Golem: A creature animated by written words
Kristi placed the half-eaten banana across the pages of the book as she bent down to put on her shoes. Assuming a pose that a heron might take, Kristi managed the operation without so much as losing her place. Afterward, she stomped her feet to make sure her shoes were secure.
She slid an old photograph into the pages of the book for a marker, shut it, and put it in her bag. She ate the rest of the banana and threw the peel in the garbage. There was a note from her mother on the front door. Her mother sometimes came during the day while Kristi was away at work. She never read them until morning.
I put lasagna in the fridge for you. Your father and I had extra.
Kristi crumpled the note and threw it in the garbage with the peel. She turned off the lights with a brush of her hand.
Her rain slicker still smelled like new plastic, and the scent of it was all around her when she pulled it over her head. She grabbed her bag and ran out the door to the bus stop. Two and a half miles, every morning. It kept her fit.
Tonight, she would have lasagna for dinner. She wouldn’t put it past her mother to come by with a salad.
Kristi tried hard to give a fuck.
The bus driver might have been Mexican or Filipino, but Kristi had never asked in all the years she’d been taking the bus to her job at the library. Their acquaintance was casual in the extreme and it would have been rude. He had one of those bus driver bodies. With the fat thighs and the wide butt that spread over the seat. It seemed to keep him still even when they made sharp turns. She handed him her pass and he took it with a grunt.
Kristi pulled the book out of the bag, removed the bookmark and turned it over so she wouldn’t have to look at it. It was a book of poems, one she was beginning to realize she hated, and she supposed if anyone had cared to look it would have seemed pretentious.
She caught herself trying to avert the disaster of being noticed for the book, and read it low and at an angle, so that the cover was pointed toward the side of the bus. She didn’t adjust herself though. It was the same reason she put in earbuds. It stopped anyone from talking to her.
The college kids got on when they were closer to the city. Sometimes one of these would sit next to Kristi, and they might politely nod at one another, but no more than that. Not ever. At thirty, she was just a bit too old for anything like friendship, and she probably scared them. Them with all their questions about where they fit in, and her, sitting there next to them, as proof that they simply might not fit in anywhere. That they could… just glide along for the rest of their lives.
The couple in front of her bothered her, mostly because the girl had a loud donkey bray for a laugh. The boy also mumbled a lot and his skin was pock-marked and porous, not that he could help it. The music not quite loud enough to cover the sound, Kristi heard him lean over to his girlfriend and say “I’ve written a poem for you.”
She turned the music up, but she could still see his lips moving. She could see the girl with her donkey bray laugh of pleasure. The bad poetry. The awful jarring words that would come without rhyme, meter, or clarity. Rotten poetry for rotten love that was not aware of what it was.
Kristi shut her eyes very tight and gripped the pages of the book.
It was not going to be a good day.
She leaned her head against the window and exhaled. Her breath lit up the window with fog to reveal a heart that had been traced there previously. Kristi turned her eyes up at the rising buildings and tried to look nowhere.
Kristi stacked books. She did it almost every day. Sometimes she would find a few books out of order, the result of some lazy browser who never gave consideration to the idea the books had been placed in a specific pattern, and she would correct this. She would also pull books that had been requested. She liked doing this.
Someone would pick it up later and never think of her. The book had come from “The Library.” No entity called Kristi had ever touched it. Connected but invisible. All the luxury of life with none of the mess.
Mrs. Beardsley, the head librarian, left Kristi alone with her menial tasks. That was good, because Mrs. Beardsely knew, and Kristi did not like to speak to her unless it was absolutely necessary. The knowledge reflected in Mrs. Beardsley’s eyes sometimes, and it was awful to look upon.
Like when Tracy who stacked books in the poetry section tried to get Kristi to cover for her, and Mrs. Beardsley had had to swoop in and say that that wouldn’t be possible. Or when they had had a meeting and someone wanted to get a local author to come, and someone else had wondered aloud if Allen McConnell was from Seattle.
