“But it is no accident either!” Sarah snapped. “I love our son. I love him more than anything. I am happy with him and him alone. But a soul like his cannot find a wife or plant a seed in her womb. We have already grown old, and now we will die with no lineage but our soft, passive boy with the reborn soul of a sinning woman fixed in his chest. It must be my fault. I must have passed on a blemish that resides in my own spirit.” Yitzchak realized that he was trembling, the wonder of hearing part of the truth lodged in his heart voiced aloud by the woman he loved most in the world sending quivering awe through his body.

  Avraham hushed his wife. Yitzchak heard a shuffling and the whisper of fabric against fabric. They must have embraced each other.

  “G-d will provide,” Avraham whispered. “Have faith, and keep hold of the love that is in your heart. G-d listens to our prayers and will not forsake us.”

  “I’m just so lonely,” Sarah sobbed. “I miss our families. I know we have left Avram and Sarai behind, and I love G-d and our flocks and the open sky and the way I can feel the seam where I have been stitched into everything else and it has been stitched into me. But I miss being like everyone else.”

  Avraham chuckled. “To be changed is not only to lose who you were before, but also to forget how to love what made that person who they were. I grieve Avram and Sarai every day, but every day I learn to love Avraham and Sarah and Yitzchak even more.”

  Sarah sighed. “Thank you,” she said softly. A gentle hand began to stroke Yitzchak’s hair, and he would know the touch of his mother anywhere.

  He wished he had been able to say goodbye to her before he and his father had left for Moriah. Their household was filled with love, but Yitzchak and Sarah were special confidants. They understood each other and loved each other in a way that no one else could. It had only been three days, but Yitzchak already missed her terribly. He could not wait to see her again. The longing was an ache in his heart.

  Before he could voice his pain aloud, Yitzchak followed his father around a lip of rock and, instead of more mountain, there was only rocky, flat ground. The air was thin in Yitzchak’s lungs and, looking out across the landscape stretched out impossibly small like anthills and weeds, he finally realized how much closer to the heavens he had climbed.

  He came up beside his father to join him, and the man’s face was pale, too bloodless underneath the sweltering afternoon sun.

  “Father?” Yitzchak asked. “Are you alright? Have you been visited by another messenger?”

  Avraham shook his head. “All is well.” The corners of his mouth twitched in an attempt to smile. “I am just too old to be climbing mountains. Let us set up the altar.” Avraham arranged the firestone, and Yitzchak laid down the wood that he had carried on his back. Once the altar was finished, Yitzchak’s father came up beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder. He turned to look up at him, smiling, and opened his mouth to ask about the sacrifice that the L-rd would provide. His voice died in his throat when he saw his father’s solemn face.

  Yitzchak’s head began to shake of its own volition. “Father—”

  Avraham had always been larger and stronger than Yitzchak. He made quick work of wrenching his wrists behind him and tying them together with a rough length of rope. Yitzchak tugged fruitlessly against it as his father wrapped his arms around him in one final embrace, the momentum of which he used to throw his son onto his back on top of the altar. Yitzchak’s shoulders twinged as his arms were crushed underneath him.

  His heart hammered in his chest. His father’s clammy hand pressed down over top of his mouth, pinning him by clutching his skull too tightly for Yitzchak to be able to move it. He screamed against his stone-faced father’s palm loud enough for his voice to crack and fray at the edges. The sacrificial knife glinted in Avraham’s free hand. As Yitzchak helplessly kicked his legs, he realized that he had soiled himself.

  He was looking up at his father, but also he was standing several feet away, watching his own body thrash like a frenzied prey animal. As his father slowly raised up the knife, what felt like rain dropped against Yitzchak’s eyelids. He blinked it away, and when he opened his eyes again there was another figure looming above him.

