(Context: 1 Samuel 20:18 “And Jonathan said to him: ‘There’s a new moon tomorrow…’”)

This bow, these arrows weigh heavily on my back. My quiver can hold many more arrows than the three that it carries now. But each arrow is laden with the message that I had prayed that I would not have to send, the message of goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

An attendant walks beside me. But this boy is too small to carry my weapons, too small to know anything, to do anything other than follow the clear directions that I will give him.

We walk slowly eastward through the forest, toward the barely risen sun, away from the pale dim sliver of the setting moon, eastward to the edge of the dew-dampened meadow. Arriving, we set down our packs and wait until enough light appears for us to see the target.

There, off at the far edge of the meadow, the marker stone gradually shows itself: white, taller than most men, slightly wider than it is tall. On the far side of the stone, I know that a man awaits: my beloved, David, huddled against the morning chill as he listens for my sounds, for my words.

We set up this meeting four days ago, a lifetime ago, it seems. We met, then I went back to the palace, to my home, to gauge the madness of my father, the king, to learn whether David could safely come home with me, or whether he would need to flee to other lands, to save his life, to be able to continue with his sacred destiny. Now I am here, and I know that he is here, though I cannot see him in the distance, silent as he is amidst the sound of the morning breezes against trees and grass, amidst the chatter of the morning birds.

I kneel and pick up the bow from the ground. I pluck the string to test its tautness. A clear note sounds with a secret harmony, resonating with my memories of the sound of David’s harp. “Boy,” I say to my attendant, “pick up the quiver there, and be ready to hand me each of the three arrows, one at a time, as I ask you for them.”

I rise to standing. He picks up the quiver and stands near me, but not too near, off where he is away from any danger from sudden motions of the bow.

“Hand me the first arrow,” I say. The boy reaches into the quiver, lifts the arrow out, and hands it up to me, careful to keep it pointed down and away from us.

I take the arrow, position it on the bow, and pull back on the string. Focusing on the target, focusing as if I, too, were to launch with it and fly, I let a full breath out and take a full breath in. With an instant of clarity, of prayer, I let go of the arrow. My eye is sharp. My aim is true. The arrow arcs and lands precisely where I sent it, directly in front of the marker stone.

I reach back down to the boy. “The second arrow,” I say, and the boy hands it up to me. Again I set the arrow on the bowstring. Again I pull it back, breathe out, breathe in, and let it fly. It sails, arcs, and lands, several strides nearer to me than the first arrow and slightly to the left.

I reach down, and, without needing me to say anything, the boy hands the final arrow to me. I launch it, watch it fly, and see it land, several paces to the left of the other two, forming a perfect triangle, exactly as far from each of them as they are from each other. But rather than feeling any pride in the accuracy of my archery or joy in the mathematical beauty of their pattern, I feel only pain, pain as if each of the arrows had pierced my own heart.

I look down to the quiver and see what I already know, that there are no more arrows left to shoot. For a moment, I am tempted to turn and run away, away from David, away from our destiny. But to run from him now would be to leave him with no news, which would be harsher than the foul news that I have to convey.

I put the bow on the ground and, crouching, speak more quietly to the boy. “Run ahead now, to the arrow nearest us. Pull it from the ground and wait for me to tell you the next thing to do.”

The boy runs on ahead. His short legs carry him toward the arrow as swiftly as they can. The furrow that they trace through the long wet grass takes a eternity to grow toward the arrow, toward David.  It takes an eternity, but not nearly long enough.

The boy reaches the arrow and, trying first with one hand then with two, pulls it from the ground. He stumbles backward slightly as it comes out, but does not fall. Turning, he waves the arrow in the air for me to see.

This is the moment for which I had waiting, the moment that I had been avoiding. David and I had established two signals. If David hears me tell the boy that the arrows are off to his side, he will know that he is free to come home. If I tell the boy that the arrow is beyond him, David will know that he must run. And if… Is there a third option? Might I say something else or say nothing? Might we avoid or change our fate?

My heart and mind thrash through the spectrum of possible futures, searching for a possibility of possibilities. But none appears. My father’s heart has hardened, and if he ever finds David, David will die. The future has constricted to one small truth. The words that I must speak are cast in stone.

I call out to the boy, “Aren’t the arrows –” My voice breaks. I pause and try again. “Aren’t the arrows beyond you?”

The boy turns and walks toward one of the arrows. I call out to him, but even more so to David, “Quick! Hurry! Do not stand still!”

The boy runs as quickly as he can and retrieves the remaining arrows, yanking first one and then the other from the ground. He turns again and, looking toward me, sees me wave, signaling him to return to me, to return the arrows to me.

