Water: John 4

Dirty Feet

She moves in silence, her feet ever hovering low across the dirt—a breath could not squeeze into the space. Her feet and the dirt. She snatches a jar and wick from a shelf, ignoring the one placed in the window. In most houses the window would be lit; in this house it has intentionally been forgotten.

She moves in memorized patterns around furniture, her eyes open, blank, staring at nothing but grateful black. Her feet and the dirt. She places the jar on the table. She gently lifts a scroll from another shelf, placing it too on the table.

Her feet and the dirt. This is her relationship with the earth. She walks on it, and it leaves its dirt on her.

Finally she sits. Nights like this one are the only times she really sits. When her spirit allows, she sleeps. During the days she moves. Dust swirls around her feet, and she moves before it settles. For she thinks, if she is ever to sit during the light of day, the dirt will come to rest. And her thoughts will tear at her. And her heart will be torn.

No, she does not trust the daylight and its tendency to expose. The daylight betrays her with memories of failures and hurts—relationships broken by her and for her, and a boneyard of shattered ambitions.

She clutches the edges of the table and grits her teeth in effort to shake the destructive trend of her thinking. She cannot. Instead she relives the past.

Early on, the sharp edges of her ambitions left deep cuts. Love, more than once left its cut. Honor, children and reputation each left cuts in turn. Body torn and dignity ripped, she looked for sympathy and found the final cut. Finally her tears dried up.

Now she looks for survival, caring little for herself or others. Even this most recent quest betrays her, allowing her to live for a dwindling handful of hours each night. The days already dead, in the dark she clings to life.

Her jaw pops. Seizing a deep breath, she lights the wick. The quick burst grows slowly into rhythmic flickering. The dim orange glow laps at the wall and washes the ceiling. So different from the light of day, the lamp cradles her in light like a baby in a father’s arms or the unborn in the womb.

It rises from the table like the cloaked arms of Moses at the Red Sea, and the darkness flees from its authority. This is her own private exodus from a world of slavery. She closes her eyes, breathing the smoke into her lungs. She holds a trembling hand over the warmth of the flame. She envisions them as the pillars of cloud and light—here for no other reason than her guidance and comfort.

She unrolls the scroll directly under her face, the lamp to her left. In these words of the law, that the snoring man keeps for his work, she finds her promised land. Forcefully, she chooses again to believe in the God therein.

There is a God, she tells herself, who promises sanctuary for everyone. By the shifting light, she reads a story about a prostitute who serves God and is saved. She hopes in this God, longs for him. Maybe, just maybe, he loves her despite his absence from her life. But why would He come looking for her. No, she must find her way to him.

She worships him fervently, desperately. She moves her lips, yet no sound escapes. She wracks her heart with obeisance to this God until sweat beads across her brow and her heavy breathing drowns out that of the man in the next room.

One final time she offers herself fully.

She embraces the moment of contradiction—secretly worshiping with dirty feet and shameful lips and all of her broken self in between. For a brief moment, she hopes once more in love. Time slips by unnoticed, lifting the burden of life from her shoulders.

A cold wind creaks through the shutters, guttering the flame.

Again, she feels she might cry. Her calm shatters and she thinks of going to the well the next day under the bright noon sun. She huffs the lamp out. She hovers silently to the shelf to return it, then back to the table. Her feet and the dirt.

She returns the scroll to its shelf. Hesitating, she glances at the open doorway into the man’s sleeping apartment. He responds on cue with an abrupt snort. She turns instead to her seat at the table. Sitting, she lays her head on her arms and rests her feet on the dirt.