers stretched out to either side. As more bones rolled away, I saw that they were connected to the man (not exactly a man) pinned to the ground. I laughed aloud as I saw the wings, then quickly felt guilty for the laughter. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But yes, I do understand how you survived. You are an angel. You lay under the waters not needing to breathe.”

As I rolled the last of the bones away, the angel shrugged the dirt from his wings. Scraps of linen draped over him from what had been his robes. These fell away as he rolled to one side, pressed first his hand then his knees against the ground, and stood. He was tall, not as tall as the giants, but far taller than me. And all aspects of his form were impressive.

The angel noticed me staring at him, and shifted his wings so that they covered him, shoulders to knees. He smiled. “I am used to this. Few humans ever see angels, especially without our robes, and yes, we are (I say objectively) beautiful.” He looked around, then up at the sky. Seeing the last of the stars fading in the morning light, he flinched in apparent pain, in recognition, and again whispered, almost in a moan, “Istahar!”

“Istahar!” I echoed, not meaning to do so, not able to keep from doing so.

The angel looked at me, understanding me, as I understood him, more deeply than we could acknowledge. “You, too?” he asked.

“You?” I replied.

He nodded. “How? When?” he asked.

I sat down heavily on a stack of the larger bones. “Nine years? No, now ten—we met just before sunset on the third day after the full moon of the month after the summer solstice—yes, I precisely remember the date.

“I had seen her before, drawing water from the well, her long lovely hair (the deep purple-blue that blessed the hair of all the children of Cain) shimmering in the breeze. I had seen her before, and we may even have spoken.

“But at that moment I heard her sing, a quiet song, a song that she had made up herself, that she sang to herself. And that song pierced my depths, exposed the workings of my heart as a blade exposes the seeds of a pomegranate, showed to me in joy, in agony, all that was missing from my life. And being near her, my life seemed suddenly complete, and I could no more be without her than I could be without my own blood, my own skin.

“I ran to her, told her that I loved her. She was taken aback, said that she could not love me, reminded me that the children of Cain could not love the children of Seth, could not marry them. But I told her that I would be devoted to her for the rest of my life. She smiled, laughed gently (the bells of her laughter singing out as if to sketch in outline the vastness of this love), and went back to singing.”

The angel had sat down, too, his elbows resting on his knees, his wings retracted behind him. He touched his hands to his face. They drifted to his temples, to his ears. I could tell that he, too, was remembering your song. “How long were you… were you and she…”

“Together?” I said. “We never were together. Though I devoted myself to her, would drop everything in my life to run to her if I heard her voice, the closer I grew to her, the farther she pulled away.

“We never… we touched only once, once when we were by the well. She had dropped one of her buckets (though her image dances wondrously in our minds, she was not completely graceful in real life). I had bent to pick it up for her, and my hat fell into the bucket. She picked it up from there and placed it on my head. As she adjusted it, her hands brushed across my face. I dropped the bucket myself (I was never graceful, either), and reaching up, held her hands in mine, told her that I loved her, told her that I could not live in her presence without being with her, told her that I could not live without her, told her that I knew that she could love me, asked her to accept being loved.

“She pulled back, said that she had to get home, filled her buckets and departed. I didn’t… I never saw her again. And some days later, word reached me that her father had sent her to the city at the meeting of the rivers, though nobody knew why.”

The angel nodded and smiled. “And you did manage to live without her.”

“Yes, I did, though more from the sheer habit of living than from any effort to do so. That, and from remembering that she had made me swear to her, one time when my passion and despair had worried her, that this love would never cause me to harm myself. I lived, and my father found me a wife, and we have had sons and daughters. But my wife always knew that my heart was never fully hers, and when I went off on this mission to gather and burn the bones, I could tell that her sadness was tinged with relief.”

“And now you are here…” the angel said.

“And now I am here, and I do my work, and I continue to dream that I might meet her again, though my heart knows even better than my mind that she must have… that she must be…”

The angel reached out and touched his hand to my shoulder. “And now I am here. Have you heard the legend that one never meets an angel by accident? The legend is true.”

“How did you know her?” I asked. “How did you come to love her?”

He leaned back, rested his hands on the ground behind him, closed his eyes, and sighed. His wings spread then closed again, fluttering behind him, their tips, seemingly without his knowledge, tracing your name in the dust.

“It was here, by the meeting of the rivers. She had been here for some years when I came to earth here, sent to deliver a message to the king of this city that God wanted him to change his ways. (It didn’t work. It rarely does.)

“I was walking among the people, my wings concealed, when I, too, heard the magic of her voice. And I went to her, told her that I was an angel, and that her song was greater than any that I heard in our choirs.

“She was flattered, but aloof, unclear (as humans so often are) of how to respond to an angel. I told her that I could love her every bit as much as a human would, that I could show her joys like heaven.

“She ran off, but I encountered her again and again here by the rivers. I told her that one never meets an angel by accident, that we must have been destined to meet.

“I lost my heart to her, though my mind could not tell why. When I sat with the chiefs of the angels, with Gabriel, with Metatron, to seek their counsel, I tried to see her through more objective eyes. And I saw that she was not the most beautiful, not the most gracious, not the most compassionate of people, that her voice was not the most lovely, that she could be terse, could be petulant, and that it seemed that, no matter how many angels or men were captured by her song, she would not let herself be open to them, would not let herself be loved. And they told me to follow my heart, but not to forget my mind, and to remember that with love comes blindness, that with yearning comes fear.

