Illustration by Andy Paciorek
WINNER, Fall 2023
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
BY SHALA ERLICH
He smoothed her belly with his thumbs, his hands encircling the tops of her hips. They were on a beach where a stream emptied into Puget Sound. His thumbs slid in opposite directions. Above her belly button, then below, over and over, shaping her wet clay.
A hazy sun cast diffuse heat over their bodies, surprisingly warm so soon after sunrise. His clothes were soaked through and clung to his skin. She wasn’t wearing anything. He was improvising—half CPR muscle memory, half ancestral breathwork perhaps. Inhaling, counting to four, his own pulse in his ears. Exhaling—two, three, four—into her mouth. And now her breath started up, rough and slow. Alan kissed her on the lips. She sneezed.
Distant morning sounds reached his awareness. Boats clanking at a dock, voices calling to each other. The noises tugged at his concentration, reminded him of the surrounding world, the possibility of an intruder. His focus dissipated, ebbed like the tide. The end of their nested, electric encounter closing in. She didn’t seem awake yet.
He spread an old towel across the passenger seat of the Subaru. Her joints were pliable and she held together when he maneuvered her into the car with only a light pinch needed to reattach her right baby toe. Her head lolled against the seat belt but she stayed propped upright all the way to the hospital.
Barely eight on a Sunday, no one was around the loading dock when he carried her in. What she needed was a little baking in the MRI machine. Plus, he wondered what it would show. He slid her in, and the noise of the magnets began, a racket that seemed out of place. Industrial-mechanical and possessed-by-spirits, when such a technologically advanced machine should be all smoothness: imperceptible electromagnetic silence.
He slid her back out. She sneezed again, but this time her eyes were open. Her irises were brown flecked with the green of sea glass. She blinked.
“I’m hungry,” she said. She had an accent, a throaty Eastern European mournfulness. He fished an energy bar from his jacket pocket, tore the wrapper off with his teeth, letting it flutter onto her lap, and fed her morsels one by one. Her fingers crinkled the metallic wrapper in time with her chewing.
Alan found her a pair of blue scrubs and matching surgery booties. He wasn’t sure where to keep her. He pictured her sleeping in a drawer in the morgue and shuddered. Instead, he found a call room in the old wing of the hospital with an almost-homey feel: faded, dusty curtains, a telephone, a lamp, and an ancient radio by the bed. He tucked her in, kissed her on the forehead, told her he’d see her soon, and she went right to sleep.
The next morning, he took clothes from Ruth’s closet, though he knew they’d be too big. A pair of flowing burgundy pants with an elastic waistband, a loose shirt he couldn’t remember her wearing. Ruth would never notice they were gone.
When he threw the scrubs into a hospital laundry bin, there was a muddy rim around the neckline and inside the drawstring waist. But after that she didn’t leave marks. He named her Gina, after a girl he knew in high school, a sleek one with long, dark hair, who had the same molded suppleness he had achieved— he could hardly believe it—in his golem. He measured her while she sucked on a popsicle he’d brought her. He planned to buy her a wardrobe at Nordstrom’s after work. She was size four, 34C. He wished he had someone to brag to: I made a golem, and she’s a petite, sexy, little thing.
* * *
He’d turned the idea over in his mind for weeks, but from every angle it had seemed impossible. The inspiration came on a drizzly weekend in March.
“What’s on the schedule today?” he’d asked Ruth after breakfast.
“It’s your turn to come up with ideas, remember? I served my twenty years as social director. Now I’m free to go for walks with my friends.”
After the rustle of hangers and raincoats subsided in the front hall and he heard the door shut, Alan scanned the movie listings in the newspaper. He and Ruth could go out to dinner, he supposed.
Anna left for college six months ago and Gabe would graduate next year—strange that he hadn’t noticed how quiet the house had become. He drifted upstairs to his study where his gaze travelled without interest across the bookshelves. Contemporary novels Ruth had given him over the years; medical school textbooks; books from college—thick science texts and slim literature and philosophy paperbacks; a few childhood hardbacks with tattered jackets.
