The Golden Dreidel

by Ellen Kushner

  “For you,” said Tante Miriam, “for you, my girl, I have something verrrry special.” She reached into the bottom of the bag, and handed Sara—a Chanukah dreidel. A shiny, gold metal dreidel, almost as big as a book.

  “Oh.” Sara had been taught that if you didn’t act grateful for every present, no matter what it was, you were never going to get any more. But it was hard to hide her disappointment. “Thank you,” she said glumly. She stood there holding the oversize dreidel, feeling like the world’s biggest idiot.

  “Hey, let’s play!” Her brother grabbed the golden dreidel out of her hands.

  “Quit it!” Sara said automatically. But Seth and the other cousins spun it all over the living room, yelling and grabbing and laughing.

  “Watch out, you kids!” cried the grown-ups. Seth and the others weren’t really trying to play the dreidel game, they were just showing off how far they could make it spin before it fell down. The dreidel was heavy, with fancy squiggles and scrollwork all over, like a work of art, not a toy. You were probably supposed to keep it on a shelf on display and not play with it at all. It took both hands to hold and spin. But the grown-ups didn’t try to stop them, because it was Chanukah and they were supposed to be glad that the children were playing with a real Chanukah toy and not some plastic piece of junk or video game. “Don’t hurt the furniture!”

  In the middle of the chaos, the lights flickered and the room grew dim. It was old Tante Miriam, lifting her arms above them all.

  “Wait!” she said. As if by magic, everyone stopped at once. Even the teenagers took out their earbuds, and the grown-ups put down their drinks to listen to her.

  “Chanukah is a time for joy,” Tante Miriam said. “But dreidels, you know, have their rules. They have their time and their season. And there are four sides to every dreidel.” The grown-ups nodded, but she ignored them, her face turned toward the children. “What is written on those sides?”

  “Letters,” said Cousin Amy.

  “But which letters are they?”

  “Hebrew letters,” Cousin Jason said quickly, because he had to know more than anyone. “Nun, gimel, hey, shin.”

  “Letters that begin the words Nes Gadol Haya Sham: A Great Miracle Was There. So be careful how you spin that dreidel, children, for with it you are spinning miracles.” A baby started to cry and was rocked and hushed. “If your dreidel lands on the side with the letter gimel, you win all you can see before you—but whether or not that is for the best, who knows? Unless you can see the next spin, and the one beyond that, never be too sure…. For hear me well: it is in the nature of dreidels to spin, as it is in the nature of the world to change. On hey, you give half and keep half—so be sure you have something worth keeping. And try to give with a generous heart. Nun means nothing, no change at all; things remain as they were. Not always a bad thing, not really. And if your dreidel lands on the letter shin, it means loss. You must give up something precious, maybe the one thing you cherish most. But never fear to spin again—for maybe it was something you needed to lose in the first place.”

  Now the whole room was looking at Sara’s present.

  “Cool,” breathed Seth, balancing the dreidel on one hand. “And what if you—”

  “That’s mine,” Sara said loudly.

  “What?”

  “That’s my present,” she said. “Give it.”

  “Nuh-uh.” Seth slung it behind his back like a basketball. “You didn’t even want it.”

  “Who says?” It might be just a dumb dreidel, but it was her dumb dreidel! “I didn’t say you could play with it.”

  “It’s mine now. By right of conquest and eminent domain.”

  Sara didn’t shout “Mo-om!” She just went for him. She got her hands on the dreidel, but her brother grabbed it back and held it up high over her head. Sara jumped, and jumped again. She knocked it right out of his hand, and—and—then it happened.

  The dreidel went flying—up in the air, right into Aunt Leah’s giant TV screen. There was a horrible sound, as if a hundred screaming cats were being tortured. And then there was silence.

  The screen was cracked from top to bottom.

  “Oh. My. God.” Sara’s mother was white-faced. “Leah, I am so sorry—”

  “Hey,” said Aunt Leah quietly, trying to sound cheerful and not quite succeeding, “don’t worry about it, Becky. We watch too much TV as it is.”