He runs back to me, back along the furrow of trampled grass that he had made while running out across the meadow.

He reaches me and hands me the arrows. I pull a soft cloth from the quiver and wipe the arrows clean of the dirt from the ground that they had pierced.

I crouch down to his level and hand him the arrows. “Bring the arrows back to where we store them. I will bring the bow back myself.”

The boy takes the quiver, takes three steps away from me, turns away, then turns back. He stands silently for a moment and looks deep into my eyes. “Have you lost something?” he says. “You look like you have lost something. Is there something that I can help you find?”

I place my hand on his shoulder. “No, I have not…” I say, then, “Yes. Yes, I have lost something. It isn’t anything that you could help me find. But I hope that someday you might find it for yourself.”

We look into each other’s eyes for a moment longer. Then I stand, and the boy takes three steps backward, then turns and runs off.

I shade my eyes and look to the east, toward the now fully risen sun, toward the marker stone behind which my David hides. I take a deep breath, start to call out his name, then refrain. If he feels that it is safe to come to me, he will come. If he feels that he must run, he will run.

My mind prays that he will run far away from me. My heart prays that he will run swiftly toward me. And my soul prays that God will grant us magic and grace, that he will change the world, change time, change my father’s vicious will, that David and I will dance once again, under a new moon, there in a new tomorrow.

Now the hard work begins…

An infinite moment of silence. In the deepening darkness, here within the well, I am falling, falling, past where I should have struck the water, past where I should have struck the earth at the bottom of the well. I have been falling for so long that I no longer feel myself fall, save that my hair (long, suddenly white) is trailing above me in my wake. Features within the walls shoot past me, helping me see the direction in which I am falling. But when I close my eyes, I feel as if I am floating, adrift on dry water on a sea of muted wind.

The life from which I have fallen – in huts, in palaces, in hiding, in the desert – seems as far from me now as the vault of heaven is from the lands where I have dwelled. But the distance, the time over which I have fallen cannot erase the senses and memories of life. Memory is seared into the milk whiteness of my flesh, my hair, in the exhaustion of my voice, raw from singing, from shouting, from celebration, from tears.

If anyone had the right to confront Moses, to criticize him, it was I, the one who had saved his life so soon after his birth, who had taught him, who spoke for him before the people as our brother Aaron spoke for him before kings. When Moses needed to sing, I led the people in his songs. When he summoned water from the rock, I formed the rock into this well, which has followed us in our travels through the desert, from Horeb on to Hatzerot.

And when his wife Zipporah came to me in tears, in despair over how Moses was neglecting her, I went to Moses, bringing Aaron with me, to speak on her behalf before all the people, to remind him that above all, above his responsibilities to his people, even above his responsibility to his God, a man’s first responsibility is to his family, to his children, to his wife.

Moses said nothing for himself. He stood silent, the image of meekness. When we were done, he simply opened his arms and looked upward. And suddenly he and Aaron and I heard the voice of God summoning us to the tent of meeting.

There we saw the pillar of cloud with which the Lord makes himself known. He summoned Aaron and me inside.

And there God rebuked me, his words slapping me in the face. Yes, he said, Aaron and I were prophets, but not prophets at the level of Moses. While God spoke to us from within dreams, within clouds, he spoke to Moses face to face. How, then, he asked, dare we speak against Moses?

And he left me as I am now, drained of all color. When I returned to the well and looked at my reflection, I saw myself as a sketch of absence: white skin framed by white hair against white clouds, then the near-white walls of the well, surrounded and completed by the desert’s white sands.

They banished me from the camp, by God’s command, condemned to stay here, in solitude, for seven days. While the people had planned to move on, they have refused to travel without me (though I wonder if they have done so in solidarity with me or out of fear of losing the well).

There I sat for six of the days, with no one to speak to, no sounds other than the wind. I took to sitting by the well, listening to how the wind, blowing across its smooth opening like breath across a flute, caused deep resonances to rise forth, groaning and rushing like the sighs and whispers of the desert itself.

Then, at twilight at the end of the sixth day, I heard the sounds coalesce into patterns. The deep hums brought forth higher tones, coming up and disappearing, forming phonemes, letters, a name: they were calling “Miriam.”

I looked down into the well, and saw, as always, the reflection of my face. But the face was speaking, calling me, calling my name. “Have I gone insane so quickly,” I thought, “that I see phantoms calling out to me?”

“No,” the face said aloud, “I speak for the Lord.”

“Have you come to apologize?”

“No,” it said. “Not to apologize, but to explain, and to ask a favor of you.”

I did not reply.

