It was all night the couple fought, until Abraham emerged hungry from the red tent. His convictions were made of salt; eternally unchanging. The breakfast I prepared him, as fixed as his beliefs, was made of mutton on bone. His wife emerged only after all of the meat was scarfed down, his pink lips as drawn to grease as they were to preaching. Once finished he marched for Bethel with grain to trade for more flesh, Sarah daring to creep from her lair when he was long out of sight. Her ruddy face was caked in brine.

She wasted no time, “Hagar, go wash yourself in the river Jordan. Return to this home in a more godly state.”

Though her eyes never met mine my soul heard bath and refused to dwell on my master’s coldness. The slow river called my name daily, beckoning to me from the groin of the green valley. I longed for its cool embrace more than anything, but Sarah forbid me to answer its call without her permission. Only the voice of God stood at higher authority than her own, and the voice of God would never address a slave girl.

I ran for the hills with more spring in my step than April offered the desperate soil. I ran with ecstatic wind at my back, toes crunching through the soft shell of the desert with every stride. When skin hit water I felt a cascade of relief fall over each cell; once shiny with sweat and exhaustion, now as sweet as the blonde water licking at my curls. Jordan held me for hours it seemed, while several linen washers and water bearers of the village kept any stray reptiles at bay. When time came to fulfill my duty of returning in godly nature, I wrapped my body in a fresh cloth and held it high so that my giddy feet would not fleck the hem with dirt on my return home.

Abraham beat me; I knew because of the crescent lamb hanging up to drain outside the front door. She was a fresh ewe, probably frolicking not long before my bath. No doubt he had walked her all the way from the village; even the sacrificial lambs must labor for their fate. I found Sarah rinsing the knives out back.

Why would she have me bathe before the butchering? This question loomed in the air unanswered, raining silent suspicion down on the both of us.

“Abraham’s waiting for you inside.” She murmured, not bothering to look up from the wash.

I lingered long enough to expect reprimanding, but silver Sarah refused to acknowledge my presence. Punishment was a daily inevitability, and I always strived to know what I had done to earn it. Maybe, just maybe such knowledge could protect me in the future. I needed to ask what Abraham wanted with me, but my feet already knew. The turned back that Sarah offered told me that she knew, too. I had to force my legs to budge from her wake.

Inside the red tent time was at a standstill. Abraham looked at me deeply, his eyes wild with anticipation. He looked at me despite my clothes, he looked at me from the inside out. Always searching for something deeper, two blue eyes moving in reckless curiosity. Searching for something they would never grasp alone, but grasped for none the less. He grasped for my robes and then he grasped beneath them, hungrier than I’d ever seen him before. This fury of grasping and searching eventually left me in pieces. Neither body nor soul, I melted straight into the water that churned so freshly in my heart. I don’t know what he did, I didn’t dare ask. Pain consumed everything, and then it was over.

Outside the sun greeted me with hot urgency, and I panted for light. A trail of tears encircled an untouched lamb carcass and the carcass of a sobbing old woman. Infertile Sarah unleashed an abundance of saltwater from her tired body, a sea too acrid to support life of any kind. I stumbled past her toward the only relief I knew, Jordan. Rivers of my own blood trickled down my legs and the release crippled me; I wasn’t going to make it. I knew with each trembling step I took that I was headed for nowhere, but it was better than the somewhere that fate had given me. I called for nothingness.

I don’t know how I reached the valley but by the time I collapsed I was close enough to the river to feel its breeze. Blood was rampant by then, mixing with the earth beneath me like a bed of clay. I was sweating off heat but too cold to keep from shivering, each cell quivering to the beat of my bewildered breath. It was there, trembling in the dirt that I first heard the voice from nowhere. It called my name from no particular direction, unlike the river that always whispered from the east. This voice had no sound at all, but I heard it with every fiber of my being.

You are not a slave, you are no-thing. 

It was in the nothingness that I began to feel peaceful. The earth below me was alive, and beside me I heard the rush of Jordan washing away any impurities of the barren land, bringing life. Taking life. I saw the red water flowing from between my legs but I felt anything but empty, I wasn’t afraid. I knew then that God was no one to fear. No one at all, in fact; I knew then that I wanted to live. An old women destined to populate the earth with her body was much more a slave than I would ever be; I knew that I must return to her.

This is not your fate. There is more.

(To be continued.)