by Lori Sambol Brody
Do not worry about the consequences. Do not worry about your husband, crumpled on the couch, holding a photo of your daughter. Do not worry about horror movies warning you that they come back wrong, that Frankenstein’s monster always kills. Do not worry about the police with their stock phrase, I’m sorry about your loss, when you know they are thinking: Why did she wear that short skirt why did she get into that boy’s car she’s to blame. Do not think of her last text, Getting a ride home from a friend, home by 2 a.m.
Just run out into the night.
Into the fog into the call of the coyotes into the chill after the rain. Your wails spook an owl and it takes off. Running on oak duff, dead leaves sharp on your bare feet. This nightmare world. Holding the last thing she gave you, the rock of gold sandstone shaped like a heart she found when you hiked to the labyrinth. She liked to give you heart-shaped stones; she called herself basic and laughed. She was not just a broken body wearing a short skirt and high heels in the culvert. Her hand pressing the heart stone, warmed by her body, into your receiving palm.
It is written that Adam was a golem until God cast a soul into him.
The creek near your house runs now, after the summer drought, clearing out algae, pooling between rocks worn by water and time. Drop to your knees. Sink into cold mud. You’ve read the Sefer Yetzirah, The Book of Creation, in your Kabbalah class. All you need is the alphabet, mud, and clean water. And the breath of God, of life. Don’t hesitate. Don’t worry that you will fail or that you don’t know what the breath of life is.
It is written that once a group of rabbis, growing hungry on a journey, created a calf out of earth to eat for dinner. You understand how hunger gnawed at them, hollowed their insides. Hunger is not only for food.
The mud here is gritty and you dig into it, your fingers claw. Gripping some life force that must be deep within the soil. Close your eyes and knead it like the challah dough you knead every Friday. A coyote walks the creek bed, freezes when it sees you. Ignore it. Howl and it’ll run away. Sculpt a head, her long fingers, her breasts.
Golem means unfinished, incomplete, an embryo.
Make it out of love and loss and pain and ecstasy. Remember when you were pregnant, heavy with languor. The third month, fingerprints. The fifth month, eyelids. The eighth month, the brain. Ninth months, the lungs. You created her once, you can do it again. You are a vessel of creation.
Remember your husband holding your hand and telling you to breathe and the entire world was pain and the red on the inside of your eyelids the baby held up all blue and wrinkled the knot of fear the rush of pink and the sudden start of breath entering her as she screamed.
Your husband will not be holding your hand now. Disregard that. He is not needed. He cannot follow you.
It is written that we are all golemim and golemahot until the breath of life makes us human.
Each of the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet correspond to a part of the body. It’s all a matter of chanting the right letters, in the right combination. You do not know how you know the combination. You attribute divine intervention. The mud figure glows then turns red hot, like coals. Heat emanates from the figure. You write the sacred letters, אמח, truth, on the golem’s forehead.
At the last moment, thrust the sandstone heart into the golem’s chest.
It is written that a friend of Nachmanides of Grenada created a golem and sent it to his door, arms laden with pomegranates. Nachmanides let the golem into his house. And into his heart.
Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California. Her short fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Tin House Flash Fridays, the New Orleans Review, Craft, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her stories have been chosen for the Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019 and Best Microfiction 2021 anthologies. She can be found on Twitter at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.