Kristi stacked three biographies of Oliver Cromwell, one of Roosevelt, two of Mary Curie. She pulled back the biographies of Pasteur, Einstein, and Newton. A teacher somewhere had probably assigned a class to do a paper on a scientist. She could see the trickles sometimes when that happened.
She stayed until closing, and helped Bart out the door with minimal fuss. He was homeless and spent all of his daytime hours perusing the newspapers under the auspice of “finding work.”
“You’re pretty.” Bart said.
“Thank you.” Kristi replied.
“I’ll see you again tomorrow, won’t I?” His breath smelled like old milk.
Kristi smiled back in a way that said “unless I kill myself” and showed him out the door.
When she got home there was salad. Kristi ate it with half the lasagna. She took the picture out of the book. Put it on the tile counter top in front of her stool, and did not cry. Her eyes reddened, her cheeks stung, but she did not cry.
Then she pulled the book out of the bag, ripped it up, and threw it in the garbage.
Her mother was there the next morning, in the kitchen before Kristi had woken up. She was pan frying an egg. Making them square in some perfect manner that Kristi had never quite managed.
“I let myself in, I hope you don’t mind.”
Leave it to her mother to point out the most obvious thing first. Not that she was in the kitchen making breakfast at five o’clock in the morning. Not that it was obvious she had done this on purpose because she had not spoken to her daughter in more than three days.
“No problem.”
Kristi made a point of picking up a banana and sitting a distance away from her mother on the counter where the egg could not easily be given to her.
“How’s dad?” Kristi asked.
“Same as always. Doctor says he could use more exercise, but other than that he’s fit as a fiddle.” Her mother threw a hand towel over her shoulder, scraped the egg out of the pan and put it on a plate. As if on command some toast popped up from her toaster.
“What brings you here so early?” Kristi put her elbows on the table to fill the place where the plate would have fit. A weak resistance to be sure, but it was some.
“Your cousin Jim needed a ride to the airport. Had to go away on business and of course it’s cheapest to fly when everyone is…. here you go honey.” Her mother said, leaning across the counter, trying to put the plate in front of Kristi.
“I’m on a diet, mom.”
“Psh! You’re skin and bones, Kristi. Let your mom make you some breakfast. I came by so I could give you a ride to work today. I’m thinking of taking some classes up there anyway. I figured we could make it a thing.”
“I need my morning walks.” A year ago she could have done a better job of dressing that up. A “no thanks” or even a direction salutation of “mom” but it was not a year ago.
“Why don’t you buy a car Kristi, I thought you were getting all those royalties now. What have you been doing with it?”
Kristi shrugged. “Doesn’t feel right to spend it.”
“If he were alive he’d want you to spend it.”
“If he were alive we wouldn’t have it to spend. People only like poets when they’re dead.” Kristi pushed the plate far away from her, suddenly disgusted at the viscosity of the yolk in a way that made her want to vomit.
“Remember Sheryl Johnson’s boy? Brett? You two went to school together. He’s in town. He’s a widower, and-”
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s been over a year now.”
“I need to leave for work.”
“You haven’t even showered!”
“I showered last night.”
“Kristi, please! I haven’t seen you in a week! We haven’t spoken in months!”
“Sorry mom, I’ll try to make it up to you. Lock up when you leave.”
Kristi liked the fence. Liked the way the wood planks were somehow crooked and straight at the same time. How some of them seemed to twist all the way around, or would whirlpool around knots, but how each one would keep finding the next post to keep the fence moving along. She tracked it with her eyes. The path of it going all the way to where it terminated in the morning mist.
Half a mile away now, she could see the light of her kitchen and imagined her mother digging through her house. Cleaning things up. Moving things about. Preparing a dinner Kristi would probably scrape into the garbage can when eating it seemed too laborious. It was tiresome, but Kristi appreciated that her mother still cared.