He idly picked up his old collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer stories—a bar mitzvah gift? A high school graduation present? How long since he’d read anything more than a journal article? He sat down, reading with childhood attention, marveling at the world of the stories, a community, mundane and surreal, pious and devilish, that knew itself so well.
Toward the back was Singer’s version of the Golem story. The Rabbi’s transformation of clay into a living being, a miraculous solution to the problem of persecution.
Not that he could say he was persecuted. His problem was the almost the opposite. No ghetto or shtetl, no stories or myths. Just the practice of medicine, and season tickets to the Seattle Opera with Ruth, to the Mariners with his practice partners, and a vague uneasiness, shifting in his seat among the Scandinavians and Microsofties.
As his parents reminded him every day of his childhood, a Jew never knew when things would turn ugly, then lethal. These days he was more concerned with fading away of his own accord. Over the years, he’d toyed with regular synagogue attendance, giving up phones and driving on Shabbat, but Ruth had never been on board, and maybe stricter observance wasn’t what he was looking for anyway. A golem though, that’s a tradition. And then he thought: why not here, now, for me?
Not that he believed that fantastic schmaltz.
But a month later, the Sunday of the fifth on-call weekend in three months, crabby, sleep-deprived, he was done with the things he believed in. Fully dressed at the breakfast table at six-thirty in the morning, he’d hung up with a nursing-home director when his pager went off again. Ruth, in her bathrobe frying eggs at the stove, said, “You’re going back to the hospital?”
“That’s what being on call means. How long have we been doing this?”
“Is it an emergency? We’ve finally gotten Anna on a Skype routine. Surely you can wait half an hour and not miss talking to your daughter, again.”
It wasn’t an emergency. A couple of admits to round on at some point. Still, he shook his head, automatically, not thinking it was a big deal. Ruth was used to the gravitational pull of the hospital overpowering all but the most significant events in the home sphere.
But Ruth swallowed and went pale. He could see the pulse in her throat.
“You realize you haven’t really been a parent? I don’t think you have any idea how amazing they are.”
“Of course I do. Why do I send them to those fancy colleges?”
“That’s not what I meant. Oh God.” Now her lips compressed and her eyes slid sideways, downward, the way they did before tears came.
He left the house as soon as possible. As he backed out of the garage, he planned to go straight to the hospital but instead—unable to tolerate trading one managed space for another—he detoured to Golden Gardens Beach where he and Ruth used to walk holding hands, and at low tide the kids caught tiny crabs and poked their fingers into sea anemones.
Now Alan explored on his own, with brazen hope but not much expectation. Like making a pass, a deadly serious beautiful pass, at someone out of your league, going for it because you didn’t expect to get anywhere. Trying, in this case, to see what he could shape out of the fine, dark, brackish, alluvial silt.
* * *
The call room had been a perfect solution. Gina’s breasts fit right into his palms, since that was how he’d made them. And he’d done a nice job on her clavicles and that notch between, one of his favorite spots on any woman. To lull her to sleep between trysts, he rubbed her forehead and hummed a Yiddish lullaby his grandmother used to sing or clicked the radio on at low volume, dialed to something instrumental and soothing.
Gina the Golem developed a taste for frozen yogurt from the cafeteria. She smiled at him like a child when he brought her red-and-white-checked waxed bowls piled high with tater tots. She was easy to please. Loving and docile.
What a feeling of protection and solace she gave him, along with the leaping excitement of a new romance: new, new, new! What an incredible joy and release—he had breathed new life into his own existence. He scanned his body, checking for guilt, and found wellbeing. Ruth could stay in the routines of book clubs and Netflix. Now he had his own cosmos.
* * *
“Remember when we used to have fun together?” Ruth often asked. It took effort these days, but he remembered. In their first weeks, how she gripped his waist and hovered her legs as he pedaled her around campus on his bicycle; the endless pre-kid weekend mornings in bed; and much later, making fun of the teachers, laughing so hard they staggered against each other walking back to the car after curriculum night at the middle school (he hadn’t missed all of those).
Another thing Ruth liked to say: “The hospital has become your life.” And, yes, it had.
