The following chapters are excerpts from Gabber and Crow by Linda Beltz Glaser.

Chapter One: Kabist Town

Perhaps it was the heat that set me prowling alone that day. I’d like to blame it on the desert winds blowing me into recklessness, but more likely it was that serene smile on my mother’s face even as the sweat dripped down her cheeks. She had hold of the Endless, she told me, and within that sphere the sun is the kiss of God.

Disgusted with her, with the endless negotiations over who would marry me, the youngest daughter of the great mystic, I slipped through the permitted streets like the ghosts I might one day be able to see.
My wanderings brought me at last to the school yard. Nothing had changed since my graduation in the spring; dust-coated cement underfoot and the smell of disinfectant wafting from the building. The same dying cactus by the front door.
Though the long school day was over, a dozen girls stood beside a bus. I slipped through the crowd to the teacher, moving as silently as if the winds really had blown me. My luck held. Morah Hana was in charge, the only teacher who’d seen me as just another child and not as my mother’s successor. She told me they were going to visit the Botanical Gardens and I was welcome to join their trip.

I should have been preparing my soul for the opening of the Heavenly Gates and the Day of Redemption, the major holidays that ushered in the winter. Instead I stood at the back of the bus and brooded about the short months until my nineteenth birthday while the girls chattered with excitement, pointing out the sights as we passed. Especially the forbidden ones: the city men.

Mother had decreed we all must marry at the holy age of eighteen, but still she had not chosen me a husband. The eligible men of Kabist Town seemed to me a sorry bunch of sycophants and dictators. One day I would be the most important person in Kabist Town, a fate I dreaded but my suitors coveted. Perhaps if they knew how little power my father had over my mother, they would be less eager to court me. But not one of those shiny-eyed young men had ever asked. And I must marry one of them, and soon, lest my soul be in jeopardy.

When we arrived at the Botanical Gardens, I waited until the others were distracted by a dead rabbit at the side of the path, then slipped away. I wanted to disappear into open air and silence and the warmth of living things. Hard to sense life in the little parks in Kabist Town, where the grass was trampled and the trees crowded by too many houses in too small a space. Rab Goren hasn’t permitted Kabist Town to expand beyond its current walls, and Mother won’t challenge his authority.

The mud of the earth sits heavy on Rab Goren’s shoes: he will never hear angels singing. Mother says that is as it should be. He guards us on earth, and frees her to attend to the One Without End.
I took a path that wound through a thicket of small juniper trees and thought about love made in heaven, and match-making mothers, and the future mapped out for me since I was born.

And then…

Floating between worlds.

Where was I?

I felt no air when I breathed, touched nothing as I stretched my hands. Somewhere close by, God’s Seventh Heaven shone in all its glory, tantalizing…but the faint sound of my mother’s voice pulled me back. Demanding, as always.

I was in no mood for her lessons. Why wouldn’t she leave me alone? I screamed her name through the darkness, but her murmur didn’t change.

She wasn’t calling me. She was praying. I couldn’t make out the words, but I knew that sing-song cadence. On and on she chanted: had someone died?

What happened in that juniper thicket?

Chapter Two: Dodtson City

Three kids today, blocking my way home. Their faces sullen, angry, as though I had offended them by being alone. As if a boy with a mother like mine could be anything else.

Last time I’d come home with a bloody nose she hadn’t let me out of the house for an entire week. In case they were waiting to finish me off, she said. She’d been so hysterical I didn’t even try to sneak out while she was sleeping.

I told the teachers I’d been sick.

The biggest of the three kids had a red ganger bandana on his arm over his coat. I didn’t recognize him from Dodston High School, though I’d seen the other two.

If I came home bloodied again, I’d lose another week to that airless house. I needed the sky the way my mother needed me near her.

“Cops!” I shouted, pointing at the empty street. The three turned to look, and I ran.

The heavy school books in my backpack whacked against my spine with each racing step. I cut across someone’s yard, then ducked between two parked trucks. I could hear cursing behind me until the sudden wail of sirens drowned their voices. Maybe the police had  seen them—but it was a fire truck. I followed its wail down two more blocks before I realized the three had given up the chase. My pace slowed.

Maybe it would be one of the good days and I could leave my mother long enough to go to the store. We were almost out of milk. That girl with the dimples might be working the cash register. Maybe she’d smile at me. Her fingers might brush mine as she gave me my change…

Not that my mother would let me leave long enough to actually go on a date. Even if I could find the courage to ask the girl out. I’d never even asked her name.

Another siren joined the first as I reached my street. I smelled disaster before I saw it, a charcoal sense of wrongness. I got home just in time to see the roof collapse. Flames shot out of the open windows. The driveway was blocked with fire trucks, police cars, gaping neighbors.

I raced past them all.

“Hey, boy!” Yellow-covered arms grabbed me and lifted me from the ground. “You can’t go in there.” The voice thick, smoke-hoarsened.

“My mother,” I choked out. The arms carried me backward, depositing me in the grip of another uniform. This one was blue instead of yellow and made of cloth.

“Could there have been someone home?” the cop asked.

“My mother!” I shouted. She hadn’t left the house in four years.

They didn’t find her until a little later, when the fire had died down enough to mount a search. They told me the door to her bedroom was open—they asked why hadn’t she tried to escape? Was she taking sleeping pills? Her bedroom was on the first floor. Was she disabled?

Not the way they meant. She hadn’t been well, I told them. All I could ever say about my mother. She’d seen to that.

The cop liked my answer. Their image of a sick old lady fit the scene they’d found. She hadn’t even tried to open the windows.