twenty-fourth night (Epiphany)

Hello. My name is Cheryl Pierce. My mother used to call me Scheherazade. My brother called me Sherry.


This is the story of my brother. This is the story of how he died and how a monster took his place. I call this monster the Golem, but in other circles it is called the Manufactured Newborn. It is a monster of machinery, a thing of grinding gears and bone and sinew. It appears out of nowhere, usually as a small toy, and then grows. It adds to itself and gets bigger and bigger until it can rip a hole in reality - and then it goes back to its home, the Towering Realm, where its true form lies.


Four months ago, I saw the Golem for the first time. I had an epiphany. A sudden realization. It was not a good day.


Cats had been disappearing from our neighborhood. My brother, Paul, told me not to worry about it, but I did. We had two cats and I doted on them. One day, however, one of them disappeared and I went to find him - and I found the Golem instead. It wasn't big yet - it had added some bicycle parts to itself, some cat bones, but it was about the size of a raccoon.


It chased after me on its needle-like legs. I ran. I ran back inside our home and I ran into our kitchen. It followed. Somehow (I don't quite remember), I was able to push it inside the microwave oven and turned it on high. Perhaps it was the microwaves that did it - it seemed sluggish after that. But it was still alive.


My brother, having heard me yell, took that moment to run inside. The Golem turned and pounced on him. It was sluggish, but strong. It's mouth was a drill and I watched as it drilled into my brother's chest. Perhaps it was seeking more materials to grow, but instead it grew inside him. I watched as he convulsed and collapsed. "I can feel it, Sherry," he said as blood dripped from his mouth. "I can feel it inside me." His last words, now the only thing his mouth can say.


I'm afraid I wasn't strong enough then to end his pain. I did not have the conviction to burn him.


I do now.

twentieth night

four more nights until the feast of the epiphany.

epiphany is often called theophany, "vision of god." a divine appearance of a god to a mortal. the burning bush. the pillar of cloud and fire by night.  

one tale of theophany concerns semele, a priestess of zeus, who slaughtered bulls for him. one day, zeus looked and saw her swimming in the river to clean the blood from her body and fell in love with her. he appeared to her as an eagle and impregnated her. the ever-jealous hera convinced semele that it might not have been zeus, though, so semele requested a boon from him. zeus stood on the river styx and declared that he would give anything to her - so she requested to see his true form. zeus was forced to reveal himself and the thunder and lightning of his body incinerated her when she looked. 

and we celebrate the appearance of god. the vision of god. something so incomprehensible that if we were to see its true appearance, we would burn away.

during the time of dying cats, when my brother was still my brother, i saw the golem when it was small. it was growing bigger and it managed to open a small tear to babel. it was too small to go through, but i could still see it: the true form of the golem, the vision of god.

i did not burn away. i saw it and did not burn. perhaps i did not see all of it, but it was enough for me to now how small i was. but i did not burn. i hope that means something.

nine.

sixteenth night

it's a cold night outside. why don't we tell a story to warm us up.

well known is the tale of orpheus and eurydice, how she was taken from him by a snake bite and how he traveled to the underworld to find her and bring her back. but there are other tales that are trips to the underworld -- in greek, this is called "katabasis" or "descent." a hero travels to the underworld (or some other dystopic place) and returns. 

there are many examples of trips to the underworld, of heroes rescuing lost lovers, allegories of winter and summer, the sun and the moon, love and hate, life and death. 

but, while the hero sometimes does not achieve their goal - orpheus fails to rescue eurydice, after all - they do all return from the underworld. they return changed. they have had a manifestation, an epiphany. the realization of a great truth. 

there have been epiphanies in the real world, too. great ones. it was an apple that fell on newton's head that led him to discover gravity. it was a bath and spilled water that led archimedes to yell "eureka." and einstein -- well, allegedly, einstein realized that there was some unseen force in space when he was given something during his childhood. 

he was given a compass.

descent. on the twelfth night, before the feast of epiphany, i will descend. all because of a compass.

five.