IEach week, I send out a story via my email newsletter. Each story is around 1000 words, sometimes less, sometimes more. The stories are in a variety of genres: supernatural, thriller, sci-fi, horror, and sometimes romance, and all of my stories typically feature a gay protagonist.
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This is story number 37 of the series. Enjoy!
Clay and Ashes
t was close to midnight when Theo decided to walk off the weird energy buzzing under his skin. He’d been stuck in his apartment all day, fiddling with clay—his latest attempt at sculpting a bust of the ex who’d ghosted him after three months and four overpriced dinners. Not healthy. Definitely not productive.
The night was cool and damp, city steam rising from manhole covers like the pavement was sighing. Autumn had officially arrived, and with it came that sour-sweet smell of wet leaves and garbage. But it was better than his stuffy apartment that still reeked of mineral spirits and stale heartbreak.
He turned onto Ashwood Lane—a stretch of sidewalk most people avoided after dark. It ran behind an old synagogue that had burned down decades ago. The structure was still there, mostly, just a hollow husk of scorched stone and shattered stained glass.
Theo wasn’t scared. He wasn’t brave either—just chronically curious. Plus, he’d read enough folklore to know that interesting things didn’t happen in well-lit places with working doorbells.
So when he heard the creak of movement and the low scrape of something heavy shifting behind the blackened synagogue doors, he paused instead of running.
That’s when he saw it.
A man—no, a thing—stepped into the moonlight. Seven feet tall, maybe more. Skin the color and texture of unglazed clay. Thick arms, impossibly broad shoulders, and deep lines etched into his body like cracks in a dried riverbed. He wore a coat—an actual trench coat—that was comically undersized for his bulk, and a fedora perched on his head like it was trying to make him look casual. It failed.
Theo blinked. Then blinked again.
“I’m hallucinating,” he muttered.
“You’re not.”
The voice was deep and rumbled through the ground more than through the air.
Theo froze. “Okay… that’s new.”
The golem tilted his head, a motion too precise to be entirely human. “Curious. You’re the first person who hasn’t screamed.”
“Give me time,” Theo said, his voice cracking. “I’m still deciding.”
The golem stepped forward. Not aggressively, just enough that Theo could see the Hebrew letters etched into the thick clay where his collarbone would be.
“My name is Umet,” the golem said.
Theo, who had read way too many books on folklore, whispered, “Truth.” His eyes locked onto the letters—emet. “Holy shit. You’re real.”
“Yes,” Umet replied. “And I’m very lost.”
They stood in silence for a beat, the wind whistling through the hollow windows of the synagogue.
Umet finally broke the silence. “My master died three weeks after creating me.”
“Sorry, what?”
The golem’s stone-cut face twitched. A hint of sadness? It was hard to tell with someone whose face didn’t really do expressions.
“He gave me life. Taught me how to speak. Then he coughed blood for two days and never woke up.”
Theo swallowed hard. “Jesus.”
“I do not know him.”
“Yeah. It’s a—never mind. So… you’ve just been wandering around since then?”
“Yes. I was made to protect. But I have no one to protect. I was made to obey. But there are no commands. I tried going back to the soil, but the earth refused me. It said I still had purpose.”
Theo’s spine prickled. He didn’t love where this was going. “And you think that purpose is… me?”
“No,” Umet said. Then added, “But I was told you might help me find it.”
Theo blinked. “By who?”
The golem hesitated. “A raven.”
Theo’s jaw dropped. “A talking raven?”
“It said your name. Said you had fire under your skin.”
“Oh, come on. I’m not—like—the chosen one or anything. I do ceramics and read tarot sometimes. I work part-time at an occult bookstore. That’s not a resume. That’s a Tumblr bio.”
The golem didn’t laugh. Didn’t even blink.
Which made it worse.
“So what do you want from me?”
“I want to stop dreaming.”
“Golem’s dream?”
“I don’t know about other Golems because I’ve never met any but I do. Since my master’s death. I dream of fire. A city crumbling. And something beneath the ashes calling my name.”