“Then one night, I came to her, threw myself to the ground, brushed her feet with the tips of my wings, and asked her what I might do to show her that the heart of an angel was hers, to convince her that I might show her heaven.

“She backed away, then stopped, as if hovering, thinking. Then she stepped forward, knelt on the ground next to me, and asked quietly, ‘You can take me far from here, from this ugly city? You can take me to heaven?’

” ‘I can travel between heaven and earth,’ I said. ‘With the right word, I believe that anyone can.’

” ‘What is that word?’ she said.

” ‘It is a secret name of God,’ I replied. ‘But we are forbidden to tell it to anybody.’

“She looked at me for a long time, then shrugged. ‘If that rule is stronger than your love for me,’ she said, ‘then you do not really need to be with me. I should have known that,’ she said, then laughed, as if in derision, the shards of her laughter slicing through my heart.

” ‘Wait!’ I called out. ‘I will tell you!’

“She came back, and I sketched the thirteen letters in the dust. She looked at them carefully. ‘I say these out loud?’ she asked.

” ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But quietly, so that no one else may hear.’

“She looked at them, then looked up and gingerly, quietly, whispered the secret name. And a small whirlwind appeared, formed around her, obscured her. It roared in my ears, scrambled my vision, spun out the scent of ten thousand sacred spices, then swiftly calmed, faded, disappeared. She was gone.

“My heart leapt in the knowledge that she was now in heaven, waiting for me. I opened my mouth to call out the secret name—and no words came. My memory of the name was gone. I looked down on the ground where I had written it, but the whirlwind had erased my letters, smoothed the dust down to form an unreadable glassy sheen.

“I frantically tried variants of what I could remember, dredged my memory for scraps of the sacred name. But all was forgotten, all was gone. In that moment, I knew that the number of beings who could know the name was finite. In giving it to Istahar, I no longer had it for myself.

“And so I remain here on earth, trapped, immortal, walking the earth in mourning, trying to find how I might survive eternity without Istahar.”

He fell silent, his head bowed, his wings trailing limply behind him. I put my hand on his shoulder, as he had put his on mine. “So she is in heaven now? She is not… she is an angel?”

He smiled faintly, looking again to the sky. “In heaven, yes, but not an angel. When the other angels found me, they told me that yes, she had ascended, was no longer on the earth. But once in heaven, she could work no magic on the angels, and never did fit in. Her laughter grated on their ears, and her songs, sung in her human modes, clashed with the songs of the angels. She could not stay in heaven, but, being a human who had seen heaven’s secrets, could not return to earth.

“So they found a solution, found a way to keep her in the heavens, happy, looking down on the earth. She became a set of stars, a constellation. See, that one, close to the horizon, its stars winking at the rest of the sky. That, now, is my—is our Istahar.”

The angel fell silent. We sat and looked at your stars, at the horizon. When a cloud drifted before us, breaking the line from our gaze to the stars, he spoke again. “So when the floods came, everyone, everything else died, everything except the fish and what your father saved on the ark. But she, alone, escaped.

“For months, I walked then swam around this land, still an angel, not needing to breathe, not able to die. Eventually, a sudden current swept the bones of these giants on top of me. I lay here until you appeared to rescue me. But lying here, I realized that I was in exactly the right place, since I could see Istahar, the stars that had been Istahar, in their place in the sky, winking at me in what I have to believe is loving thanks, the shimmering of the stars echoing the rhythm of her sacred laughter.”

“So she is immortal!” I said. “The stars will be here forever!”

“In time,” the angel said, “even the stars must fade. But that may not be until the end of days, when all names will be revealed, when all will know God’s secret name, when all soul will be reunited into one supreme soul, when all the pieces of souls that inhabit men, inhabit angels, inhabit, yes, the stars, will return to being a perfect whole.”

I looked up at the sky, at your blessed stars, strove to say something, but only one word came to my lips. In perfect unison, the angel and I called out, “Istahar!”

I lay back on the ground, staring at your stars for hours. The angel and I exchanged few words. Eventually we slept.

And now I lie awake again. In the night, in the cold, the angel has moved closer to me, engulfed me in his wings to keep me warm. His breast rises and falls in the rhythm of sleep, though, close as his face is to mine, I feel no breath from him.

I look at your stars, thinking of you, remembering, rejoicing that you are not—yes, I can say it, that you are not dead. And I know that for the rest of my life, I will be able to look into the sky and know that, even by day, even beyond the cruelty of the sun and the taunting translucence of the clouds, you will be there, always, there in my heart, always, there to comfort me, to save me, to protect me, to join with my voice as I try to sing what I can remember of your songs.

I am not alone. For not only are you with me, but you have brought the angel to me. Indeed, meeting the angel was no accident, and my love for you, his love for you, must have been preordained, must have been real. I now have a partner, a friend. He will travel with me along these ruined hills and plains, working with me to build a new world from the fragments of the old.

I look around me, and all I see are bones, bones upon bones. But with the help of God, with your grace, with your magic and the memory of your music, these bones again can live, as I now know, in joy, in excitement, in love, that I, too, now, once again can live.

(Next: The Daughter of Jephthah)