Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: HONEST (05/31/18)
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TITLE: Hard to Believe | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jack Taylor
06/06/18 -
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The peace was an illusion. A lie.
Inside a mud-brick hut nearby, two half-robed figures propped up a third and whispered urgent words of encouragement. “Push harder, now!”
A young girl slipped into the doorway, out of breath. “They’re coming. Hurry.”
The older woman shook her head and tried to flick a long strand of hair back over her shoulder. “Stall them, Miriam. We can’t have them near if there’s a cry.”
The young girl hesitated, unsure.
The second woman nodded and moved away to wash her hands. “I’ll take care of it. Miriam, you help Shiphrah. This boy has got to be born.”
Puah slipped on her robe, ran a brush through her hair and covered it with a shawl. She stepped into her leather sandals and slipped out of the hut. At a tent nearby, she wrestled back the flap and crawled inside. Moments later, she emerged with a child.
The torch-bearing troop of eight infantrymen met her a hundred paces from the site where Miriam now attempted to assist the seasoned midwife trying to quiet a mother in desperate pain.
“What have you there?” barked the leader of the eight. “It looks like a boy. I thought the king made it clear. Boys die, girls live.”
Puah knelt in the sand ignoring the grit whipped up by the breeze. She shielded the child against her breast. “My lord,” she said. “As I told the king, Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women. They are vigorous and give birth before we get there. There is no way to stifle a child’s life once they are in the hands of their mothers.”
The man pawed roughly at the child and pulled back the blanket to examine it. “Crocodile food if you ask me,” he said. “You lazy hags need to get up faster. When’s the next birth scheduled?”
Puah covered the child and settled on her haunches. “Children come when children come,” she said. “Our God knows the way of life and we trust in him.”
The trooper stepped back and spat. “Your faceless god is no match for the power of Egypt. I know you spit out lies like cobra venom but you don’t fool me. If I hear of another boy escaping from your fingers then I will personally throw them into the Nile.”
The child returned to suckling without a whimper and the men turned their search toward another row of huts. They pounded on doors and poked inside but no newborns were discovered this day.
The bleating of lambs and kids gave urgency to the morning and Puah returned the child to its mother and took a roundabout path to the hut where she found Shiphrah and Miriam washing down the boy and his mother.
“Jochebed, you have a fine son,” whispered Puah. “We must keep him quiet and hidden. The troopers aim to feed him to the crocodiles.”
Shiphrah examined the placenta in the growing light. “This will be a fine child. A strong child. Miriam, you must guard your brother while he grows.”
Miriam bent over the little one and rubbed her finger along his cheek. “What if I am discovered. What will I say? Must I be honest in declaring who he is?”
Puah wrapped up Miriam in a hug. “You must trust God to guide your words and thoughts my child. We have no messengers to guide us in what God expects. Perhaps your brother will rise to greatness and teach us all.”
Miriam crouched again by the child, picked up a cloth and rubbed away the fluid nestling in the tiny black curls. “What can someone so little do in a place like Egypt? We hide, we lie, we creep around in the shadows pretending that someday we will all be free.”
Shiphrah raised herself up. “Remember the bones of Joseph,” she said. “Those bones remind us of a powerful God who is true to his promises. One day we will be free. One day we will be home.”
Miriam smiled. “Maybe, one day I will honestly share the dream with this little one.”
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Just think, without these two women, no Moses, no exodus, no promised land and no Christ. Not that God would ever let His plan fail, but just so amazing at how it all hinged on these two women standing against the mightiest ruler in the world at the time.
Your writing was both beautiful and descriptive and your characters so realistic.
Excellent work!
I mean this as constructive, I think having "honestly" in the last sentence weakens the story. But this was well done.