  Aunt Rachel was on the warpath. “See what happens?! See what happens when you kids get wild?”

  Max started crying. Sara had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from doing it, too.

  “Nice going, Sara,” Seth muttered.

  “That’s enough, kids!” Their mother clapped her hands once. “Bed. Right now. All of you.”

  Jason complained, “We didn’t do anything. It was Seth and Sara—”

  She just glared at him.

  “But what about presents?” Amy asked in a small voice. “We haven’t opened family presents yet.”

  Aunt Leah said softly, “Maybe tomorrow, kids. Good night.”

  SARA COULDN’T SLEEP. No one was speaking to her, not even Amy. It was not fair. Sara knew it was not fair. She hadn’t meant to throw the dreidel at the TV. All she’d wanted was to get it away from Seth. But when she touched it, it had seemed to fly from her hand like a rocket, shot right into the screen for a landing.

  Maybe the damage wasn’t as bad as it looked. Maybe they could fix it. Maybe she could sell the dreidel to help pay for the TV. What if it were real gold? It was still her present, wasn’t it? “Something verrrry special,” Tante Miriam had said. Maybe she meant it was worth thousands of dollars! If Sara sold it, she could buy giant TVs for everyone, maybe.

  “Hey, Amy,” Sara whispered from the bunk bed below her cousin. Usually they tossed for who got the top bunk, but this time Amy had just taken it without asking.

  “Shut up!” hissed one of the teenage cousins, who was on the floor in a sleeping bag.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” Sara muttered. She pulled on her slippers and grabbed her robe and crept downstairs to the living room. The rooms downstairs smelled of burned-out fires, the way they always did after all the candles in the menorahs had burned down to nothing and put themselves out. The house was dark. Even the grown-ups had gone to bed.

  There was a glow of light in the living room, though—and it seemed to be coming from the busted TV. Sara breathed out a gentle phew! Maybe the TV wasn’t really broken after all. In fact, she was almost sure it wasn’t, because she could hear voices coming from it. Some sort of adventure program was on, with people shouting, “Come on! Hurry up! Are you coming through or not?”

  The light and the voices guided her into the living room. Sara stared at the screen. Had the TV always been this big? It was nearly as tall as she was. But the crack was still there, so bright she could hardly look at it. And there was no program on, nothing to see at all—nothing but the voices, calling, calling:

  “Come on! Hurry up! Tante Miriam crossed the Red Sea—are you scared to follow through here?”

  She stared at the crack getting higher—as high as a door—as high as the wall, growing, growing….

  “Come on, girl, don’t be a chicken!”

  Sara took a step toward the screen.

  She stepped on something squishy that moved under her.

  “Yeow!” a new voice cried. “That hurt!”

  In the dazzling light Sara saw a girl her own age on the floor—a girl with crazy golden hair and sparkling eyes.

  “Help me up,” the girl gasped. “We’ve got to get through before it closes!”

  The girl gripped her arm, and Sara hauled her to her feet.

  “Come on,” the girl said, pulling Sara toward the TV. “Aren’t you coming? Don’t you want to see?”

  “But it’s broken,” Sara said wildly, trying to get free.

  “No, it’s not—
it’s finally fixed!” And with that, the girl hurled herself into the golden light, taking Sara with her.

  Sara heard music, or maybe it was just voices, the voices of hundreds of people, all calling to her to follow them…then it became a crystal sound, like wine glasses ringing when you wet the rims, only many, so many, deep and rich and high and clear….

  NEXT THING SHE KNEW, Sara found herself sprawled in the green grass of a meadow, the golden girl at her side. It was daytime, sunny and warm. There were yellow flowers everywhere, and it smelled like summer vacation. Off in the distance, majestic mountains stretched purple into the clouds, but above them the sky was a perfect blue.

  “How did you land?” the girl asked breathlessly. “Did you win or lose?”

  “Huh?”

  The girl got up and brushed herself off. “Didn’t you look? How did you fall?”

