Her opiod receptors are blown. There is only so much relief a body is built to take, her doctor tells her. As she fills out the hospice forms, she makes a mental list of things she would’ve rather allotted her life’s pleasures to: afternoons spent eating cherries and brownie batter, the encyclopedia of textures of skins of the world that she never got to touch. Are there equations in this? Could she have traded the gardens of heirloom tomatoes she grew every summer for forty years for the ability to walk on her cancer softened hips? please god please god please god, i’ll trade you the four nights when i was nineteen i couldn’t sleep for laughing, the pair of red soled shoes i had when i was thirty and… Judah realizes she doesn’t have anything else in her life that she could trade with god. She wishes for two pain free months, three weeks, a hundred minutes. She wishes she had had a daughter. She wishes the cancer hadn’t metastized. She doesn’t know a god who would give her any of this.

She wishes she had told her story any kind of different way; loneliness, divorce, and isolation have been done to death. But it’s too late for self revision. It’s almost the end of all her stories, the angel is about to cap her pen.


1. Call to Worship

The first night she dreams of herself, of the translation that went out of print sixty odd years ago.

-Washing the dishes at the sink in her first apartment, she reminds herself of a very young racehorse, sinewy and nervous. The bones of her hands peek through the skin; she is far too skinny. The lines of her ankles and calves are tidy and minimalist, but her body has never managed to get traction, healthwise. Her dreamself watches the veins in her neck flex each time she jerks her head at a sudden noise and thinks this here is someone who could use nurturing. She always attracted people who wanted to fill up the holes in her with macadam and tar and liquor when what she really needed was a pan of mac and cheese. Judah has learned in her time to recognize those who are only walking holes and wonders how she missed seeing the absence in her own self

At this point in her life, she remembers that she was spending most of her afternoons (and nights and three in the mornings) building towers of Babel out of matches and dead Queen Anne’s lace on the floor of her kitchen, little Zions instead of sleeping. She called these failures art. She tried not to sleep. When she was finally pinned down by exhaustion, she dreamed of blue pinfeathers and her eight foster homes.

A body is a city, which in the Bible means a thing to be protected.

She (the eighty nine year old one, the one who loved the Book of Job, who did therapy until she stopped crying uncontrollably on a certain Saturday in April) looks at her younger self and wishes someone had protected that. Out of the corner of her aging eyes, she catches a flash of gold and blue just behind a cracked door.


2. Call to Prayer

Nowadays, the ending takes so much time. In the Pentuarchal before, you burned out in chariots, you walked with man no more. Now there’s paperwork. Judah can’t decide if she wants to outlast Methuselah or just take the Seconal and get it over with. All the drugs have blown her capacity for pleasure and she misses grace, the feeling of a tongue on her clit, almost feeling pure. There is no glorious ascension nowadays.

She sleeps a lot these days. She closes her eyes and dreams of blood.


3. Call to Confession

Unfortunately, what stays with you is mostly fragments. Half drowned soldiers. Her fathers perfume (she thinks its from the cedars they cut down in Lebanon). A robe of beaten gold. The sword that burns, from the beginning. She dreams the sword is buried under the foundation of her childhood home and the fumes rise like radon and that’s why her family turned out so sick.

Judah supposes the dreams and prophecies are a side effect of the medication. She does not tell her doctor.

3.Confession

She lies awake, dreaming eulogies.

She was a good woman.

(There was a cave filled with bones in the desert.)

Nobody had such lovely, small hands as her.

(When the wandering Israelites- and at that point they weren’t called the Israelites, they were called the People as all people are- went into the cave, they saw the bones)

She never complained. Judah was a woman who did not want to burden others.

(They called what they saw in the cave a disaster. They decided they saw the bones of people who died in a disaster, and they knew it was a disaster sent from The Thing That Moves The Wind)

She never let a sad word slip about her lack of children.

(When the People came out from the cave, they took the story with them. The story itself becomes the disaster.)

Her childhood was warm and loving.

(The story becomes a metaphor for the things you shouldn’t let yourself have. The Israelites told each a story about desire, and faith and sex and power, and really, what else is there to talk about?)

She never regretted her two short marriages. She said that marrying a farmer taught her about life and that marrying a tax auditor taught her about death.

(The cave became a city, two cities. The people in the desert are angels. In the story, their wings are white, not blue. This is another fabrication. The cities were never called Sodom, let alone Gomorrah.)

She spoke often of fond memories of growing up in the church.

(The consequences become not just dust, but brimstone. The moral is rendered in fire and Judah is left as a pillar of salt.)