Rebekah watched the tip of the poker blaze. An ember began to blossom. It was beautiful, like rosebuds about to bloom. She’d adorn her daughter’s hair with roses, scatter petals in her cradle, on the pool, on Venus’s saddle, and fill up bowls she’d set around the house.

Jacob the Fatherless stabbed the poker into the fire, retrieved and examined it, returned it into the hearth. He raised the poker. Spat on the tip. Held it to his ear. Relished the sizzle of dying spittle.

Rebekah pressed her palm to her heart. What was he trying to do now? He must not spoil this hour given to her. She promised God to repay His kindness by continuing to light the Sabbath candles, and to attend services in the synagogue of the One-Eyed Rabbi. After services, she would allow herself some vanity and flaunt her daughter’s beauty. They would ride Venus through the bazaar for the people to see that her daughter had ivory skin and full lips like her mother and that she was not cross-eyed and sour like her father.

Jacob approached the bed.

As if she were watching a fantastical dream, Rebekah connected the image of this menacing stranger to Ahriman, the devil who resided in the Ancient Zoroastrian’s dry, musky scrolls. But this devil did not have bat wings or horns. He had small, feminine feet buried in large boots, which he now planted beside her mattress. He towered over her. His stare pierced through her naked body.

He held the poker above her. The heat felt unbearable. “Please,” she pleaded, “leave me alone.”

Jacob the Fatherless drove the tip of the poker between her breasts.

Lifted on the wings of a breeze, she soared away. The skies became lucid. Crystalline objects, china dolls, emerald carriages, and porcelain animals floated in weightless sweeps. On the luminous horizon, veiled spirits pointed out an arbor of jasmine crowned with candle flames. A company of messengers awaited her at the foot of the arbor and lured her forward. Faster, they whispered, in voices that reverberated in her chest, there is little time till dawn, when we must fall silent to hear the prayers and praises of the living.

Rebekah sighed, contented. She would forgive her mother, forgive her husband, make this place, where fires did not rage, her home.

The echo of her daughter’s name came from remote places.

She had not named her daughter.

Who had? She listened.

Gold Dust!

Jacob the Fatherless called her baby Gold Dust. Why? What did that name imply to him? Was he identifying her with gold so as to tolerate her presence? If she stayed here Jacob would convert her daughter into a motherless whore.

Rebekah plummeted into the acrid stench of burning flesh in her bedroom. Jacob was gone. The hearth was cold. The poker swayed on its peg.

“Our holy mothers are merciful, Khanom!” the midwife cried. “Your heart had stopped. We thought you were dead.” She laid the baby on Rebekah’s bosom.