The Golem of Hollywood

The Offering

Her older brother says, “You are mine, for I am elder.”

Her twin brother says, “You should love me, for you arrived on my heels.”

Her older sister says, “You are ungrateful and must humble yourself.”

Her twin sister says, “You are willful and must submit.”

Her father says, “You remind me of one I once knew. She flew away.”

Her mother frowns and says nothing at all.

Of herself, she says, “I am mine and I will do as I please.”

One year has passed since Asham’s sisters wed. Now the harvest has come again — a great bounty, thanks to Cain’s wooden mule — and their father declares that they will bring their offerings soon.

“And then you must choose.”

“I choose nothing,” Asham says.

Eve sighs.

“It isn’t right to be alone,” Adam says. “Every creature finds its mate.”

“‘Its’? Am I an animal?”

Nava, bent over the loom, snorts.

Adam says, “If you won’t make a decision, we will allow the Lord to make it for you.”

“I thought you and He weren’t on speaking terms,” Asham says.

Yaffa feeds the fire, clucks her tongue. “Don’t be rude.”

“Your vanity is a sin,” Adam says.

“You say everything’s a sin.”

“Things cannot go on as they have,” Adam says.

“They’re grown men,” Asham says. She turns to her sisters. “Tell your

husbands to stop behaving like children.” She picks up the carrying gourd and starts out.

“I’m not done talking to you,” Adam says.

“I’ll be back later,” Asham says.

Whenever their father speaks of the garden, his voice droops with sorrow. Knowing nothing of the early days, Asham feels not sadness but wonder that things could be any different than they are. Her greatest pleasure is to walk alone, plucking flowers, grass caressing her bare knees. The land smiles on her. As a girl she would annoy her parents by coming home with her face caked in mud and her hands teeming with bugs and worms and snakes that she has been warned never, ever to touch. They are her companions, the earth’s hidden majority, the displaced and the disdained.

Today the valley sings of spring, and she hums in harmony as she tramps through the fields, the gourd swinging by her side, keeping time. She sips air sweet with pollen and savory with solitude.

And why shouldn’t she be vain? Not terribly much, but she’s not going to pretend she doesn’t see how her brothers look at her. And would be lying if she said she didn’t find their rivalry flattering, in some perverse way. Though she thinks it would be wicked if that were her only reason for holding out. She knows them. She knows that choosing one will rupture the fragile truce that exists because she has steadfastly refused them both.

What kind of creator creates a world out of balance?

Asham does not share all of Cain’s doubts about the Lord’s perfection, but neither can she content herself with the simple obedience preached by Abel and their father.

Two by two they exist.

Father and Mother, Cain and Nava, Abel and Yaffa.

And her.

She is the odd number, extraneous, a joke perpetrated by a cruel god.

Runty and irate, she arrived last, moments after Yaffa, in a gush of blood. Their mother speaks of the birth as if she still feels the pain.

In that moment, I understood my punishment.

She does not speak this way of any of her other children, only Asham. Leading Asham to wonder: was the punishment the agony, or her very existence?

Twilight finds her hugging her knees beneath the canopy of a carob tree. Against a sky of purple and gold, soot-colored lumps come over the hill.

Abel, returning with the flock.

Asham watches his regal shape grow. Her twin is fine and fair with fluffy golden hair; he looks, in fact, not dissimilar to the animals he tends. Though she has never heard him raise his voice in anger, there is nothing weak about him. She has seen him carry four stragglers at once, digging his fingers into fleece, lifting while they bleated and protested.

Across the meadow, she can hear him clicking his tongue and stamping his crook, urging the sheep homeward.

The dog sprints ahead to scout.

Asham lets out a low whistle, and the animal pricks up its ears. It bounds through the foliage and into her arms, licking her face. She holds it close and puts her finger to her lips.

“I know you’re out there.”

Asham smiles.

“Both of you,” Abel says. “I can hear you.”

“No, you can’t,” she calls.

He laughs deeply.

She releases the dog and it bolts forward to lick its master’s hand. Asham crawls out and shows herself. “How did you know it was me?”

“I know you,” he says.

“You’re out late.”

“I could say the same about you.”

“I didn’t want to go home,” she says, hefting the sloshing gourd on her shoulder. It wobbles on a handle made of spun flax — Cain’s invention.

“Let me,” Abel says, taking the gourd as easily as if it were empty.

The light has left the trees, and the night stirs, prey and predator alike seeking cover. Fireflies flash and extinguish. The flock tightens of its own accord, and the dog barks at any who stray. Abel listens to Asham relate the discoveries of the day, showing him with her hands the size of the iridescent beetle she caught this morning.