Kristi ticked the iPod wheel often. She did it on shuffle and at random because it felt like work, digging through songs she didn’t like to find ones she did. Mining of a trivial sort. Busy work. The kind you did when your nerves were frayed and you didn’t want to admit it to yourself.
She let out a sigh, a long trail of mist that joined the mist around her. Then she breathed in… and her breath caught.
A shadow in the shape of a man stood in a crouch on top of the last visible fence post. Kristi paused, considering a return home. What she believed was the head of the shadow turned to her, head cocked to one side. Her heart caught in her chest, and when it started again the hammering of it seemed simultaneously slow and powerful.
She took a few steps forward, trying to decide whether there was any danger, and when it seemed as if she might be able to make out the features of the shadow in detail…. It stood adroitly and leaned back, turning over and over, hands and feet clutching the hoary boards, until it stood another post distant.
Before she could be startled by the first, an engine blared to life behind her, out of nowhere, and Kristi ran forward. The shadow flipped backwards, end over end, always staying at the limits of her vision.
It was all happening too terribly quick. She hated it when this happened. When things moved so quick that she had to be pulled out of her head. The end of the fence loomed ahead… and maybe she could turn off to the side and pound on someone’s door and ask for help if the shadow turned to get her… or the person behind her decided to chase her down.
The last post loomed, and the shadow crouched there, Kristi ran toward the other end of the road daring to be struck by the car, preparing for the inevitable pounce when the horn honked behind her. She looked away from the shadow, for the first time over her shoulder.
“Kristi, my God! I could have run you over! I can’t see a thing in this damed fog!” Her mother shouted from out the window.
Heart hammering, Kristi looked back to the post. The shadow crouched there. It gave her a minimalist wave, making one arc with its hands while its fingers spread apart. Then it jumped up… and up… and up… until Kristi couldn’t see it anymore.
When Allen had killed himself as clumsily as he managed to do everything else but write, Kristi had wondered if she might begin to go insane. It had felt rather the opposite. As if she was seeing everything as it really was for the first time, stripped naked. Allen had always been the romantic one, the one who felt all their feelings, even if he bottled them up. With him gone, she had stopped caring.
So when her mother sat there demanding that she see a therapist, because after all Aunt Tabitha had gone to see a therapist and there was no shame in it, because that’s what they were there for, Kristi shrugged.
She might be going insane.
So what?
She had been terrified on the dirt road of course. Absolutely terrified. But now that she was in the car again, trapped inside of her own head… now that she was herself it couldn’t matter less.
“I just thought I saw someone by the fence, mom. I don’t need a therapist for that.” Kristi had deigned not to tell her mother that she had also seen the shadow jump up into the sky.
“You don’t talk to anyone. You can’t keep this all bottled up. You were crying when I came across you.”
“I can’t afford a therapist anyway.”
“You’ve got over a hundred thousand dollars in that bank account, and don’t pretend otherwise. I saw your bank statement while I was cleaning up the house.”
“It’s not my money, mom.”
“It’s yours if it’s anyone’s. So spend it to get some help, or I’ll get the help for you.” Kristi turned to look out the window. The sun was rising and light streamed around the high rises of the city like water through a sluice gate. Her mother, perhaps sensing she had gone too far added, “Are you sure there wasn’t someone there? They might have run off. Some crazy fan or something?”
Kristi didn’t like thinking about “the fans” or Allen himself for that matter, since the two were directly responsible for the events that led up to the dissolution of, what she was increasingly coming to think of as, her actual life. Ever since… well… she’d never really been able to figure out how to put things back on track.
“Allen’s fans don’t even know where I live. They all think about the old house down in B-town, the one where he did all the writing. It’s the one all the fan sites show.” The house she lived in currently had been owned by Allen’s aunt and uncle, and they had bought it with the intention of starting a family. Allen even got a “real” job after his third book of poetry, shockingly, failed to sell. She should have predicted the noose right then.
“Still, he has all those weirdos. All those little fans of his. All it takes is one.”