All along he loved the small-town world of the hospital. He knew everyone. His charm bloomed. He teased the women in medical records and the nurses on the floor. He liked to pop into the radiology reading room to go over an X-ray and trade dot-com stock tips with Richard Martin, or the pathology lab where Dr. Anderson showed him findings of interest under the microscope: gout crystals or signet ring carcinoma.
On a good day he felt like the mayor of the hospital—himself and more than himself—rising, expanding into his role, his good name as a doctor.
“Dr. Loeb is thorough,” the nurses would say to the patient’s family as he left the room. “I’d want him taking care of my mother. He saw my brother-in-law last year. Figured out what three other doctors missed.”
Those comments fueled his dedication for years. He remembered his surprise, early on, when Ruth reacted badly to his passion for doctoring. She’d been pissed when he won the residency teaching award the year Gabe was a born. “Why do you always choose them over us?” she’d said.
In the end wasn’t his work for her and the kids? Nice vacations, a spacious house with a shiny kitchen, the small but expensive gifts he hunted down after a stretch of hospital shifts. Overall, she’d seemed happy with the arrangement, managing the kids’ lives, teaching French part-time, nuzzling a pleased “thank you” in his ear when he brought home that slim silver wristwatch she’d coveted. Was it the empty nest that left her making these bitter comments?
Having Gina now, he was amazed either Ruth or the day-to-day rewards of medicine had ever been enough. While he listened to an elderly female patient describe her daily regimen of long walks and prune juice, he let himself dip into a pool of recent sensations: the way Gina pointed her feet in pleasure, the thumb-printable arch of her foot, the upward sweep to the swell of her calf. She was a good kisser. Giving and hungry, insatiable for Alan’s attentions. Her flesh warmed and softened each time he touched her, as he bent and worked her limbs.
During his lunch break later that day, he marveled at the delicate amphibious feel of her finger pads on his neck.
“You are lovely, my little salamander,” he said.
“I am a salamander?” she asked.
“You are perfect,” he said, kissing her forehead. “I have to get back to work now.”
“What is my work?”
“You don’t have to work, honey.”
“I want work.”
* * *
He got her a job with Lydia Nguyen in patient transport. People accepted her as human no problem, but she was clearly from somewhere else. He sweet-talked Lydia with a sad tale about how Gina’s husband had abandoned her, taking her Green Card paperwork with him.
When Alan checked in with Lydia at the end of the week, she was effusive.
“Gina’s better than a computer,” she told him in the hall near the elevators. “She never gets lost—on her first day, she could find her way to the ER, post-op, the lab, medical records, the parking garage, you name it, like she was born here! And she’s so strong! We’ve been joking she’s supernatural.”
“Wow,” said Alan, at a loss for words. “Glad she’s a good worker even if her English isn’t perfect.”
“Have you heard her call gurneys ‘wheelbeds?’ She’s adorable!”
Alan agreed whole-heartedly.
Over the summer and fall, Alan and Gina met at her room after his workday, and at lunch, if he could squeeze it in. She often had the radio on in the background. She favored a station he didn’t recognize, some version of the BBC, warbling on about conflicts in little-known places, muted news bulletins punctuated by odd musical interludes.
The hospital ventilation system dried Gina out, so he rubbed her down with a warm, wet washcloth to erase a fine network of cracks. This turned into a weekly ritual, a tender re-enactment of their first morning together.
One day she opened the door to him wearing a necklace of paper clips.
“Look at you,” he said.
“See these, too!” She showed him the colored folder labels she had stuck to her earlobes for earrings.
“Monkey see, money do, huh?” He held back her thick, kelp-like hair and kissed each of her ears.
What a sweet inborn feminine urge to decorate herself. The next time he was shopping for jewelry for Ruth, he bought a pair of diamond studs for Gina, and pierced her ears with them himself.
“Where is my treat?” was how she greeted him now.
Soon this became an extra pleasure: the search for offerings to bring her each time they met. Some he bought specially for Gina. Others, pressed for time, he poached from the cluttered recesses of Ruth’s closet.
* * *
One evening in late fall Gina said, “I am sick.”
“You are not. You can’t be.”
“I am sick.” She pulled the stethoscope from his neck and planted it on her chest. “Listen to me.”