“Don’t exaggerate,” he says.

“I’m not,” she says, jostling him.

“You’re spilling my water,” he says.

“Sorry — your water?” she says.

“Now my leg’s all wet,” he complains.

“Last I checked, I drew it.”

“I’m carrying it.”

“I never asked you to,” she says.

He clucks his tongue at her. It makes her feel like she’s one of his sheep.

She says, “Father says we’ll bring the offerings next week.”

“It’ll be good to give thanks. The Lord has been generous.”

Depending on her mood, his piety either charms or irritates her. At present she wants to hit him again, in earnest; he knows as well as she does that Adam has set her a deadline.

They fall silent. Not for the first time, she wishes Abel would be the one to lead the conversation. Talking to him is like floating in a lake.

Talking to Cain is like thrashing in a whirlpool.

“I’m expecting another lamb any day now,” Abel says.

“Can I help?” she asks.

“If you’d like.”

Asham’s sisters are mystified by the satisfaction she takes midwifing the ewes. Nava, particularly averse to manual labor, makes snide comments.

A man in a woman’s body. That’s you.

The gory frenzy thrills Asham, though, and until her brothers settle their differences, accepting a lamb into her arms is the closest she’ll come to motherhood.

Abel says, “I wish you’d make up your mind.”

“And if I choose him?”

“Then I hope you’ll reconsider.”

“Don’t be greedy,” she says.

“It isn’t greedy to love someone,” Abel says.

“Yes,” she says. “It is. There’s nothing greedier.”

The altar is high atop the Mountain of Consideration, one day’s journey from the valley floor.

It is a pilgrimage fraught with disappointment: the closer they draw, the more landmarks they reach, the clearer the memories of previous failures. Cain has often argued that they’re wasting good food. They ought to face the fact that they are praying to no one, and that their survival depends solely on their own efforts.

The idea terrifies everyone else, including Nava. Only Asham can see any value in it.

She knows what it is like to rely on herself.

It was in this same spirit that Cain built the wooden mule, in defiance of Adam’s warnings. When the crops came up plentiful and fat, Cain hurled the sheaves at his father’s feet and crowed.

You are cursed. Not by Heaven, but by your own lack of imagination.

However stern Adam’s rebuke, Asham observed that he did not hesitate to eat from Cain’s harvest.

The journey began at sunrise; by midday they are trudging along, weak from having fasted. Abel carries his offering on one shoulder and guides Yaffa with his free hand. Cain and Nava lean on carved walking sticks. The wind whips Asham’s hair, and she lags behind, breathless with anxiety. If she feels especially jumpy, it’s with good reason. With the brothers still at loggerheads, her father has declared that she will be given to the one whose offering draws favor.

She’s not sure how seriously to take this threat. He has made similar pronouncements in the past. But the zeal with which he charges up the hill — Eve following him like a shadow — tells her this time will be different.

Cain falls in next to her.

“Cheer up,” he murmurs. “What’s the worst that can happen? Me. Lucky you. Anyhow,” he says, giving her a dig in the ribs, giving her a heretical wink, “I wouldn’t worry too much.”

She wishes she shared the confidence of his unbelief.

It seems an accepted truth that Cain is the clever one, Abel the handsome one. To her it’s never been quite so clear. That mode of thinking — the assertion that if one person is blessed with one talent, the other must have an equal talent; the idea that equity inevitably prevails — grates hard against her experience. It’s true that she finds Abel easy to look at. But she can just as easily look away, knowing that she can always come back to him, and find him unchanged.

There is beauty in imperfection.

Beauty in its evolution.

On the surface, her brothers would seem mismatched to their pursuits. Better Abel to preside over the land, Cain to cope with the bloody realities of livestock. But Asham knows better. For the most part, sheep are self-contained. They reproduce themselves. They emerge fully formed. They allow Abel to ply his benevolence from a comfortable distance.

Farming is different. It is hand-to-hand combat, a constant negotiation with an unwilling partner. It is the slaughter of weeds, the massacre of thorns and thistles. It drafts unruly trees and drills them into orderly rows, inducing them to produce fruits that are larger and bigger every season. And it is there, on the line between coaxing and coercion, dreaming and plotting, that Cain thrives.

“Here,” he says, handing her his stick. “You look like you could use it.”

He leaves it with her and goes ahead to walk beside Nava, glancing back to wink at Asham again. She thinks he is more handsome than anyone will admit. His scaly green eyes ripple like rising grass. His dark brow holds the force of storm clouds that frighten and sustain them all. For better and for worse, he moves her.