  “I—don’t know,” Sara said, confused. “I’m OK, I guess. I mean, I’m fine.”

  “You’ll find out later,” the girl said. “That’s for sure. I fell on gimel. I win!”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m lucky that way.”

  It wasn’t an answer, but Sara didn’t care so much about how she landed as where. “Where are we?”

  “We’re home!” the girl said happily.

  “This isn’t my home.”

  “Why not? It could be. You can live anywhere, really, if you put your mind to it. I’ve lived in your world for years.”

  “But—what were you doing at Aunt Leah’s? What happened to the TV? Who are you, anyway?”

  The girl grinned. “Don’t you recognize me?” She lifted her arms over her head and spun around until she fell, dizzy and laughing, onto the grass. “That’s a hey, Sara: you only get to keep half of what you got—’cause I’m your special gift—your golden dreidel!” She was certainly gifted at spinning and falling. “You can be my friend, though, and that’s a thing worth keeping. Get it?”

  No, Sara wanted to say, I don’t get it at all. But what good would it do? This girl seemed so fizzy, no matter what—dizzily, giddily happy, as if she knew everything were a big joke, and she knew the punchline, and Sara didn’t, but Sara was supposed to, and she was dumb not to get it.

  “Right,” Sara said. “You’re a dreidel, and I’m—” Then she saw it, a deep red scratch on the dreidel girl’s arm. “Hey,” said Sara, “you’re hurt.”

  The girl put her hand over the scratch. “No, I’m not. I’m fine. I’m home, and I’m just fine.”

  Sara fished in her pajama pocket and pulled out a tissue. Her pockets were always lumpy with them, and her mother complained that they got all disgusting in the wash when she forgot to take them out first. But this time it was a good thing they were there, because the girl really was bleeding all down her arm. Sara pressed a couple to the scratch. “Hold this,” she instructed. “Press down really hard; it’ll stop the blood.”

  The girl stared at her own arm. “Wow,” she said. “I guess I got wounded when you threw me at the big screen.”

  “When I what?! I didn’t throw you anywhere—you know I didn’t!”

  “You did, Sara, you know you did,” the girl said helpfully, as if she were reminding her of a candy bar she’d dropped. “You got mad at your brother ’cause he was having fun and you weren’t, and he held me up in the air and you grabbed me and threw me and—”

  “Hold it,” said Sara. “You weren’t there.”

  “Yes, I was, I told you.”

  Sara took a deep breath. She had a feeling she knew where this was going—but she didn’t want this girl to get away with it so easily. “OK. So you were a big, golden dreidel, and Tante Miriam brought you in her bag.”

  “That’s right,” the girl said nodding encouragingly.

  “So how do you know everything that happened?” Sara asked logically. “Dreidels don’t have any ears. Or any eyes.”

  The girl gave her a look like she was being truly dumb. “I’m not really a dreidel,” she said. “I was just being one.”

  Sara sighed. She’d always prayed for magic to be real some day, but she hated stories where it just happened for no reason or didn’t make sense. “OK, let’s say you were being this big, metal dreidel, but you’re really a girl—but at the time, you were a dreidel, right?”

  The girl nodded, her wiry golden curls splashing her neck.

  “So how did you get a cut on your arm, huh?”

  “I told you.”

  Sara was glad to see the other girl looking confused, for once. She moved in to make her point. “I mean, it’s like ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors,’ ” Sara went on. “Metal cracks glass. Glass doesn’t scratch metal.”

  “I’m not metal,” the girl said mournfully.

  “But then how did you get wounded? Cause you were still a dreidel then, right?”

  The girl just started spinning around. She was wearing a thin dress made of many layers of fine material: green, yellow, a little blue, a little red…like the colors you see in a candle flame. She spun herself into dizziness, then fell into the soft grass. She looked up at Sara. “Oops,” she said. She wasn’t laughing now. “That’s a shin.”

