So, having read the last verse I cast a look at the attendants, especially the ones closest to me. Their faces seem to have softened. I can sense them beginning to adore me. One of them comes over and taps my shoulder, which nearly knocks me off my feet. Another one laughs. Others wipe their eyes.
Then I glance at Saul, hoping for a tear, a smile, a word of encouragement. Instead I note an odd, vacant look on his face. Utter indifference. It stings me. Am I too short, too young, too curly for the role he has in mind for me?
Wiping the sweat off my brow I bow down before him and turn to leave the court, which is the moment he leans forward on his spear.
“Stop right there,” says Saul. “Tell me: what can you do best?”
To which I say, “Recover.”
He glowers at me as if to ask, Recover? From what?
“From this,” I point out, daring to be honest. “Rejection.”
David in Rise to Power
Excerpt: Twisted
He turns to me with a sly look. To my surprise, his smile—even with those sharp fangs—is quite endearing.
“Job’s wife, I presume? Hallelujah! I have been expecting you for quite a long while,” says Satan. His voice is sweet. He must have sung in a choir in his youth, because in some ways he sounds as pious as my husband. “Shame, shame, shame on you,” he wags his finger. “You sure made me wait, didn’t you...”
And without allowing time for an answer, he brings a magnifying glass to his bloodshot eye. Enlarged, his pupil is clearly horizontal and slit-shaped.
Which makes me feel quite at home with him, because so are the pupils of the goats in the herds we used to own.
Meanwhile, Satan unfolds a piece of paper and runs his finger through some names listed there. Then, with a gleam of satisfaction he marks a checkbox there, right in the middle of the crinkled page. At once, a whiff of smoke whirls in the air.
Satan blows off a few specks of charred paper, folds the thing and tucks it into his breast pocket, somewhere in his wool. Cashmere, I ask myself? Really? In this heat?
Back home, when I would count my gold coins, this was something I craved with a passion... It would keep me warm during the long winter nights...
Then, without even bothering to look at me, Satan says, “I swear, madam, you look lovely tonight.”
For a moment I am grateful that my husband is among the living. Or so I think. Nowadays, influenced by the elders, he regards swearing as a mortal sin, as bad as cursing. He even plugs his ears, for no better reason than to avoid hearing it. But if you ask me, I swear: without a bit of blasphemy, language would utterly dull, and fit for nothing but endless prayer. Sigh.
Strangely, Satan does not frighten me that much anymore. And so, swaying on my hip bones, I strut out of the cave in his direction. I feel an odd urge to fondle his horns. Along the path toward him I make sure to suck in my belly, because in the company of a gentleman, even a corpse is entitled to look her best.
Job’s Wife in Twisted
Excerpt: A Favorite Son
You may have heard those rumors about me: how I escaped by moonlight, how I hid inside each one of the seven wells of Beersheba, with nothing in my possession but the shirt on my back, how I eluded my enemy, my brother, and then, how frightened I was, how alone. I’m afraid you have been, at best, misinformed—or, more probably, mislead by some romantic foolery, some fiction and lies, the kind of which can easily be found, and in abundance I might add, in the holy scriptures.
I insist: it was not moonlight but rather, high noon. I was wearing no shirt whatsoever—nothing, really, but a goatskin sleeve. There was only one well in which I could hide, not seven. And most importantly, I was hardly alone, for the entire camp—all the maidservants, the shepherds, the guards—stood aghast all around me. So now, you must see that I could not, despite my best intentions, escape stealthily out of there, nor could I elude anyone.
Instead I was flung out, kicking and screaming, with tugs and pulls loosening the remaining shreds of my clothes, and whacks and smacks coming at my bare back from all directions. My left eye swelled up to such a degree that out of necessity, I resorted to use the right one—only to discover, once I raised my head from the dirt, that my brother was standing right over me. His foot could be seen coming straight at me, at an easygoing, unhurried pace, until it turned into a full blown kick.
I managed to roll away, mainly by flailing my arms wildly over my head. With a great sense of urgency I crawled on all four through the crowd, and hid inside the closest well. Luckily it was bone dry, thanks to a yearlong drought. And so for a second, I could hang there by my fingernails and pant, and catch my breath. Then I tiptoed behind the corner, right into the shade of my mother’s tent.
From there I took a plunge and hurled myself downhill—where, to my utter disappointment, I found out that my brother had already caught up to where I was headed, and was waiting there for me with open arms. He made a point of letting me know that his hate for me would, by no means, stand in the way of our closeness.
“Come, Yankle,” said Esav. “I promise not to hurt you.”
“Really,” I said. “Can I trust you?”
“Aha,” said he. “I will just kill you.”
Yankle in A Favorite Son
Books by Uviart
My Own Voice
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A Favorite Son
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Jess and Wiggle
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Now I Am Paper
978-1494919429
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The White Piano (Still Life with Memories Book 2) Page 18