Exhausted, the family huddles together on their knees. A year’s worth of weather has erased the traces of their last offerings, and as Adam raises his hands in supplication, praying that their gifts be accepted with favor, the howling wind drowns him out.

He finishes his prayer, and they rise.

Cain offers first, a bundle of leftover flax. Adam ordered him to bring wheat, but Cain refused, arguing that the crops were his, to be distributed as he pleased. Grow your own and you can do what you like.

He places the limp, fibrous mass atop the stone altar. Nava pours out a libation of foul-smelling retting water and they reconvene at a distance, watching the heavens for a sign of forgiveness.

The heavens remain expressionless.

Cain smiles sourly. The silence vindicates him, even as it robs him of a wife.

Abel has brought his finest newborn lamb. Three days old and unsteady on its legs, it could not manage the walk, and he has bound it hand and foot. As he carries it to the altar, it raises its head in search of its mother, wailing miserably when it cannot find her.

Yaffa burrows into Asham’s shoulder.

Abel sets the lamb down and leans over it, soothing it, stroking its belly.

Cain says, “Get on with it.”

Abel’s hand trembles as he raises the slaughtering stone. He glances back at Asham, as if seeking her permission. She looks away and waits for the scream.

It does not come. She looks again. The lamb is squirming. Abel has not moved.

“Son,” Adam says.

Abel shakes his head. “I can’t.”

Eve moans softly.

“Then let’s go,” Nava says.

“We can’t leave the poor thing here,” Yaffa says.

“It cannot come down,” Adam says. “It is consecrated.”

That is precisely the sort of obscure logic that drives Cain mad, and he makes an exasperated noise and strides forth to snatch the stone from Abel’s hand.

“Hold it down,” he says.

Abel is wan, useless.

Cain turns to the rest of the family, appraising them one by one before addressing Asham.

“Help me.”

Her heart punches.

He says, “Do you want to be finished here, or not?”

As though compelled by an outside force, she approaches the altar.

The lamb squeals and kicks and she cradles its hot body.

“Keep it still,” Cain says. “I don’t want to cut myself.”

She grasps the lamb’s feet. It bucks wildly. Terror has doubled its strength and she nearly lets go. Cain grabs it.

“Listen,” he says. His voice is gentle. “It’ll be over in a minute. The tighter you hold him, the better it’ll go for both of us. For all of us. Tight. Tighter. Good. Good.”

Asham shuts her eyes.

Warmth jets across her arms.

The kicks slow and then cease altogether.

She swallows back vomit.

“It’s over.”

She opens her eyes. The dripping stone hangs by Cain’s side, and he is gazing testily at the mute sky. Abel stares in horror at the lamb’s carcass.

Though weak herself, Asham rises, takes him by the hand, and leads him away.

They have not descended far when the top of the mountain explodes.

The sound splits Asham’s skull and the light blinds her and she is cast down and awakes to Yaffa screaming and Eve lying in Adam’s arms and Abel cowering and Nava groaning in pain.

Asham’s ears ring.

Where is Cain?

Rolling gales of dust pour down the mountain. She hears coughing and the babble of her mother, unhinged. Where is Cain? Asham starts crawling up the hill, calling his name, overwhelmed with relief when at last she spies his compact, muscular shape, erect and visible against a greasy plume of smoke, rising from the blast-scorched stone.

He is staring at the altar.

The smell of charred flesh and singed hair is overpowering.

It begins to rain, cool drops against Asham’s upturned face.

“Mercy,” Eve says.

Yaffa has crawled over to Nava and is pressing her bleeding arm. Adam falls to his knees to pray.

The rain thickens, lashing loose chunks of the hillside, sending muddy currents sluicing toward the valley.

They are all shocked, but none more so than Abel, who blinks rapidly, rainwater streaming into his open mouth, his golden curls a sodden mass.

“Mercy,” Eve says. “Mercy.”

Cain hears her. He turns back, blows water from his nostrils. “What does that mean?”

He faces the altar again. Asham cannot tell if he is pleased or horrified, who is victor, who vanquished.

Days later, the top of the mountain continues to chuff smoke, a thin black line twining into the sky. It is still drizzling, the earth still drenched, the judgment a riddle.

Having regained his composure, Abel contends in his smuggest voice that the offering was his and therefore the favor shown to him — a statement that draws whoops of derision from Cain. The storm, Cain insists, was nothing more than a coincidence, and besides, favor was clearly shown to he who carried out the deed.

Bitter words rush in to fill the void.

The inability to interpret a sign would seem to indicate to Asham that it is no sign at all.

Sick of listening to them fight, she reiterates that the choice is hers.

The men, shouting, pay her no mind.