The radio murmured. He caught something about Darfur, a mention of Chechnya, then fragments of serpentine music. He reached over to turn it off.
“OK, if you want to play doctor . . . .” he laughed. “Can I listen here? And here?”
“Don’t play. Listen to me.”
But there was nothing to hear. The dreadfulness of her inner silence pierced him with disappointment.
As he went through the free sample cabinet at his office, he wondered if it mattered what he chose from the well-stocked shelves. Something with colorful packaging. She’d like that.
Handing someone Extra-Strength Tylenol was a familiar act. He often gave it out as a placebo to appease the people who came in for colds. There was no doubt that giving them something beyond the usual advice of rest and fluids was in their best interest, genuinely made them feel better.
Now, though, he felt a twinge of guilt as he opened the bottle and passed Gina the pills and a paper cup of water.
Growing up, Alan harbored a half-submerged desire to become a rabbi, later transmuted into his choice of medicine. By the time he was taking pre-med classes in college, the idea of wrapping himself in his grandfather’s severe black-and-white tallis became unthinkable. How old-fashioned and backwards could you get? You would have to believe in God, wouldn’t you? And in prayers and rules about mezuzahs and burying unkosher pots in the backyard, even here and now in America? A doctor got the heavy books, the advice-giving role, the power to judge or approve people’s daily choices, even the mystical hope of fixing the world. A placebo, while it might not fix the world, was where medicine and religion overlapped nicely.
Made nervous by the unrestrained way Gina swallowed her handful of Tylenol, Alan chattered, telling her more than he’d previously bothered to share. How Thanksgiving was his favorite non-Jewish holiday, but how Ruth was on his case to take the whole week off to help her clear the gutters and cook ornate, exotic recipes she’d seen on TV, when he preferred the usual ones. “What’s wrong with roast turkey, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes?”
“Who is Ruth?”
“Ruth is my wife. I live with her when I’m not here.”
“She takes care of you?”
“Not like you do, honey.”
* * *
During the winter months, into the spring, Gina went through a bottle of Tylenol a week. Perhaps he was imagining it, but her shape seemed to be changing. Her hands looked and felt bigger, subtly disproportionate, grown almost as large as his. He clasped them now, pinning them behind her low back as they leaned against the door, kissing. The radio played wheezy, hypnotic, Baltic-sounding music. She became stranger and stranger to him. But he wasn’t repelled; oh no, on the contrary.
Still, the memory of that inner silence, flowing through the earpieces of the stethoscope, haunted him at random moments in the office. He had no idea about her insides, how her body grew but her chest remained silent. What about the MRI from her first day? In the excitement of her animation, he never bothered to look. He opened the radiology tab on his computer screen and scrolled backwards to find it. His own name, Alan Loeb, was listed as the ordering provider. And the patient’s name: Lobe, Gina. He couldn’t remember entering her demographic information. Was the surname a mangled version of his own? A joke? The date of birth and the date of the report were the same—04/03/02. He’d put Gina in the scanner almost exactly a year ago.
He pulled up the images. There were the bones of the skull, as usual, but the brain was blank: no ventricles, no brainstem, no nothing. Except, as he shuffled through the different views, for a faint glow of enhancement behind her forehead, in the space where her frontal lobes should be.
The images made Gina more real, provided unerasable evidence that she existed. The MRI felt heavy with meaning, but what was it? That he’d created a brainless creature for his own pleasure? That he’d left an electronic trail from the start? He clicked the box marking the MRI report completed, hoped it would disappear back into the depths of the computer system.
Passover was less than two weeks away; neither of the kids was coming home. Gabe was spending the vacation with his girlfriend. Anna’s break didn’t coincide with the holiday. Last night, Ruth wondered whether it was worth the trouble to host a seder at all.
Ruth’s family were areligious, hyper-educated Viennese Jews, doctorates going back four generations. The year they got engaged, her parents brought bagels to his parents’ seder. Everything Ruth knew about Jewish observance, she’d learned from him, and now seemed happy to forget.
Alan remembered his grandfather’s booming voice with his authoritative vus-vussy accent rolling down from the head of the table. His grandfather’s wink at Alan as he wrapped up the afikomen, still singing, and made it disappear with a sleight of hand. There was some family story about his grandfather and a golem, but he couldn’t call it up.
