The men were gone after Lot. I felt it calling for me in the night again and knew it would make me answer. I laid down in my tent, and darkness took me.

When I opened my eyes, the walls of the sky were shivering. Blackness blazed at the mouth of the tent and danced with the silver torches of the stars. A voice was calling through the veins of the body of the giant sky. A voice made of silence. It called me Sarah and I arose.

Everything shimmered and shook. The whole night was alive with the God within it. The trees whispered with voiceless power. The rocks quivered beneath their lord. Then the stars vanished. Like a man in a dream, I knelt and closed my eyes. When I looked again, the stars had vanished. A torch blazed in the heart of the sky.

Sarah, the voice said. Here I am, I whispered. The voice said look upon me.

I felt my skin dissolved, and my eyes were filled with flame. The whole of the night sky heaved in its bed and turned upwards, like a black palm, and at its center it cupped the torch, which expanded to engulf the heavens. The Earth felt warm and pliable beneath me, like skin. Fire filled my vision. And in the orange flame moved writhing angels.

My lord, I whispered.

My heart was lifted from my body by the hand of an angel and placed on a scale. God blew upon it, and it glowed hot red like an ember from the fire.

Do not fear, Sarah, said the voice of the wind, and the trees and the sky. I, who can count the stars and know the name of each grain of sand, tell you that so many will your children be. And you will have sons.

The sky shimmered now through the tears in my eyes, the refracted flame rebounding again and again towards my heart. Sons. In a night black and wide like a hand holding the Earth I fell to my knees beneath the giant ladder of the stars.

I felt them all standing around me then, children and grandchildren, and the spirits of my ancestors, the whole human family filling the world like dancing embers from the flames. When they found me I was laughing, laughing, yitzhak…