Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Earth and Sun, Moon and Stars
Friday, October 10th, 2008
Great Aunt Marion’s daughter has been selling the land off lot by lot since the early 90’s. Fortunately, there isn’t a house on the prescribed spot — not much anyone can do with a ravine that steep and muddy. Which is good, since the will is very detailed and very clear that we have follow Marion’s instructions exactly.
We had to climb over a fence, but we’re used to that from past years. I turned around by habit, soon as I was over, caught the bag of masks Annette threw over. Roy caught the bundle of robes.
Glenna tapped her watch. We started up the leaf-crunching path.
The cauldron was still there; which was good, since it had been a hassle lugging it in the first year after the fence.
I always plan to review my lines for weeks ahead of time. I never wind up reading it until the night before, and stay up late cramming. It works. Once we start, the words just flow.
On the drive up, Roy passed around a script he found online, a different version than the one in the yellow-paged paperbacks Marion left us. The words seemed pretty much the same, some phrases a little old-fashioned and too poetic. The illustrations showed the moon short like Glenna, like Marion, while the sun had Annette’s height and her way of looking elegant even robed and masked. Our books just had words.
Glenna nodded at the exact moment of sunset.
“I wait, invisible,” said Roy. It’s a good thing he just stands in the cauldron and doesn’t go anywhere, since his mask is a silver-speckled black plate, with no holes even for his eyes.
“In the west, I lay down, ” said Annette, crouching with a swirl of velvet.
“While I, in the east, stand up,” said Glenna. She mimed her arms in a crescent like the internet woodcut.
I had a frozen, mind-blank moment, like I always do, then the words came off my tongue, reliable as ever: “The spheres reel in motion, but I am still. I watch all, and nod slumberward.”
Not the usual words, I realized, but the new/old internet version.
“Damn,” said Glenna.
The cauldron cracked with a sound like a gong, and Roy was gone. We heard car alarms, dogs howling, and people shouting in all those new houses. Above us, the sky was full of unfamiliar stars.
The Golem and the Ants
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
The Makers
When your mystical text is bought at a mall bookstore, and you have to cross out the passages about self-actualization to get a clear idea what the golem-making process involves, it’s no wonder that, even though you’ve sculpted the body with the right kind of earthen clay, and even though you’ve matched the Hebrew letters for the word that means life and carved them on the forehead, and even though you’ve chanted the alphabets of the 221 gates in the proper order as you marched around the body in the proper direction–even though you’ve done all that–something can still go wrong.
The Made
When you’ve just woken into the world and the people around you are whooping and shouting, it can be a little frightening. When they take you outside, it’s natural that frightened turns to running.
The Makers
You were clever enough to learn from the old stories, so you didn’t do like the rabbi in one version of the tale, who was crushed when he unmade a golem who’d slipped from his control, the golem grown so large that it towered over its maker, the golem who crushed its maker on returning to being a load of inanimate clay. So making your creation small was wise. Foolish was taking it outside just when a school group passed by, when you could hardly run after and haul it home.
The Made
You wandered days before finding the place that seemed comfortable, and you sat there among the upright stones and the overhanging trees. You sensed bodies there, not turning from mud to flesh like you’d done, but the other way around. Your makers neglected to give you a purpose; becoming earth again seemed as good as any.
Ants
Your queen sought unclaimed ground to start a new colony, and the rest of you came after. It was readymade for you, with vein-tunnels, a stomach big enough to store many wintersworth of grass seed, and a well-protected place up top where the queen could settle in and bring forth generations.
The (Re)Made
You rose from a season’s sleep among the stones and the bodies they marked, and stood, your substance stirring with life, your mind borrowing the colony’s purpose. Hungry, industrious, you moved out into the world, looking for something to build, something to make with your big clay hands.