“His fans are all literary snobs. They’re not the stalking type. Besides, they’re all too busy congratulating themselves for making Allen famous after he died to think of me.” Kristi had never become directly involved with Allen’s fandom. When they spoke of Allen, they were speaking of someone who was a stranger to her, as if they knew him better than she ever had. It made her uncomfortable.
“Kristi, you be careful. I’m going to come pick you up from work tonight. Okay?”
Kristi sighed, too tired to argue, rubbed her temples, and stepped out of the car. “Yes mother.”
Kristi liked the smell of old books, even if on some level she knew it was the smell of rot. A slow rot to be sure, but as she understood it there was some acid slowly chewing up the paper, and that over time it would turn the whole library to dust. When she bent over to stack some books on the bottom shelf, she stole a moment and sat there to relish the smell. It worked out that there were a lot of M names down there. Madonna, Mandela, and even “The Merovingians.”
It was about where Allen would have been, if someone had written a biography about him….
The book was there, not even a quarter of an inch thick, and recessed every so slightly that its spine was hidden in the shade of the adjacent books. It had passed through her hands before, a little thing mostly full of pictures and words on glossy paper. The kind of book that never picked up a pleasant smell when it aged. Unpleasantly immortal. It was “Fiery Shores” the first of
Allen’s three published books.
Kristi felt her knees start to give.
There were less than one thousand copies of “Fiery Shores” in all of existence. Kristi had refused to let it go into another run. A copy was worth three thousand dollars. Easy. The library did not have one.
She sat with her back pressed against Gandhi, Garland, and Gates and watched as her legs wobbled beyond her control. Breathe, she reminded herself and her chest released from within as if her lungs had been stuck together with an adhesive and had to be plied apart.
“You okay, Miss McConnell?” Bart asked.
Kristi put one shaky hand on the shelf behind her and stood. “Yes. I’m okay, Bart. Thank you for asking.”
“I can get Mrs. Beardsley if you want. You don’t look too well, ma’am.”
Kristi didn’t respond. She was too busy looking at the book.
Nodding politely, she pushed past Bart. Fresh air. That was the thing. That would…. A punk girl with a red mohawk was reading “From the Mouths of Golems.” A first printing, of which there were only five hundred copies. It was Allen’s second book.
Kristi locked herself in the break room closet and called her mother.
Allen was like a three-legged puppy. Cute, humble, well-intentioned, but not really good for much. Kristi had asked him to replace a hallway light bulb once. Instead of getting a step ladder and replacing it, he had climbed on top of two buckets, managed to twist the bulb the wrong way, and cut his hand severely before falling to the ground and almost breaking his leg. Useless. Clumsy. Always getting into trouble.
Allen.
Love as clumsy as his could not help but be sweet. He loved her whole-heartedly because he did not have the subtlety for anything else. After five years it had started to wear thin. It would get to be too much when he came to her, red-faced and embarrassed, because he could not work up the courage to call the customer service number on the back of his credit card. Allen started to share less and less of himself.
Was it the way she had taken to rolling her eyes when he came to her with his tiny emergencies? Or was it the way she had been only lukewarm about his poetry?
That had hurt him badly. Poetry was everything to Allen. She knew that he didn’t really think of himself as Allen the taker out of garbage, Allen the maker of food, or even as Allen the husband. Allen only ever really felt like Allen when he wrote, and Kristi had been loathed that fact, especially when the part of himself he kept hidden was so lackluster.
“If you get a job, we can afford a baby.”
“I’ll make it big one day, honey. You’ll see. We can have babies then.”
For Poe she could have been second. For Byron, third. For Anais Nin, she would have become a lesbian. But for clumsy Allen who seemed to tuck in only half his shirt simply to spite her? For useless Allen who looked down at his shoes and scratched his hair when he asked her if maybe, if she felt like it, she wanted to have sex? No. For Allen she would not settle for second class.
