After the Angel
The bats came just after midnight: the eleventh plague come to claim us firstborn and newly dead for a God I never knew existed. I felt them, the bats, their rush of wings. Heard their keening, clicking voices navigating, searching out the right spirit to clasp in their teeth. A bat for every firstborn child, every firstborn cow, every firstborn man with a firstborn of his own, and they carried us into the night. They swept us across the sands of Egypt so close sometimes I felt plumes of dust rise to coat what was left of me.
I wondered how I would look, if any living soul could see my dead one in the blackness of night's heart. Would I still have hair cascading over my shoulders like black oil spilled on tile? Would I yet have breasts capable of inspiring a man to dole out a week's labor for one hour of my time? Pay me extra to pretend I loved him—if only for those sixty minutes?
Would the man who knew me and loved me still offer his life in place of mine? And could that second-born man ever forgive me for telling him his spirit had no value on this night? That what it was worth to me, to him, would be valueless to the God who took me to purchase his own children, so they could live in their hovels sealed with lamb's blood? Unblemished. Untaken.
I'd been trained to understand worth, trained to know value, and I knew that once again I had been bought. Except that this time, the angel of death weighed me out alongside men and pharoahs alike—and I'd been found of equal value.
Copyright 2006 by Thea Atkinson
