The Golem of Paris

Chapter two

High in the garret above, through brick, and wood, and clay, seeps the gray.

She feels it before she sees it: an icy press, foul and consuming, rushing in like poisoned floodwaters to pry open her many thousand eyes, rousing her to fury, limbs stirring, writhing, wriggling.

She opens her armor, spreads her wings, takes flight.

It lasts one glorious moment and then she crashes into the clay ceiling.

She lands awkwardly, legs bent in six incompatible directions. Even with no one around to see it, it’s more humiliating than painful.

Hissing, she rights herself for another try and once more bounces back as though swatted by a giant hand.

Now the pain is real.

On the bowl of her back, she rocks from side to side, managing to flop onto her belly. Flapping her wings slowly, she ascends cautiously in captive space until she touches a solid surface, the roof of her prison, river mud hardened to ceramic.

Tucking her legs in, she braces herself.

Pushes.

It is like arguing with a cliff. She struggles and struggles and meanwhile the gray has begun to drain, taking her strength with it, time running down.

No.

Abandoning caution, she begins slamming herself upward, again and again and again, at last settling on her side, exhausted, gutted by pain, shell split clean open, bleeding, jaws bent, wings shredded, watching the air as it steadily quiets, her eyes closing a hundred at a time.

Noting with satisfaction, before all goes black, a pale, slim fissure, a crack in the darkness of clay.