Jeremiah 30

Her hands are rough; they flit across her skirt like butterflies, or Spanish dancers - her fingers become lace mantilals, shaking back and forth to the rythm of the leaves, which are twirled by the wind. She thought of life in images, spare frames filled with motion she could not grasp, and sounds she could not quite understand. "One day, I will make a movie out of it", she would think, at random moments, like when she was spicing the chicken soup. The kitchen tiles felt cold against the soles of her feet, and she wished she had remembered to wash her socks in the laundry. "But it all comes in fragments", she fretted, as she sliced the onions. She enjoyed the feel of their thin layers between her fingers, and once she had claimed that men were weaker than onions, because no man had made her cry. But now, she grew misty-eyed when she thought about that bravado - and then she turned to the author, and complained that she hated cliches, like "misty-eyed" and "bravado".

"And aren't you supposed to be studying Jeremiah?" she asked, "about how God punishes, then redeems, his people? And how dare you think of me when the image crops up of an abandoned whore - if I wanted, I could have a man between my thighs." She goes back to stirring the soup. She is adorable in her anger - the way she flashes her hair and stomps her feet. "Stop comparing me to a dancer!". Another stomp, a bit more paprika. The author is the one who has read (or, at least, skimmed) Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of An Author", so she should take the initiative - but she is too tired, and the words of Jeremiah too beautiful. She wonders briefly whether he would have been good in bed, or whether she should take men between her thighs more often. She ponders feminism, and is grateful that her breasts are no longer being opressed by the patriarchy, her pink bra having been removed somewhere around verse six. She longs to chant the words to the ancient text, almost as much as she longs for sleep.