33rd Thread: The rich need to squeeze through the eye of a needle

I hear women tell their daughters, I do not know why. War should not be told, the blood spilled in the gravel, in the grain. Sliced throats, flayed skin, spilled guts, rape, famine, even your father all torn up in a ditch, everything must be forgotten. Yet I cannot but remember, but I pray. When we fled from the capital, your father and I, you were barely walking. Was it a mistake? Would your father have escaped death, would we have been saved from capture if we had stayed? We should not think about it. Live each day as it comes. We are alive. We have a little food, clothes, a straw cot in the workshop’s storeroom. And the lord who died for us. Instead of working in the fields or at the docks, we are sheltered because my mother taught us dyeing.

See how that little girl, the one with shorn hair, learns well and quickly?
She amuses the supervisor with her laughter, she sings cheerfully too. Be good during the day, pray god at night, otherwise you will be sold, do you understand? Your masters will force you to satisfy the filthy needs of men, whatever your religion and age. I can not even describe to you the shameful life you would endure, a life that would age your body before its time. Dying is hard work, but preferable to sin. Why are you looking at me? Do you not believe me, poor child?

I was lucky when I was a child, because the steward had converted to the true faith. We prayed together, our food improved, thanks to Mother, who was educated. She had been hiding it out of caution, but the steward caught her deciphering an inscription. From then on, he asked her to read parables in the workshop, in the early morning, for the women who came to listen in wonder. The lord took for wife the woman who was to be stoned. He turned water into wine. He multiplied the loaves. He filled with plump fish the fishermen’s nets. He said, the rich need to squeeze through the eye of a needle to enter paradise.