She had wanted a baby. Someone little to pass on the things she knew. Someone to pester as her mother pestered her. Allen had not objected at all. But he never did. Allen was quiet when things bothered him. He bottled everything up for the page. Every insubstantial, melodramatic little bit of himself.
“Why can’t you just write on the side?”
“Because it’s like drawing breath, taking a moment to yourself before you dive back into life.”
Except he’d never really dived into life, not really. For Allen, it had all been drawing breath until she’d convinced him to stop.
So he’d tried to kill himself. Well, perhaps “tried” was being too harsh because it was the hanging that killed him, however bad he’d botched the job. The rope had come loose because he had not anchored it well. It crushed his throat though, but he lasted long enough for her to get home and call the ambulance.
The whole time she couldn’t help but notice the tears in his eyes. The tears that said “Sorry I fucked this up. I was going to try and do it better than this.”
She wished she’d told him how she loved his honesty. How she loved his simple way of always saying what he felt when he could be compelled to speak. How she loved the way he touched her like he couldn’t believe she was real.
Instead, she had said “Oh Allen, what were you thinking?”
“I’m not leaving. There’s a psycho reader. Some fan who has gone out of their mind.” If food was a weapon, Kristi’s mother was planning to equip a small army. Kristi watched the food with a grimace. There was a bowl of spaghetti where the noodles seem to be… adhering to one another in a way that reminded her of collagen on the surgery channel. The smell of fried eggplant wafted to her and she had to put her hands in front of her face.
“I’m overstressed. I need to relax. I’ll take a vacation.”
“From the Mouths of Golems,” first edition -because some legal loophole had allowed for a second against her wishes- was worth six thousand dollars. Allen’s agent sometimes sent her links to auctions on ebay. Kristi guessed he thought it made her feel good to see Allen valued.
“I’m going to call your father. He’s got that shotgun. We’re sleeping over.”
Kristi had a vision of her father hearing a mousetrap clap shut in the middle of the night and shooting his foot off by mistake. If she wanted a template for her relationship with Allen, she need look no further than her own parents. Dad taught history. Not too well. His aim was probably worse.
“Mom, I will not be responsible for Dad having a gun in my house.”
“And I won’t have my daughter putting her life in danger, because she’s too proud.”
If she’d seen one copy of one of Allen’s rares that would be one thing. Two copies though. Two copies of Allen’s rares? The ones that had lived in the attics of people who subscribed to obscure literary magazines? That had collected dust for five years before they had been worth more than what they’d been picked up for in the bargain bin? Not a chance.
“Allen had a gun in our closet. There’s no need to call dad.” It was a lie of course. Allen got nervous about chopping onions. However, Kristi knew that it would placate her mother.
“You should call the police.”
“And tell them that I may have seen someone?”
“I just think someone should know.”
“Know what?”
“Just… just… stuff.”
Kristi could see the fence from her bedroom window. Far and away, illuminated in the moonglow. It was wet country around here, and it had probably been a swamp once, and the earth had never given up all the damp. So every night and every morning the water rose up like a ghost, saying “This is not the way things used to be. Once there was water all over this place, and now we are all that is left.”
Kristi didn’t get up from her bed, because she wasn’t sure if she was dreaming or not. Wasn’t sure she wanted to find out, because far and away, on the very last fence post that she could see, was the shadow. It was doing a hand stand with one arm, its legs spread wide. Kristi wanted to bite her comforter. Bite her knuckle. Shout for her mother.
But she was too terrified to find out she wasn’t dreaming.
The shadow began to do back flips along the fence, up toward the road that led to her house. Unable to look away, she watched, wondering what it would do when he reached the last post that would carry him where it wanted to go. Would it simply go backward and spin forever in a loop? Would it jump off and clumsily walk toward her?
The shadow moved so slickly, and so fluidly Kristi knew it couldn’t be human. When it fell the boards did not shudder. There was no snapping of twigs in the night, and the wind did not touch it. There was no strain in its movements. If I am dreaming, I can wake up, and it won’t be there anymore.