Absorbed in his labor, Cain does not notice her approaching. She reaches the edge of the field where it borders the orchard, and he stands up from behind the wooden mule, grunting, black chest hair flat with sweat.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“I wasn’t sneaking,” she says.

“I couldn’t hear you,” he says. “Therefore, you were sneaking.”

“If you can’t hear me, that’s your problem.”

He laughs, spits. “What brings you all the way out here?”

She regards the wooden mule. Deftly carved, sleekly proportional, the grips grown shiny where Cain rests his hands to steer, it is a marvelous object, turning the earth ten times as fast as Adam can. The real mule yoked to it swishes its tail rhythmically, causing the mosquitos at its rump to scatter and contract.

Sometimes she wonders what her parents’ life was like before Cain arrived. More peaceful, surely, but also frustratingly basic.

She would admire him so much more if he did not demand it.

“Hard at work,” she says.

“No time to waste. New cycle.”

She nods. It has rained on and off for weeks, leaving puddles in the churned earth. The breeze coming through the orchard brings fig and lemon, cloying and cutting.

“I wanted to ask you something,” she says.

“All right.”

“On the mountain,” she says. “You chose me to hold the lamb.”

He nods.

“Why.”

“Because I knew you could do it.”

“And how did you know that?”

“Because,” he says, “you’re like me.”

Asham has no ready answer. She could say No, I’m not, I’m nothing like you. She could cite the womb she shared with Abel. She remembers the blood spurting and the twitching of the lamb as it died, and it repels her to know that Cain could see that in her and bring it out.

But she cannot blame him, can she, if it was there all along.

He moves closer to her, an intoxicating mineral reek.

“We could build a whole world together,” he says.

“The world already exists.”

“A new one.”

“You have Nava for that.”

He makes an impatient noise. “I want you.”

She starts to move away from him, and he grabs her arm.

“I’m begging you,” he says. “Please.”

“Don’t do that,” she says. “Don’t ever beg.”

He flushes red, and his face swells, and he pulls her to him, crushing his lips against hers, his stubble shredding the skin on her chin, his humid chest an animal skin thrown over her. His tongue stabs through her teeth; he would suck the life from her, and she works her hand between their bodies and shoves him back, sending him stumbling into the mud.

“What are you doing?” she says.

“I’m sorry,” he says, rising.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and he throws himself atop her.

In an instant he has torn her robes off, and she screams and kicks, and they wallow in the sucking, squelching mud. Stones bite her naked back. She pounds his arms, strains at his chin as if to snap his head off, but he slaps her and shakes her and roars his dominance. He will not be denied; she will be his, he will possess her.

Overhead, dark birds puncture a blazingly clear sky.

She gropes in the mud for a stone, opens a jagged chasm in his forehead that sheets blood into his eyes. He bays and releases her, clutching at his face, and she wriggles free and runs.

She runs, naked, maddeningly slowly, her feet sinking into the mud, her limbs gowned in clay. She clears the edge of the field and breaks through a wooded patch and plunges across another field — fallow, muddy, slowing her further — and more woods and then the pasturelands begin. He’s behind her. She can hear his feet slapping the wet ground, and she scrambles, chest burning, up a hillside; she reaches the crest and below sprawls the soft wonderful gentle flock and the frantic spot of the dog and Abel, tall and golden.

She screams for help and Cain tackles her.

Down they tumble, grabbing at each other instinctively, turning over and over, again and again slammed against the ground, their mud-covered bodies picking up leaves and twigs and grass, their noses touching, his eye sockets rimmed with blood, his forehead a bloody valley, blood and mud soaking his forelocks.

At the bottom of the hill they come to a rest, broken and slashed and coughing plant matter. The dog’s barks race over the pasture, and a long shadow enfolds Asham.

Abel says, “You will be repaid for your wickedness.”

Cain wipes his mouth. The back of his hand comes away red. He spits. “You know nothing.”

“I know what I see.” Abel tosses down his crook. He kneels, scoops Asham into his arms, and starts to carry her away.

He has taken five steps when the crook splinters on the back of his skull.

The earth here is drier, thirstier, unforgiving as Asham falls and cracks her own head against it. Her eyes cloud and her ears dull and her limbs do not work and her tongue lolls like a slug in her mouth; she can do nothing other than watch them struggle. It shouldn’t last long, and it does not. Abel is larger, and stronger, and Cain, brought to his knees, begs for mercy while the sheepdog snaps and snarls.

What will you tell Mother.

Such a brazen ploy. So simple. She would never fall for it. But she knows that Abel will, because he, too, is simple, and she watches, immobile, as his anger melts and he extends a hand to his brother and Cain rises up.