(this will not be your usual titillating Fab story, I'm afraid. Sorry to disappoint)
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will lead your path straight.”
She repeated the childhood memory verse, over and over, as she looked herself in the mirror. Waited for her voice to stop shaking, the tears to stop streaming down her face. As she had for many years, she struggled to turn her emotions off, watched the fire in her eyes dwindle until it almost disappeared. Tensed her jaw, splashed cold water on her face. Joy. Jesus, Others, Yourself.
Almost time to paint the smile back on her face and return to reality.
It was her lot, of course, and there wasn’t any good crying over it, silly little girl that she was. The Lord had indeed seen her since she was being stitched within her mother’s womb. For reasons that no one had ever explained to her, she was tainted, and was thus destined for a lesser life. Something she had done, something her parents had done, something wrong with her. She didn’t know. She was to be a lesson to others, to uphold their faith, to assist the righteous. Her suffering was her gift to her community, she had been told and known since she could remember. She had, of course, been doubly cursed. She had not even been blessed with children, whose hope was even more inextinguishable than her own, who might have something to hope for. A daughter of Eve, temptress of men, who could not fulfil the reason for her existence.
She always wondered why her mother had chosen to call her Hope. What an inappropriate name.
She did have a husband, with whom the community had ordained she was to spend the rest of her life. His helpmeet. Her thoughts departed from her bitter, hollow barrenness as he shrieked and she heard something shatter. Reality resumed. She ran, as she did every day, to rescue him from himself. Her desperate aching loneliness returned to its almost impenetrable fortress.
She had been promised to him, and so it was, they were married when she was old enough. Maybe a wife, maybe children, would purge him of his demons. She had no other prospects in any case: she was tainted. She was, of course, not good enough for the challenge, and so she brought him to regular exorcisms. Would it be that she had the faith the size of a mustard seed...
It was not so, and so her private torment continued. He was shunned from jobs within their community because of his affliction. Quite how he held down his good secular job she didn’t know, given how he behaved at home. But he did, and she was always there to pick up the pieces. The favour was never returned, despite her occasional illness or frailty. She painted on a smile, pretended all was well, and allowed her heart to freeze rather than atrophy.
Their lesser status in the community did bring some advantages, in a way. He had a regular job away from home. She was rarely if ever included in the community groups that her sisters in Christ spent their time with, and she had no children to tend to. She returned to the temptations of her youth: reading. She began to sneak into the library. Not just the Bible. Devotionals at first, from other forms of Christianity. Mythology, and she remembered the fury her father unleashed after she was caught with the story of Pandora’s Box open on her lap. She began to research demon possession, or, as they seemed to call it outside her community, mental illness.
She covered herself for her covert secular trips very carefully. Clothed in plain dark cloth, collarbone to wrist to ankle. She kept her head down, and spoke to as few people as she could get away with. She learned to navigate the library independently. She did not notice the way that people looked at her: she would not have seen it if she’d been looking. She was tainted, as you recall, and no one had ever looked at her as a full, complete woman, not even on her wedding day. But even in her slightly odd, loose attire, her almost whispered words and avoiding eye contact, other people certainly noticed her. She didn’t know it. No one had ever told her. But she was a strikingly beautiful woman. |
