Poor Banished Children by Fiorella De Maria

Author:Fiorella De Maria [de Maria, Fiorella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Catholic
ISBN: 9781586176327
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Despair

She sat near the window in a pool of light, staring blindly outward. Slaves had come with water and new clothes for her to wear, and she had washed and dressed without looking at them. But as she slipped out of her old clothes, they could not help noticing that she had made marks all over her body from tearing at her own flesh, and she was chided for harming herself. “Bad”, they said. “Very bad girl. Never do that again.” Then when she persisted, they bound her hands in soft strips of cloth to prevent her from injuring herself and kept a close eye on her.

Her hands felt hot under the layers of cloth. She could have fidgeted sufficiently to loosen them or tried tearing at them with her teeth, but even if she could have summoned up the strength to try, a pair of watchful eyes scrutinised her every move for signs of trouble. So she sat utterly still and let an invisible curtain come down all around her.

+

Father Dan had been right. Every morning she woke up to feel death yawning beneath her feet and had to choose to avoid it. To begin with, she prayed with every passing day that the next morning would bring her freedom, but as the days and weeks passed, she was forced to accept once and for all that she would never be set free. Then she prayed that he would lose interest in her and she would be spared the bitterness of submitting to him—only to fear that he would discard her and she would be killed or handed over to some even crueller fate. That was something else she had learnt—that there was always a worse fate to suffer. Even if she could not imagine a greater misery than whatever she was being forced to endure, Warda knew that there were no limits to how much one human being could hurt another in this world—except the boundary of death. And so she prayed for death at the very same time as fending it off, hating herself for being too cowardly to die and too miserable to make something, anything at all, out of the dregs of life they had left for her.

She was never allowed out of the house and did not know whether it was because they thought it unseemly for a woman such as she to walk the streets or, more probably, because she was behaving so strangely they suspected she might run off again if she so much as stepped into the outside world. During the long daylight hours when she was left alone, she took up her position by the window and looked out at the little corner of the world that surrounded her unwelcome home. She looked out with the impassive eyes of a prisoner whose cell window merely reveals the rest of the gaol and its unfortunate inhabitants—at the pale, stark walls of the buildings that glared at her in the harsh sunlight;

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.