It’s fall in Bologna, which means rain, scarves, pumpkin pasta and finally FINALLY, my teenagers are back in school. After I finished my second novel in June, I got busy submitting the most vulnerable part of my soul to faceless agents, so this summer wasn’t a creative one. 130 queries later, I’m well into the process and I’ve had some very promising developments!
The market is flooded, agents are overwhelmed (some of them receive upwards of 2,000 queries a year) and the process for querying has, especially since COVID, become longer and longer. Agents are routinely taking up to six months to read manuscripts, which means that agent searches can take a year or more and might not lead to anything good. It will be spring before I have any news to report.
My novel originally contained seven standalone stories of women from the Old Testament, which more than one agent told me are slowing the pace of the book, so it’s time to cut them. Over the next month, I’ll be revising and resubmitting the manuscript, and in the meantime I’m excited to publish the seven stories here.
One VP of a New York agency who read the manuscript, said that the Old Testament interludes were—if I can brag for a minute—“gorgeous” so I’ll be living off of that compliment for years to come.
Here is the first story, one of three in the Bible about women who steal sperm, which as you can imagine don’t come up often in sermons. All the stories in the series are true to the events in Scripture—disturbing, macabre, sometimes heroic events—and they ask this question: even if the story literally happened, and even if it accomplished a holy purpose, what was the price for the woman who lived it?
I should also mention that the girl in this story is nameless in the Bible.
The Sperm Thief
Around 1650 BCE
Sodom and Gomorrah are on fire. An hour ago, tremendous rolling heads of smoke exploded into the sky and stayed there. The heavens fell utterly black, and now they pulse every few seconds with green electricity. Afterward, the hills rattle with thunder.
Just outside Pilgah’s cave, a hot wind is thrashing branches into and out of view. This must be what Noah felt like, watching God execute the world. Only this time, she imagines it smells worse.
Sometimes, when you know for days that a catastrophe is coming, the anticipation is almost as bad as the brimstone when it falls. After a week of waiting, the world is finally ending and everyone Pilgah grew up with must be dead by now. Her two older sisters and their husbands and kids. Every house and lemon tree and pet cat, incinerated.
Pilgah is dead, too, isn’t she. She died the morning she was dragged away from her city and her life. It was the same morning her mother died—or maybe Pilgah’s life ended even before that, on the night the mob came.
Pilgah had a pet cat of her own, Arnav. He was gray with white paws and sat on his haunches like a rabbit when he begged. Arnav slept between her knees at night and she somersaulted him off the mat every time she rolled over.
The night her family moved into their newly erected house in eastern Sodom, Arnav moved in as well. He just walked through the open door and asked Pilgah and her little sister what they were doing in his front room. The housekeeper chased him out, and twenty minutes later he sauntered back in and suggested that perhaps, they’d misunderstood the situation. He would allow them to stay, if they were quick with his mutton and wine.
Pilgah was five when the family first moved to Sodom and six when the house was finished. She doesn’t remember much about life before that in Haran with uncle Abraham, but she does remember why they had to move.
It was because of the two shepherds brawling in the north pasture where she was playing—two loud halfwits locked in a knot of tunic and fist and knee and dirt. They were too close to actually hit each other, so they clawed at each other’s ears and pulled each other’s hair, cheered by her father’s men on one side and Uncle Abraham’s men on the other.
The way the two shepherds rolled around wasn’t a lot different from the way her parents wrestled sometimes, was it.
That fight was the last between the two companies. It ended with one shepherd locking his arm around the other’s neck until his guttural curses stopped. As well as his breath.
The tension between Lot and Uncle Abraham also ended that day. They divided their expansive territory between them, and uncle Abraham magnanimously allowed Pilgah’s father to choose which half he wanted.
Lot decided he wanted the pretty half, the half with the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in it. So Abraham kept his homestead in the country and Lot moved his clan to the city.
From the very beginning Pilgah and her family were outsiders in Sodom, and it didn’t help that her parents never really learned the language. Lot’s clotted accent embarrassed his daughters and Pilgah often had to translate the neighbor’s jokes for him.
Lot had mastered the trade language years before they moved, because it was vastly more simple and direct. In Sodom’s main market, her father haggled with vendors and farmers, but for daily conversation he was a mess. Once at a wedding he substituted the word “liver” for “lovely” when he complimented the bride,
Unlike her father, Pilgah had a flawless accent, because she was so young when they moved and she played with the neighbor kids after her chores. She wasn’t allowed to actually go in their homes, but the neighbor kids wanted to investigate Pilgah’s house because she was new and rich.
The kids later reported to their parents that the immigrant family smelled funny, that the dad didn’t have any lovers, that he didn’t have any idols, and that he did blood sacrifices in the backyard. And then there were no more visits. Monogamous blood drinkers aren’t to be trusted, are they. Especially rich ones.
If anyone smelled funny, it was Sodomites. Their food stunk and they had a weird obsession with cucumber. They ate it with everything, including breakfast.
For almost ten years, Pilgah lived in Sodom. Over time she did make one friend, Enki, and she was close to her sisters and nephews and nieces. She also had her stick sculptures: sheep, cats, birds, houses, infinite linking circles, and a portrait of Lot with big ears that made her mother laugh.
It was on the evening of Pilgah’s fifteenth birthday that the angels came to Sodom. They bore the white beards of old men and the skin of infants. They had strange green eyes, matching white scars on their left cheeks, and ferociously gnarled staffs. Within minutes, a wary and inquisitive crowd collected around them, wondering to each other what manner of gods they were, but Pilgah’s father, who was already at Sodom’s gate with city elders that evening, approached the newcomers directly.