  The world around Yitzchak was already so bright and loud, so the stranger’s brilliance was too much to comprehend. There were only flashes of hands and wings and hooves and eyes, so many eyes, all of them weeping. Their tears mingled with Yitzchak’s own, gravity pulling them down to the back of the sockets, ready to eat away at the nerves.

  Avraham’s grip had loosened, his hand shaking and spasming, but Yitzchak had stopped fighting. He just lay there limply. He was the firstborn son of a prophet. He would be a good son. It was his duty to bear this weight that had always felt like it was meant for someone else. It was his duty to bear it, to let everyone believe that he was the man that would usher in countless generations with strength and dignity.

  “Please,” he whispered to his father in a hoarse, high voice, higher than that of any man he had ever met, something that he savored even now. “When you tell mother, keep her away from the wells and the cliffs. Tell her that I love her, and that I did not struggle.” The latter was a lie, but one that Yitzchak hoped might save his mother’s life.

  Avraham did not answer, he only raised the knife higher. Yitzchak watched him do it from over Avraham’s shoulder.

  “Avraham,” the stranger said in countless quivering voices. Yitzchak dimly realized that he was finally seeing one of his father’s angels. It wasn’t terrifying like his mother had claimed it to be. It was beautiful. It touched Yitzchak’s face gently, and he nuzzled against the warm softness of it. His father did not heed the call, and Yitzchak watched and waited for the knife in his throat.

  “Avraham!” the angel called again, louder and more urgent, and Avraham’s head finally jerked up to look at it.

  “Here I am,” he whispered, his gaze far away.

  “Do not raise your hand against the boy,” the angel said, “or do anything to him. For now I know that you fear G-d, since you have not withheld your son, your favored one, from Me.” Yitzchak could feel it watching not his body on the altar, but the version of him standing beyond it.

  Avraham’s grip went slack around the knife, and it fell to the ground with a thud. His gaze wandered to the right, and he staggered off to investigate something out of Yitzchak’s sight. He watched his body roll off the altar and fall to the ground, throwing up a cloud of dust as he gagged and gasped and retched. Then the angel was in front of him.

  “You were trapped in there for much too long,” it said kindly. “Come along with me, I will show you the place that has been made for you.”

  One of Yitzchak’s souls watched his body, the form that had never been his. The other curled up into a ball and sobbed.

  “I think you have the wrong one,” said the Yitzchak calmly standing on his feet. “I am the firstborn son. I am the one whom the knife was meant for.”

  “And it found you,” the angel responded. “This body was never yours, it was only a vessel you were stuffed into alongside that other spirit. I will bring you home.” The soul that was no longer Yitzchak did not respond. He stood silently and watched his companion cry.

  “Do not fear,” the angel said. “You will see her again.”

  “I will trust in the L-rd,” the soul finally said, finding peace in the words as he spoke them. “I will go with you.”

  “Thank you,” the angel said, and then Yitzchak was alone.

  Avraham came back to the altar with a ram, lustrous and without blemish. Yitzchak watched him mechanically sacrifice it with dull eyes. Once the deed was done, Avraham turned and shuffled off to begin making his way down the mountain, mumbling to an angel that Yitzchak could not hear.

  As Avraham slowly departed from the altar, Yitzchak sat up with trembling, weak arms. The rope had come untied as a result of either angelic intervention or lucky coincidence, and Yitzchak, now freed, sat back against the blood-slick altar. The landscape was just as beautiful as it had been minutes ago, but it sat differently in Yitzchak’s chest now. It felt lighter, more free. Now that the other one was gone, Yitzchak could feel the place where the two souls had been chafing against each other. The burning of it was gone, in its place nothing but a soothing wholeness.

  Yitzchak braced her forearms on the altar and heaved herself to her feet. She took a moment to drink in the land sprawling below her and listen to the soft sounds of the wind and the birds. Then, she followed her father down the slopes of Mount Moriah.