  “Loss,” Sara said. “But it’s only a game.” This was starting to spook her. She knew perfectly well none of this was normal. And it wasn’t “just a dream,” either. She never had dreams like this. It was like a story in a book, or a movie. Wherever she was, she didn’t belong here, and she didn’t know the rules. And no amount of logical thinking or arguing with this girl was going to change that. “It’s only a game, right?”

  “Are you playing?” the girl asked. She looked serious for once. She looked right into Sara’s eyes, and her eyes were blue like the heart of a flame. “Are you playing? ’Cause if you’re not playing, you have to get out.”

  I’m not playing. She’d said it once already that night. But that was different. That was Seth and Amy and everyone being stupid to her. Here, she was all alone, except for her “special gift,” the golden dreidel that weird Tante Miriam had pulled last out of the bag for her.

  “I’m playing,” Sara said. “What do I have to do?”

  “Spin,” the girl said.

  “But—” Sara felt like it would just be so dumb. She hadn’t spun around like that since she was a little kid. “But—I’m not a dreidel!” she objected.

  “Neither am I!” the girl sang out. She stuck out her arms at both sides, like Sara and Seth used to do when they were playing airplane. And the smell of the grass under her feet was the smell of long summer afternoons with nothing to do but turn around and around until the trees went round and round overhead.

  Sara spun. Sara spun, and Sara laughed. Her voice was loud and silly, and the dreidel girl’s voice joined hers like one bird in a tree calling to another that something good had come into their world. She spun until she had to fall down, and she was still laughing when she flopped down onto the sweet, sweet grass.

  “How did you land?” the girl asked, lying beside her.

  “Um…” Sara looked down at her panting belly, but she didn’t see any letters there. “How can you tell?”

  “Practice, practice, practice!” It sounded like one of those dopey jokes her father used to tell.

  “No way,” Sara said. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a dreidel. How did you land, yourself?”

  The girl looked down. “Nun.” She frowned. “Nun means nothing. Let’s try again.”

  “No more spinning. I want to do something different now. Let’s go exploring, or get something to eat, or something. Does anyone else live here? Is this a magic world, or just Europe or something? Are there vampires? Do you have to go to school?”

  The dreidel girl was picking at some of the blood that had dried on her arm. Then she looked up into the distance.

  “Do you like adventures?” she asked.

  “Sometimes. What kind?”
/>   “Maybe one with demons?”

  It sounded like one of Seth’s computer games. “What kind of demons?”

  The girl pointed with her chin toward the purple mountains. Off in the distance, a grayish cloud bristled with angry motion. The cloud was rushing closer and closer, so quickly that soon both girls could see the shape of huge beasts and hear the flap of wings. The weird thing was, they looked backward—it was a lot of tails and hooves and things, coming closer and closer….

  “What is it?” Sara whispered.

  “Demons.” For the first time, the dreidel girl’s voice was tinged with fear. “Hordes of them—an entire demon army. I thought they were still locked up in Solomon’s Cave!”

  Sara gulped. “Well, they’re not. What should we do?”

  “If they’re on the march, it means only one thing: the demons have escaped—and we’d better run and warn the king!”

  They took off across the grass. Sara was a good runner, at least. But two girls, even fast ones, are no match for huge creatures with hooves and horns and wings, scaly and feathered and fast. In no time at all, the demons had them surrounded.

  Greatest of them all, riding a fierce beast that was half-camel, half-goat, with fire breathing from his nostrils, was a demon in armor glittering with jewels and a crown on his head: the Demon King. He stared down at them with red eyes and lifted his hand high.

  All of a sudden, the dreidel started to spin. For a second, Sara thought she was just being silly, or else trying to do her special magic—but then she saw her face. The dreidel girl looked so scared. Sara grabbed for her hand, but a powerful force was pulling her away.

  “Help me, Sara!” cried her friend. Sara tried to hook her arm, but it slipped from her grasp as the dreidel turned faster and faster, like a dancer doing a million pirouettes, but clumsy, not elegant, trying to resist. And she wasn’t just spinning in circles. She was moving closer and closer to the terrible creature whose hand was still raised, wielding an awful power.