“A golem, a golem,” Alan repeated, staring at his login screen. Such a frog-like swallowing, a globular sound. In the original story, the golem was a lurching giant with the strength of ten men, but Alan had solved that when he made Gina so dainty.
After his last patient left, he spent an hour catching up on journal articles instead of going to see Gina. He read two separate articles about Vitamin D, the latest silver bullet, for osteoporosis, and also for diabetes and autoimmune disease, possibly other ailments. Alan was skeptical: all the rage today, discredited tomorrow. On the other hand, maybe Ruth should be taking it, just in case. He thought of the nob at the nape of her neck, where her curls came loose. He pictured Ruth over the years. Her neck, her strong back, surprisingly flat stomach, wide hips, and delicate wrists, her hazel eyes, and her loud, heedless laugh. He’d hate to see her hunched from compression fractures.
* * *
As he drove home, Alan felt in his pocket for the necklace, cool and slippery, he’d found last weekend at Nordstrom’s. He’d bought it for Gina but now realized it was perfect for Ruth. He arrived late for supper. Ruth was reading and eating on her own when he let himself in the back door, but she stood up when he came over to her. He pulled her to him, still holding her fork and book, and kissed her on the cheek.
“Here’s something beautiful to make you feel beautiful,” he said. He put the necklace, shaped like leaves and berries, around her neck and stood back to admire it on her.
“Thank you, Alan.” Her eyes were glittering like the berries in the necklace but he got the sense something was wrong.
“Don’t you like it?”
“It’s gorgeous. But—next time—what about something we can do together? Theater tickets? A weekend away?”
“I’d like that,” said Alan. “San Juan Island in May?”
* * *
The next day at lunchtime, he stopped in to see Gina. He was running late. That morning he had knocked over the latte a drug rep had left for him on his desk. Pale foaming liquid soaked instantly into all his papers, and so the rest of the day went: running behind on patients, a call from the pharmacist about a dosage mistake, a reminder letter that he was behind on CME credits. He was pleased with himself when he thought to ask Gina to pick up the high-dose Vitamin D.
“Ask for Ruth Loeb’s prescription at the pharmacy window—it’s all paid for.”
When he let himself into Gina’s room at the end of the day, she passed him the white paper bag without looking at him, sneezed, and turned away. Then she turned back and ripped the bag from his hands. Forget the child-safe seal—she broke the bottle in half. Then she tipped all the pills into her mouth. She held them there, looking at him with an unreadable expression, and swallowed.
“Those were for Ruth!”
“Not for Ruth. Your medicine is for me.”
After this, she became more demanding each time they met. She wouldn’t let him sing her to sleep. Didn’t want him to go. When he made excuses, listed tasks competing for his time, her distress increased.
“Stay with me.”
“Hold me.”
“Press me.”
“Leave button marks on me.”
Over the following days, when he was in the grip of her embrace he could feel other parts of her had grown: her lips were fuller, her breasts were larger than his hands, her hips a caricature of their former curviness. All the parts he touched most bulged under his caresses. And whereas before she warmed to his touch, now she was hot at first contact, as if her core were stoked and burning like an oven.
* * *
He’d taken to going to the hospital most Sundays—he told Ruth he needed to catch up on paperwork and see patients in the hospital, which he did. This week he planned to skip his visit to Gina but as he left the cafeteria, she tapped him on the back.
“Come with me,” she said.
She had the strength of ten men. She pushed him down on the bed.
“I need to know you better,” she announced, in a heavier accent than usual. “It’s my turn now.”
She performed a rough physical exam on him, plonking the bell of his stethoscope four times against his chest, kneading his belly with the heels of her hands. The radio played static, quiet at first, then louder, and an announcer read a list of names he could barely hear, let alone pay attention to whether they were places or people.
“Take deep breath,” Gina said sternly, reaching in and mashing on his liver, as if she might dig it out of him.
She wouldn’t take no for an answer.
On Monday he used a different entrance to the hospital, going the long way around from clinic, but she found him in the stairwell and dragged him back to her room. After that, he tried writing her a letter. Explaining why things between them had to stop. His responsibility to his family. How his fractured life could not go on like this. But when he gave her the letter, she didn’t know how to read it.
