Free After Abel and Other Stories by Michal Lemberger

Hapi was angry, and the frogs stopped their singing, the flies sat stunned on the dry banks. When the rains didn’t come, and the river didn’t rise, the papyrus dried out, and her father went out each day to work, and came home at midday with an empty purse. During those times, her parents fought. She could hear their voices, loud and full of anger, from where she sat outside. Her father would accuse his wife of treachery, of having a diseased womb that gave him a baby who looked normal. He had already planned her wedding and the dowry it would bring in, but then she turned out to be an imbecile and useless. “If I had known,” he said, “I would have left her out for the crocodiles.” He would rail against the rich men whose whims determined the course of his life, how stingy they became when things didn’t go as they’d hoped. “The wrong men get all the fortune,” he’d say. “They bribe the gods, but it’s all wasted on them. Look at me! Strong and healthy, but stuck here with only one deceptive wife and a drooling girl-child hanging on her apron.”
    Hagar didn’t understand why he would say that. She lifted her hand to her mouth, but she knew even before doing so that he was wrong. There was no drool on her chin. Her mother had taught her to keep it inside her mouth, to swallow it down. She remembered her mothersaying, “Men like your father cannot see the world before them. He lives in dreams, like you, only his blind him to the world as it is.”
    Her father was still ranting, “I deserved better than this. I deserved the palaces. It should have been me surrounded by beautiful wives and dozens of children making my name for me.”
    â€œYou?” her mother would scoff, “who digs in the mud and makes bricks? Who cuts the papyrus, only to hand it off to others with the skill to make use of it?” Her own father had been a merchant once. She had hoped to marry a scholar, but a daughter’s fate depends on her father’s continued success, which is how she ended up here, in a mud hut filled with dust and stale sweat. “The gods have already given you everything and more than you deserve.”
    At times like that, when her parents spat in each other’s faces, and her mother told her to look for signs of prosperity in the feathers that fell from the birds as they passed overhead, or the patterns of mud and dried-out silt at the edge of the reeds, her brothers would cuff Hagar’s face anytime they happened to pass by, and then they, too, would laugh at her, even though they’d always chase off the other boys who tried to look up her dress or confuse her with their tricks.
    During the dry years, Hagar had to stay very quiet. She had to keep out of everyone’s way. But the year sheturned twelve, her body stopped wanting to be hidden. Her skirts got shorter, her tunics tighter, and no one noticed for all the fighting, until the day the boy next door, who had suckled with her, their mothers sitting side by side in the afternoon sun, promised her a jewel he’d pulled from the bottom of the mud if she came with him into the high reeds, until he’d tried to put his hand under her dress and made a funny face. That’s where her brothers found them, and she smiled at them, as she always did, wondering at the new game the neighbor boy would play.
    She cried all the way home, telling them she wanted her jewel, but they dragged her home to their mother, then turned back around and left. When they came back, their knuckles were bruised, and she saw she’d have to mend their clothes again. She hoped she’d sew them well.
    Her mother began crying over her, asking, “What will happen to you, my stupid, dreamy girl?” Each night, she would hear whispers from her parents’ bed at night. Hagar couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she knew they were talking about her. They were always talking