Kristi closed her eyes and counted out a minute. She opened them again, and saw two big yellow cat’s eyes pressed against her window. No other feature was visible. It smiled, and then there was an infinity of white teeth gleaming without light, set in a face that she couldn’t see. Only the two yellow cat’s eyes and the teeth.
For the first time she could hear a sound produced by the creature. It was dragging a finger across her window. She could hear the squeal of it against the glass, like a squeegee. One cat’s eye closed and reopened. A wink. Then it jumped up high into the sky again and was gone.
Kristi urinated.
Kristi stood in the kitchen, eating another banana, and stared at the fence outside. Good poetry flows. It’s like liquid. It was not how Allen wrote, and it’s not even something Allen would have said, but it came to her mind for some reason and it would not be dismissed. Poetry is supposed to flow.
“Why is the laundry machine already running?”
“I had a few loads in a hamper in my room I’d forgotten to do.” Kristi lied. She’d slept in the tub last night with the door locked. She hadn’t stripped the bed until half an hour ago. She’d tried to scrub the mattress with a wash cloth, but in the end she’d had to settle with flipping it.
“Do you ever eat anything besides bananas?”
“I like the texture.” They were like eating air that had a little bit of flavor.
“You better watch what you eat, Kristi. You’re already thing as a rail. You’ll be nothing but banana if that’s all you put inside you.”
Allen’s second book had been called “From the Mouths of Golems” after the Hebrew myth. You made a man out of clay, put words in its mouth, and it became animate. Kristi tapped her finger on the tiles of the kitchen counter, and wondered.
“I know mom.” Kristi ate the rest of her banana out of spite.
“Did you hear anything last night?”
“Not a thing. You?”
Her mother shook her head, with the barest look of defeat.
“You think dad’s burned down the house trying to make breakfast yet?” Kristi said, every so slightly implanting the suggestion that maybe it was time for her mother to go home.
Kristi grabbed a handful of flour from out of the cupboard when her mother left, and headed to her room. She opened the door to the patio with her free hand, and turned back to face the glass. She blew the flour out of her palm. It caught on whatever it was the shadow had left behind.
“Breathe”
It was the title of the book in the garbage. The book of Allen’s that she had only found a week ago, when she had finally tidied up his office. The one she had been debating on whether or not to publish. The one he had been hiding from her.
What happened to all the life poured into words? Did any of it linger? What happened to the hours spent on a novel? The weeks on the World Histories. Where did the months go after they were spent on the textbooks? After it had wrapped around the words, flowed through the holes and around the curves of letters, where did the life go once it had made the words more than little pictures of nothing?
Kristi wondered if it were possible that such focus could be gathered up. She wondered if it could be accrued around the right sort of words to give them shape, purpose and will. A Golem.
In the legend you made a man out of clay, baked him, and stuck a bit of the Torah in his mouth. That was a very Biblical shape, she supposed. But Poetry? Poetry was about ephemeral things. Fleeting feelings that were also fundamental and immutable. Poetry was about sunlight and shadow. It was about starshine and moonglow. Enlightenment and Endarkling. It was about the work you did so you could relax and enjoy it later.
It hardly seemed fair that the Golem was coming for her. She hadn’t been the one to write the poetry. She had made money but she had never spent it. She had ripped up the book, yes, but was that so wrong? And no one knew other than her, so why was it coming now? What did it want?
Kristi sat on the patio, took out the book of Allen’s poetry, which was covered in tape and had some sauce stains, and read quietly to herself while the sun went down over the distant hills. She used Allen’s picture as the bookmark, and tapped her toe to while away the hours.
It came as she knew it would, when the sun was gone and the mists were thick. Poems loved mist, loved the way it obscured the concreteness of things, so that vision itself was a creative process. It appeared in the same place, at the end of the fence post.
One moment it was not there, the next it was.