  Pieces

  Emily Hoffman

  Content Warnings: gore

  Sometimes Kieran wondered if he could pinpoint it. If thinking hard enough would allow him to select a specific moment – or at least a specific day – when the last bits of his humanity had slipped away. When the cold bodies in front of him had ceased being people and had become parts with price tags. Things to be divided up, bagged, and stuffed into boxes in a giant, industrial, walk-in freezer.

  It had reminded him of Costco, at first. Overstuffed, and frigid. Except instead of bulk produce, and dried goods, there were boxes of heads. Arms. Torsos. Spines with shoulders, and spines without. He’d canceled his Costco membership a week after he’d started working. Hadn’t stepped foot in one for years.

  Maybe that had been the day – the day when he’d finally gone back. When the gigantic freezers at the store had stopped sending a shiver down his spine, and it had all become relative. When boxes of heads were suddenly no different than boxes of grapes.

  His mother would have been disappointed.

  Not that it mattered, he’d disappointed her years ago. She’d been so pleased when he’d gone into medicine instead of opera. Her odd, dramatic little boy finally choosing the respectable path. Maybe if she’d known where his career had been headed, she wouldn’t have made such a fuss over his boyfriends. How immoral could dating men be when you divided body parts up like a butcher, and sold them off for a living?

  He did his best to shake those thoughts off. To keep them from lingering. To keep from making any moral judgements against himself. This wasn’t murder, it was business. Nothing more, nothing less. He wondered sometimes if he’d have felt better working during the day, when the building felt more like an office. When it was populated, and there was a receptionist out front, smiling and answering phones. When there was light outside, and they could all pretend they didn’t do work that was truly morbid. He’d appreciated the ability to hide behind pleasantries for a few weeks, but eventually the feeling had faded. It felt false. Like a lie strung together to appease someone he couldn’t identify. No one living – save for those employed there – would ever see past the front desk, so perhaps the facade was simply for the dead. A small prayer to already departed souls that they not return to haunt here. Something about that seemed even more distasteful to Kieran.

  Either the souls were gone, or they weren’t. If they were present enough to care about what happened to their bodies after death, then perhaps this wasn’t the sort of business anyone should partake in. No one had ever taken home a ghost, though. And there was nothing that roamed the halls after dark. So Kieran had felt safe to discard the pleasantries. To do his work unbothered, when no one else could see.

  There was less judgment, in the middle of the night, even if it lacked sunshine and smiles.

  He’d developed a routine over the last few years. Arrive at 10:00pm, turn the lights on, check his cut sheets. Turn on something operatic as loud as the music would go, and then work until morning. It felt better, somehow, stepping out into the morning light than it did to leave in the evening. Maybe he was more worried about ghosts than he actually cared to admit. Not that he’d ever speak such a thing out loud.

  It should have been a normal night. Normal enough, anyway, if you were misfortunate enough to consider segmenting bodies up throughout the evening to be normal. He barely heard the knocks at the front door between his music and the bone saw, chewing its way through cold sinew, and marrow. The sound hardly cut through to the back hallways in the first place, it felt like divine intervention — that one of the raps against glass would occur during a momentary lull in the ongoing noise.

  He’d never considered himself a brave man, despite the iron stomach he seemed to have when dealing exclusively with the dead. And answering the front door of a tissue bank in the middle of the night was high on his list of things not to do — certainly not while he was by himself. Tissue — bodies — sold for more than he felt comfortable considering. Thousands of dollars, depending on the piece. Then again, body snatchers hardly seemed like the sorts to knock, given the criminality of the whole escapade.

  So he waited.

  Stilled.

  Held his breath until the knock came again, three short raps against glass, followed by a muffled sound that echoed down the halls behind it. Like a voice. A deep sort of bass that he felt in his chest, bones vibrating under his skin, despite the fact that he couldn’t actually claim to have heard anything.

  Right then.

