Hamakom

It is said that if you let a child develop its own language without any outside influence, that language would be strikingly similar to Hebrew. It is said that the first human myth about creation involved the Hebrew alphabet descending from heaven to create the world through the physical shapes of the letters.

It was said, over and over again, in ancient scrolls and practices of Jewish mysticism, only we weren’t paying attention. We translated the Hebrew word for God, the primary one used in The Old Testament, and treated it as singular, even though the word Elohim ends with a suffix used exclusively in plural form. We translated the word Nephilim as sons of God or giants that dominated pre-flood Genesis, but we have lost sight of the fact that the name is derived from the Hebrew word for ‘fallen’.

It all changed when they came, or returned; the satellite images first showed three shapes of unidentifiable objects, descending one after the other onto the Nevada desert. The crash site was sealed off by the military and the only information that was given to me along with the satellite images was that they had changed upon landing.

I can’t tell you what I do for a living, even now in retrospect; perhaps I should say, especially now, in retrospect. I was technically on maternity leave, out of the loop as far as newly formed top-secret stuff, knee deep in diapers and human secretions.

“Ella, are you there?” my very young replacement asked timidly when I had to distance my cell to avoid casing it in baby puke.

“Yes, here, wait a second,” I yelled, maybe louder than I should have, in the circus maneuvers of an out of shape gymnast. I placed my baby in...