Kristi watched as it danced, as the moonglow polished the darkness of it, making it sleek and supple. Then it began to move the same as last time. Tumbling along the hoary boards of the fence. Hands over feet, feet over hands, and back again. Sommersaulting and backflipping. Nimble as words were wont to be when they had been made with care. Kristi found herself humming an old bit of poetry, so beautiful and simple it had ceased to be poetry at all.
It was “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” She would have liked to sing it to her child if things had turned out differently. If Allen had not been so in love with the Lovely Wicked Words that he could not stand to live without them.
The shadow seemed surprised for a moment, because once it had backflipped off the fence, it stopped stock still, and stared at her. Even from a distance its eyes were big and yellow. It’s teeth were white and voracious. Kristi knew it would not speak. Spoken words were profane to it. Only on the page and in the mind, there, and only there, was the magic of its being real.
It spun like a ballerina, landing on one foot, and pushing off with the other to spin again. It flipped about on its side. It flipped horizontally like an ice-skater. It landed on her patio without so much as a thud.
“Hello,” said Kristi.
The thing approached her, and as it did the lights of the patio faded to nothing. It would not be seen. It was a thing always to be beyond sight. Always beyond understanding, because what it really was was different to everyone, and thus it must never be seen entire.
She picked Allen’s book back up from the table, and sipped her coffee. The words lay there, still and lifeless. They evoked no emotion. Not in her. The shadow stood there, so dark she could barely see anything else.
“I never got him, not really. And I think anyone who says they do is lying.” Kristi turned the page of the book. There were a few poems in here that she knew were supposed to be about her. About Allen’s love for her. A poor expression of it, if it had been such a thing to write poems about.
“I appreciated him though. I appreciated the way he tried. Even when he failed, and I knew he would keep on failing, I appreciated that he tried.” Kristi looked up into the unblinking yellow cat’s eyes. “But how am I supposed to appreciate words when they killed my husband?” There were tears in her eyes. How long had it been since she cried? Not since the funeral surely.
“He was only ever really alive when he wrote these… these things.” Kristi gestured at the book. “Nothing for me. Not ever. Not really. Not like what he had for the words. I only ever got a little bit of him, and when I wanted even a little bit more he had to take it all away. Like I was asking him to take out his own heart.” The shadow knelt in front of her, wrapped its arms around its legs, and rested it’s chin on its knees. The teeth sparkled.
“You’re a parasite. You just lay there to gobble away the hours of someone’s life, and you aren’t cruel to anyone so much as you are cruel to your creators. All the wasted hours, and it all wastes the same, whether the words flow or don’t.” Kristi choked on a sob, and put her face in her hands.
A dark finger, that was neither cold nor warm, soft nor harsh, lifted her chin. Another wiped the tears from her eyes. The shadow leaned forward, put both its hands on her knees, and opened its mouth wide as its cats eyes gazed at her sadly.
“I don’t like you. I don’t understand you, and I don’t think there anything there to be understood. But I can appreciate you, if that’s what you want. I can… appreciate the life that went into you. I can pause a moment in sadness, in respect of that even if I think it was wasted.” Without knowing why Kristi lifted the book and put it toward the Golem’s mouth. Once she let go of the book the Golem’s mouth snapped shut like a trap, so quickly it was as if it had eaten the sound as well as the book.
It’s eyes turned from yellow to silver while she watched. They were now the silver of the moon when the sun rose, like faded blue denim. The color of the night surrendering to day. It stood up and walked away, neither graceful nor clumsy, until at the last moment, when she saw it standing out in the mists… it turned to vapor and floated away.
Kristi sat for a while, letting time pass. She needed a moment. A pause for breath between this moment and the next, whether that moment would be mundane or extraordinary. That’s what a poem should be, Kristi thought. A pause for breath. A considerate look over the shoulder back at all that had come before. Kristi waited until the sun rose, and warm golden light danced across her cheeks.