“Ugly decorations!” she said, dangling the letter by one corner. She blew her nose on it. As she held the paper to her face, her expression shifted from disgusted to grief-stricken. She started to cry. “I am your family,” she sobbed. “You have no other family.”
It dawned on him that she absorbed meaning through her skin. He felt an unidentifiable pang but he pressed on.
“Let me rub your head, calm you down. I think you’ve finished your job here. Time for a vacation. Let’s go for a ride to the beach, for a swim.” He pictured her dissolving peacefully back into the ocean. “Wouldn’t you like that?”
She trashed the call room. Broke the bed, tore the bedside shelf from the wall, wrenched the radio’s tangled innards into view and pulled down the shower curtain in the bathroom. She threatened to go home with him. She sobbed clumpy, muddy sobs. Even a petite golem can make a big mess.
She said, “You don’t love me.”
She said, “You are a monster.”
She said, “Make me a real woman.”
He didn’t answer. He had to go, to clear his head. He stumbled down the corridors, dodged the planters of fake greenery in the atrium, emerged from the sliding doors into fresh air.
He was crossing the parking lot when he heard her calling his name. Her skin looked inhuman in the oyster-gray daylight. Her voice arrived in his ears unfamiliar and sludgy.
“A-lan, A-lan. Take me home with you.”
“I can’t do that, Gina. You know that.”
“I don’t know,” she wailed.
He got into the car and slammed the door.
She stood as if to block his way. He opened his window. What could he say to smooth the look on her face?
“Go back to your room. I have something nice for you. I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
She spun, spattering bits of herself over the hood and the windshield. Light patters and a few small thumps. Then she ran—away from him, away from the hospital. Missing fingers on both hands and most of her left ear, she pelted toward the park across the street and disappeared under the cherry trees. Only as she vanished in the froth of blossoms did Alan consider chasing her, but it was too late. And, as in a dream that slides and sinks and provides a sudden, belated truth, he knew that a golem is like a homing pigeon with a perfect, unlearned sense of direction. She was headed straight for his house, and Ruth.
* * *
He finds Ruth in the garden. Her usual habitat on a Sunday afternoon in May. He approaches her warily.
“Oh hello,” she says. “You’re home early.”
She turns to the currant bushes she’s planting, scraping a mound of dirt into shape at the base of the final shrub in the cluster, patting the soil around the roots. A twig is caught in her curls above one ear. He has an impulse to reach out and pull it free but stops himself. She looks back up as he continues to stand over her, panting slightly.
“What is it?”
“I have something to tell you.” How has he come this far without any idea what that could be?
“Okay?”
“I’ve been seeing someone.”
Shakily, Ruth gets to her feet. There is a streak of mud on her forehead.
“Seeing someone? Seeing someone?”
“Yes, but not, uh, a woman.”
“What? What are you saying?” Ruth puts her hand to her throat. He hears a click in her breath. “You’re fucking a man?”
“I made a golem.”
She laughs, a hoarse exhalation.
“Are you drunk?”
Alan recalls the years Ruth spent trying to manage her father’s alcohol problem. He shakes his head.
“Feverish?” She reaches up as if to touch his forehead. Her tone zigzags from irritated to concerned to panicky. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
“Not drunk. Not sick,” Alan says. “I’m serious. A golem.”
“A golem? You’re scaring me, Alan. You’re acting crazy. What’s going on? A fucking golem?”
“Ruthie.”
“Don’t ‘Ruthie’ me.” She is rigid with fury. Even her hair looks enraged. She jabs the trowel at his belly.
“You’ve been sleeping with someone else? And that person is ‘a golem?’”
“Yes. . . . No. . . .”
Ruth stares at him, waiting.
“I don’t know how to explain it.”
Her anger teeters into bewilderment. Her pupils go deeply black, her expression cracks open. Ruth’s hand is on her heart and Alan briefly feels a gushing sensation in his own chest. He hears branches snapping in the hedge behind them.
“Look out!” he shouts, knocking against Ruth’s shoulder as they whirl toward the noises.