Theo took a long breath. He could walk away. Chalk this up to a stress-induced episode. Or stay and see where it went.
Spoiler: he stayed.
“Alright,” he said. “Come on. My place isn’t far. But you’re ducking through the alley or my neighbors will call the cops. Or Animal Control. Honestly, could go either way.”
The next hour was weird, even by Theo’s standards.
He made tea while Umet sat on the floor, too heavy for furniture. Every now and then, the golem would turn his head like he was listening to something Theo couldn’t hear.
Theo asked questions. Umet answered them with the unsettling calm of someone who had never lied.
He was crafted from soil pulled from a cemetery, river mud, and ash. His master had been dying when he made him. The man—Rabbi Isaacs—had poured every last breath of magic into Umet’s creation. His final act was life-giving. His death, Umet’s beginning.
“Look,” Theo said finally, curling his hands around his mug. “I don’t know what you are, really. But if you’re having dreams, then something’s trying to tell you something. Dreams aren’t just leftover static. They’re messages. Warnings. Or both.”
The golem turned slowly toward him. “Then will you help me understand them?”
Theo hesitated. He could already feel the hook in his chest. The tug toward something bigger, weirder, and possibly lethal. And maybe it was ego, or loneliness, or a little too much wine earlier, but he nodded.
“Yeah, okay. I’ll help.”
That night, Theo dreamt too.
The city was burning.
Not metaphorically. Buildings melted like wax. The sky cracked open. Something vast and old, made of smoke and teeth, slithered through the air above it all.
In the center of the flame stood Umet—his clay body fractured, his letters half-erased.
And beside him? Theo. Holding a staff of fire.
He woke gasping, sweat-soaked and shivering.
Umet was already up. Watching him.
“You saw it too,” the golem said.
Theo nodded. “Yeah. That thing. That thing wants you gone. It wants us both gone.”
“No,” Umet said quietly. “It wants what’s inside me.”
Theo stared. “Wait. Inside you?”
“I was made as a vessel. Rabbi Isaacs put something in me. Something ancient.”
“What kind of something?”
Umet looked down, touched his chest. “He called it the ‘Name Beneath the Name.’”
Theo exhaled slowly. “Oh. Well, that’s not ominous at all.”
The next few days were a blur. Research. Dreams. More tea. At some point, Theo stopped asking whether this was really happening. Reality had been weird for a while now—this was just a different flavor of it.
Then came the night the dreams bled into waking life.
It started with shadows that didn’t follow their owners. Lights flickering when no one moved. Then, a scream from the alley behind Theo’s building.
He and Umet ran out, and there it was.
The thing from the dreams. Smoke and sinew. No eyes, just a gaping void for a face and teeth that shouldn’t be.
Theo froze.
The creature hissed in a language that curled his brain like burning paper.
Umet stepped in front of him.
“No,” the golem said. “You may not have him.”
The creature lunged.
What happened next Theo would never be able to explain.
He raised his hands. Something lit up inside him. Not metaphorically. His palms burned with gold fire, searing through the dark. The creature screamed—not just in pain, but in fear.
Umet reached into his chest and pulled out something glowing—a sliver of pure light etched with ancient runes. He hurled it at the thing.
There was a sound like thunder and breaking bones.
The thing vanished in a vortex of fire and smoke.
When it was over, Theo collapsed to the ground, panting.
Umet knelt beside him. “The piece is gone. It will no longer call to darkness.”
Theo stared at him. “You just… it out like it was a pocket watch.”
“It was never mine. Just something I was entrusted to carry. Now it’s released.”
Theo blinked. “So what now?”
Umet looked at him. “Now I choose for myself.”
Theo smiled, a little crookedly. “Any chance you wanna stick around? Teach me how to not accidentally become a magical flamethrower in my sleep?”
Umet’s mouth twitched. It might’ve been a smile.
“I would like that.”
They walked back inside together, one man and his clay companion, both changed, both still learning what that meant.
Neither of them looked back.
THE END
