The first of the seventy names of God will begin, silently, with Aleph.

Ahhh … Elohim.

He is the Power.

God of Gods.

Aleph makes no sound. Aleph, like Avigail, is the brief inhale before anything might properly be uttered.

Aleph is also the letter of fire. He stands proudly at the head of the word, fire. He is the oxygen that feeds the fire and lets it burn. Although his is a fire that dances and flickers and flames but never harms or destroys.

The primordial fire.

Home.

Bet, strangely, is the letter that represents place, that represents home; it is grounded, of the earth, and the dagesh – or dot – hidden within is the one who lives inside it.

The one who belongs.

Avigail suddenly sees her own turmoil – her own battle – neatly expressed in these two Hebrew letters – Bet and Aleph – savagely competing against each other …

Yet Elohim establishes peace between them, does he not?

Avigail scowls and thinks about everything feeling topsy-turvy from the very outset …

Home.

But then wasn’t the Torah started on the last page and completed on the first? And the letters? Everything back-to-front, inside-out, arse over tit?

Avigail ponders her own strange journey from silence to sound, from sound to silence.

Was it such a strange journey after all?

Perhaps I am not the silence that follows, she muses, the silence imposed, the quietening down, but rather – like Aleph – the letter who stands apart and will not immediately enter (defiant Aleph!) – the deep inhale before …

Perhaps, she thinks, there is room for me after all? A home. Perhaps I only had to stand outside a while and quietly wait for my number to be called?

Avigail remembers the old story of how Elohim actually created twenty-three letters – but the twenty-third letter had somehow gone missing. This extraordinary, elusive, staggeringly lovely consonant, lost.

Where is the lost letter?

Where?

Where?

And what’s its shape?

And what’s its sound?

And when it is found? Ah. All the world’s troubles and mis-fires and imperfections – all strife and disorder – will finally be set to rights in a cacophony of new words and new sentences and new works, not hitherto conceived of.

Yes. Everything falling neatly into place, the very instant this lost letter is uttered.

Perhaps we all have the lost letter written in our hearts, Avigail ponders, and it just needs to be searched for and then somehow articu- … articula … spoken?

Avigail feels her pages turning backwards. She hears the impatient licking of dry forefingers and thumbs, the rustle of expectation.

Something must be said!

Surely?

Something curious and exceptional and thoroughly singular!

Something new.

Born of her own, very particular, experience.

Oh, but …

But what?

And when?

And how?

And to whom exactly?

This is to be her mission, surely? To discover?

To peek around her? To stand and wait? To forge her lips into an apparently unfamiliar shape?