  The process of making himself fit to answer the door was an arduous one. Gloves were removed. His face mask. His apron. Scrubs were checked over for spots of blood, and his hands were washed. He’d hoped that the knocking would end in the interim — it didn’t. The voice called again. It was definitely a voice, he’d decided, rumbling down the hallway like music from a club a block away.

  “ — hold on — ”

  It didn’t make sense to respond really, no one could hear him from the back. He muttered the words regardless, heaving a sigh as he wound his way to the front office. His nerves tingled, trilling under his skin like they’d decided all on their own that he needed to run. And he felt like a child, suddenly, sprinting up the basement stairs at night so whatever lurked in the dark couldn’t catch him. He couldn’t quite temper the feeling, so he found himself speeding up — steps only slowing once the office doors came into view.

  For a split second he wondered if he’d fallen asleep, somehow. If he was dreaming, or if he’d lost time. Or if, perhaps, the night had just flown past him — because it was bright out. Just for a moment. Bright enough for him to mistake the middle of the night for dawn breaking. And there were prisms behind the glass. Bright, shifting rainbows. Confusing for all of a minute until they shifted into the shape of a man, lanky, and hovering in the darkness.

  A man who suddenly knocked at the glass again, pulling Kieran back into himself.

  He was tall. That was about all that Kieran could make out through the doors. Tall, and angular, leaning like a Ken Doll being operated by a toddler. Kieran blinked awkwardly, nose wrinkling as he scrambled for the door to open it before the man could knock again. “ –Can I help you?”

  It would have sounded rude, had he been in a customer service position of any kind. As it stood, he wasn’t exactly used to talking to anyone other than himself during working hours. The man blinked back, ducking some as he made an attempt to shift into what little light there was. “You sell bodies here, yes? Pieces of them? Cut them off and sell them for … science?”

  Kieran frowned, and his dumbfounded silence stretched out for a too long minute.

  “Science.” The man repeated the word like he’d only just learned it yesterday and it still felt wrong in his mouth. His head shook as if he somehow disapproved of the entire thought. “I need something removed and sold. Can you do that for me?”

  Kieran blinked again, eyebrows furrowing. “ – I don’t know what you think we do here, but it’s not … that.”

  The other man’s eyebrows furrowed, like he’d never made the movement himself before, but instinctively felt the need to echo Kieran’s expression. “This is a tissue bank, is it not? That’s what I was told. You remove pieces from people and sell them.”

  “Well … yes.” Kieran blinked. “But those people are dead, we take …. We take donated tissue and divide it up. Then it gets shipped out for research. This isn’t some sort of body modification … operation.” He paused, frown flickering across his face. “I don’t know what your deal is, but I think you probably need help that I’m not capable of giving —“ He shrugged, stepping back to close the door. There was work to do. Work that had nothing to do with the very clearly unhinged man outside.

  “I need my wings cut off. Please. I don’t ask this lightly, and I would not be in front of you now if I did not find this necessary.” Well. Damn. Kieran paused, if only because the offered explanation was so unexpected that it ground him to a halt. “My name is Wyatt. It is not the name I was given, it is just the name that I like. And I need your help, please.” Wyatt blinked, reaching to curl slender fingers around the door before he gently pulled it open again. “I understand that this might be difficult to process, would it help if I showed you? My wings, I mean.”

  “ … No.” It was the only thing Kieran could think to say. The only English word that came to mind in the silence that followed Wyatt’s question. “No, I think I’m okay, I think I should go, I have work — I have work to do.”

  “Please wait —” Kieran shook his head, even as Wyatt stepped away from the door and shed his jacket like it was a second skin.

  Lock the door.

  Step away.

  Go back to work.

  Call the police if he doesn’t leave —

  “ — I’ll call the police, I will.” The words fell from his mouth like an echo from an unfamiliar part of his brain. The part that took over when every other bit was occupied elsewhere, watching Wyatt awkwardly work at the buttons of his shirt like it somehow impossibly contained the wings he’d promised to show off. “Are you listening to me? Stop —”