See the Rabbi. See him tormented by choice. See his people. See them wracked by hate. See the others. See their anger radiate outward in glowing spokes, exploding firebrand in a tinder city.
On a night like any other, the moon at sixth house, fulcrum of pinwheel zodiac, the Rabbi, awash in lidless starlight, rises somber and makes his choice. And when the sun is furthermost, he and three of his others gather at the murmuring riverbank where the brown clay is most pliable and begin to dig, sifting rock and root from trundled earth. Hours spent exhuming the clay, molding it, kneading its muscles, tracing its veins, baking its skin in the starlight. More hours spent in whispering prayer, the words bent and somersaulting over themselves like tumbling books.
See Truth drawn on its forehead, life etched from clay and word. As the sun rises, so it does, wavering at first, but steadier, lapping at the river, and their faces move slowly across the water. See the Rabbi speak to it, his words winding its mechanism. See it stride past the ghetto, wade through the market, and into the borough, siege unto its own.
See the others scream for mercy from the kiln of its stare, from their flaming tenements, their crumpling rooftops.
See it wade back through the market, past the ghetto, back to the riverbank to kneel in the underbrush. See it tilt its head to the lilt of a stranded daisy caught in a vagrant gust. See it caught, too, and see it see. It sees the colors of Eden in the ferns. It hears the river churning sediment, fossils, gravel, whirling over driftwood. It touches moss on a rock; gently rotates its hand to let a grub complete an oblivious circumference. See it sit in silence.
See the Rabbi meet with the others, then his others. And on a day like any other, when the sun is at its apogee, they slip down the riverbank where it still sits, still. It ignores their autonomous logic, their homunculus rationale. They are perversions of variety cloaked in righteous intention. So it remains.
See the Rabbi and his others gather at the murmuring riverbank, shadow conclave in shifting sunlight, then rise somber and decided. They pin it to the earth as the Rabbi chants, invoking the void in which forbidden knowledge spirals. It squirms under the power of the Word, mind-forged manacle as incantation. See the Rabbi draw to a close. His hand is arbiter, swooping down to smudge Truth from its forehead. What is left but Death.
See its hand crumble in its passage as it reaches for the stranded daisy. See the colors of Eden darken in its eyes, its own body the dust that denies it light. See it collapse into itself, the clay that was once animate spilling onto the riverbank. See the Rabbi and his others shimmer then fade into city grey.
The daisy stands still.