Gina stands naked, eyes trained on Ruth. Her nose is smudged and bent to the side, and she has a deep scratch down one cheek. But her legs and torso bulge with power. In the first moment, Alan wonders if Ruth also sees her. He feels relief, then horror, when Ruth’s expression confirms that she does.
Gina moves forward with speed, lifts Ruth off the ground by her upper arms and hoists her over her shoulder.
“Gina?” Alan’s voice wavers from the stern tone he imagined.
“Doing my job. Taking care of you. Putting Ruth away!”
Ruth struggles in Gina’s grip while Alan stands frozen. He sees no way to intervene. Gina and Ruth rock side to side as Ruth arches and kicks. Ruth manages to pull her trowel hand free, swings it hard against Gina’s head. Again and again. There is a pause, a forceful outbreath—Alan is never sure whose—and Gina’s body sifts like sand through an hourglass to the ground. Looking down at Gina’s jumbled remains and Ruth’s curled, limp body, Alan is uncertain whether either of them is alive.
Then Ruth rolls away, stands up breathing hard. She steps close to him, crying harshly. “Take this.” She shoves the trowel against his chest, closes his hands on it. Pauses for a moment, then wipes both hands down his shirt and steps away.
She dashes toward the house. Hisses from the porch that she’ll call the police if he follows her inside.
* * *
For weeks afterward, Alan imagines Gina in hospital hallways, turning a corner ahead of him, disappearing through a doorway to the oncology conference room or into the women’s bathroom. Although he knows that’s not possible. The new hospital CFO reminds him of her, too, in a corporeal way. Something about the way she leans forward reassuringly, almost seductively, before delivering the new productivity expectations in a blunt, flat tone.
He works long hours—his productivity is high—but takes little pleasure in it. He avoids the old wing of the hospital. When he runs into Lydia in the cafeteria, she says, “Do you have any idea what happened to Gina?”
“Nervous breakdown?” He avoids making eye contact, selects a carton of strawberry yogurt.
He keeps expecting a call from his department head, imagines ugly and uncomfortable conversations, a hearing in front of the peer ethics review committee. But nothing happens. And, after all, what can he be accused of? Trying to solve loneliness with magic and an MRI.
He finds himself staring into space as he stands against a nursing station counter. A heavy older nurse seated on a rolling chair, a phone in the crook of her neck, is looking at him oddly. He remembers something his mother used to say when he was slow to catch on. “Nu, he wonders where the chimney smoke goes.”
A memory shimmers into focus: Alan’s mother once told him in undertones, as if a malign force might overhear, how his grandfather escaped a pogrom hiding in the barnyard manure pile among the goats, and when he stumbled into the house three days later coated in muck his mother took him for a golem and nearly ran him through with a kitchen knife. “After that day,” Alan’s mother whispered, “he always felt like a monster.”
His parents’ yartzheits pass one after the other in late May. Ruth and his mother were always fond of each other. The kids never pick up the phone, rarely respond to messages. Anna is in town for summer break, but she makes excuses every time he suggests getting together.
He stumbles through his days at work, stands like a ghost by the microwave at home, heating his pre-prepared, solitary meals. He goes for a walk on the beach, hoping for he doesn’t know what. For something better than home or work, but he feels nothing—just his steps sliding unsteadily on the pebbles and sand. It is June and has been raining, sometimes lightly, sometimes heavily, for weeks. The gray water recedes to a gray horizon. Beauty and mystery have gone out of the world.
In the mornings when he wakes and looks out the window at the magnolia petals bruised and stuck with rain to the front walk, the glistening ivy, the bedraggled rose bushes, he can’t help noticing that the lump where the flowering currants are planted is the same shape as the empty declivity on Ruth’s side of the bed.
Sometimes he hears someone breathing next to him; then the sound is gone.
___________________________________________________________
Shala Erlich, a practicing psychiatrist in Bellingham, Washington, has loved
folktales and mythology since childhood. Her stories and essays appear or are forthcoming in
The Iowa Review,
The Missouri Review, the
Cola Literary Review, and
Lilith. She is working on a novel that follows a psychiatry resident through a single night shift.