“You were right about Moses, about Zipporah,” it said. “The Lord has told him to return to his wife. His relations with her would not compromise his holiness but will enhance it. But at this sensitive time, as he builds these tribes into a people and prepares to lead them home, they could not see his leadership questioned. So the Lord chastised you, banished you, punished you, bringing you to this place, to this moment.”

“And now,” I said, “I am to be returned to the people?”

“Not now. The banishment will last the full seven days in the eyes of the people.”

“And in my eyes? In the Lord’s eyes?”

“This is the favor that the Lord asks of you. You have an opportunity to step outside of time. You would be a teacher, a leader. You can create a school, a community of prophets, where people can come, can seek refuge and learn.”

“Why would I receive this supposed honor?”

“Because you are a leader, a singer, a teacher. Because you care about doing what is right in the eyes of the Lord, but also care about the people. And, most importantly, you care enough to have challenged Moses, to have challenged the Lord.”

“And what need I do to make this transition?”

“All you need,” the face said, “is to step into the well.”

“Do I have a choice in the matter?”

“Yes. You can either accept or decline the offer.”

“Does the Lord know which choice I take?”

“The Lord sees time from outside of time. You would learn to do so also. He knows whether you come to accept the offer. But the choice is yours.”

“Both cannot be true,” I said.

“Look at the path that a serpent has left in the sand,” the face said, “or the path that a river has taken in its voyage from the mountains to the sea. Each is made of a multitude of tiny chances and decisions, but viewed from outside the voyage, the resulting path is clear.”

“And if I do not choose?”

“That in itself is a choice. In either case, at sunset tomorrow, as you measure time, you return to your people, healed.”

“If I step outside of time, do I live forever?”

“Not forever, but for a very long time. The doorway out of time opened in your world when the Lord gave the tablets of the Law to Moses. When they return to heaven from this world, the doorway closes. But that happens after more years here than, according to your histories, have elapsed since the beginning of recorded time. You would live for a very long time, but you would not age further. When you would return to this world when that world ends, it would be as if no time at all had passed.”

“Would the work there have an impact here? Would it be remembered by history?”

“No, not by history. But traces of your actions would be felt in legends and in songs. To be most effective, you would work in secret. But when people need you, they would find you. And when the Lord would need to remember his covenant with humanity, you would be there to guide him, remind him, and, when appropriate, challenge his decisions.”

I sat in silence, contemplating. When next I looked into the water, the face within the well was silent. I opened my mouth to sing a long tone, to hear it resonate in the depths of the well. The reflection of my face opened its mouth as well, then shattered as the water responded to the vibrations of my voice. When I fell silent, the reflected face returned to being identical to my own.

These were the choices: I could jump or I could stay. I knew that I would not die in the descent, since the face had said that, either way, I would return to the people, healed, tomorrow. I knew that the voice was telling the truth, knew that the voices of prophecy, though they might confuse, would never lie.

I had asked the right questions. I had received appropriate answers. The choice was mine.

I sat by the well for a long time, long enough for the sun to finish setting and for the full moon to rise. As I saw the moon’s reflection move to fill the surface of the water in the well, I heard its voice whisper to me, “Miriam, your sisters await you.”

The well filled with a brilliant glow, as if the light of the moon had transformed into a milky lantern. I knew that I would have to choose, but did not know what the choice would be. All that I could do would be to move to the point of decision.

Certain that I was alone, I dropped my robe by the side of the well, and stepped up onto its wall. For a moment that felt, itself, as if it was outside of time, I hovered there, between constancy and commitment, between time and infinity.

Then I felt my body decide: evenly, with a certainty that my mind did not yet share, my left foot stepped out into the air above the well.

I stepped out, and I fell, and I am falling, down farther than the earthly well could have gone. I hear echoes of sounds pass me (a distant gong, the wheeze of reeds, a resonance of deep sliding trumpets) as I leave the sound of the desert wind. Images flash around me, glowing from the walls (other women falling alongside me, a hare in human clothing, a circle of lesser angels shouting from and to a falling girl, a blue house in a whirlwind surrounded by leaves), as the light from the moon above fades away, and a glow from below grows more brilliant.

I fall away from the land, away from time, and see a multitude of destinies surround me. They spread out over all of time, as if a map has been laid out showing histories past and future, extending in more directions than I can name. Endless rivers of emotion flow through me, starting, perhaps, in fear or uncertainty, but all running toward an ocean of joy.

I know (though I do not know how I know) that this decision is the right one. I do not know if I will ever land, or where, or how, or precisely what awaits me. For now, I let myself sink into the luxury of this moment, away from the pull of time, of earth. I throw my head back, spread my arms, and let the ecstasy of falling overwhelm my soul.

“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.

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.

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.

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).)

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.)

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.)

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)