Her father knew who they were and what they were. He’d been expecting them, hadn’t he. Lot convinced the strangers to lodge at Pilgah’s house and when he lead them into the house, their staff flew into a panic, washing the strangers’ feet, preparing their beds, and setting the most elaborate feast of their lives, because angels have pretty high standards for things like beds and feasts.
Reports of the beautiful strangers riled the city and while Pilgah’s family was still feasting, a torch-wielding mob swarmed the perimeter of Lot’s property. Pilgah could hear the horde before she could see them.
It seemed that Sodom had had enough of the immigrant who kept only to his own. The rich fool who snubbed them, but couldn’t put a decent sentence together. Who worshiped a faceless god, and drank the blood of lambs.
Every male in Sodom, ancient to waist-high, had come to Lot’s house. Bony men, fleshy men, bald men and braided men, nobles and brutes, they had come for a taste of the divine creatures Lot was hoarding.
It wasn’t like the immigrant owned them, was it. Strangers that beautiful were useless to a prude like the Ibri. Lot wouldn’t know what to do with them. When the mob surrounded Pilgah’s house, they began to clap their left hands against their left thighs in unison. “Come out! Come out! Come out!” They chanted.
Pilgah’s mother gripped her husband’s sleeve, ”you can’t go out there!”
”If I don’t go out,” Lot faced her gravely, “they will come in. We don’t have enough men to hold them.”
The swarm pushed ever closer to the door and finally, Lot left the house to address them. Pilgah ran to the open doorway to watch.
”What are you doing?” Rasped her mother, pulling Pilgah just out of view.
“Bring them out, Ibri!” demanded the corpulent chief at the forefront. The clapping sped up a notch.
”This, do not do,” struggled Lot. “These are under my protection of my roof! Please!”
“Bring them out, you foreign piece of shit,” spat the mob chief. “Hand them over right now or we’ll just have a go at that rich ass of yours. We’ll do to you everything we’ve got in mind for those green-eyed beauties you’re hiding. And more.”
“You do not know who they are!” Lot raised his palms toward them with fingers thrown open as if he could hold them at bay. “You do not understand!” The rhythm of thigh-pounding stormed him from every direction.
The chief thrust his face close to Lot’s, ”Last warning, Ibri.”
“I cannot. This I cannot do. I am begging.” Lot looked desperately back at the house and then at the torches. Pound. Pound. Pound. “Listen, listen to me. Maybe you take instead my daughters. They are virgins still. Take them and do what you want. Only do not hurt my guests.”
Pilgah’s mother hugged Pilgah and her younger sister frantically close. “Oh God,” she whispered, “oh, God.”
The leader laughed. “I don’t think so.” He raised his torch and the pounding stopped. It was followed by a vacuum of sound that terrified Pilgah. Suddenly, the horde lunged with one mind toward the house, and Pilgah’s mother screamed.
It was only when a strange blast of light flared over the crowd that Pilgah realized the strangers had appeared in the doorway next to her. The angelic blast left the mob clutching at their eyes and staggering into one other. They set each other on fire and rolled around in the pasture, screeching.
Pilgah walked out among them and watched the Sodomites burn. They deserved it, didn’t they.
She stared at the angels. Every strand of their hair and beards hummed with white energy in the darkness. The angels herded Pilgah and her father back toward the house. “In the morning,” they said sternly, “you and your family must go.”
Lot nodded.
Pilgah’s eyes narrowed. ”Him and his family,” she repeated to herself. Who would that be? It wasn’t the virgins he just offered up to a slathering mob, was it.
Now, here they are, the loving family, three days later in a cave. The richest man in Sodom is clutching his virgins and sobbing like a little girl. Pilgah isn’t sure if he’s weeping for his empire or for the pillar of salt shaped like her mother. He’s probably just afraid of dying.
Death isn’t so bad, decides Pilgah. The dead, the really dead, are more fortunate than she is. They don’t miss their mothers.
The ancient ones in Haran used to have a saying, “the only thing death cannot swallow is blood.” It means that a single person may die, but clans live on. It means that babies who carry your name render you immortal. It means that blood is the only thing that matters, ultimate loyalty to the clan, even to the ones you hate.
But that’s not true for daughters, is it. Loyalty doesn’t extend all the way to daughters. Pilgah pulls away from her father to feed the small fire. “You need to eat,” she tells him. “And stop crying.”
Yesterday, when they fled to the cave, they didn’t bring much. Some flour, some oil, a rack of salted mutton, and all the wine they could carry—if there’s ever a time to drink, it has to be while waiting for fire and brimstone—but the most important thing Pilgah carried with her to the cave was a plan. She’s only been able to think of one way to keep her father from abandoning her and her sister, or selling them if he panics.
Pilgah extracts this morning’s flatbreads from a clay pot and opens a wine flask. “Drink,” she tells Lot. He obeys. For every two swallows that her father takes, Pilgah takes one, and forces her younger sister to keep up. “Again,” she instructs both of them.
When Lot finally topples over, Pilgah hands the wine skin to her sister, pushes up her father’s skirts and begins to ready him.
”Pilgah, stop it!” Hisses her little sister, like she might be overheard. Like there is anyone left in the world to hear.
“You go after me,” Pilgah commands her sister.
She pulls up her own tunic.
Arnav is gone. Everyone they love is gone. Every potential husband is lying in ashes. The wind smells like death and the last of her clan is in this cave. If blood is all that matters, then it’s blood she will give them.
Genesis 19:1-38
Wow, moving and dark and powerful. The way you tell the story holds one’s hand to a flame until the last word.