Jeremiah 29 (Free-Writing Exercise)

"It hurts not to get what you want", she said. Her legs were folded over the stones; I could see the bruises on her knee peeking out from beneath her skirt.
I laughed. "What have you ever wanted that you haven't gotten? A new Mercedes".
"You don't know anything about me."
She turned away, but I knew she was crying. Her chest heaved slightly with each intake of breath, moving to the rythm of her tears.
The torn letter lay on the ground; four more years in a stone palace we had grown to despise. At night,  I lay in the cellar, imagining his hands on her thighs; I could see them kissing in the moonlight.
"He says it's time to plant the roses."
"That's only because he likes thorns".
Did her lips still taste of cinnamon? Did she still cry, when she felt the ram-horn's echoes reverberate  through her bedroom, with its hardwood floors and silk sheets?

"They could import some", I was told when I complained about the rough cotton - but what was the point? It could not be undone, this incessant twining and untwining that had started the minute Moses and God shared a cigarrette.

"Do you think it's like sex?" she asked.
"What?"
"Prophecy".
 I shrugged, flicked my stub into the garden, and used my toes to pile some dirt on the ashes.
Five hundred miles away, she drew the smoke from his breath. His kiss tasted of myrrh and ashes; he could feel the thorns in her legs, the claws in each nipple.
Ravaged.
Her hand is on my shoulder.
The Temple will be ravaged.
We slide into the ground; her knees knock against my thighs; our mouths collide - I can feel the brambles at the back of my neck, but I don't care - and later on, she asks me, "Do you think it's like prophecy?"
"What?"
"Sex".

I shrug, and flick my cigarrette.