The Madonna Secret by Sophie Strand

Author:Sophie Strand [Strand, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2023-08-15T06:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Nine

They came for me just after sunrise: the women, young and old, my own kin and strangers, all loaded with armfuls of flowers so varied and lush that their combined perfume made me dizzy: crimson susons with their long tongues and tart smell, some late-season karkoms giving up puffs of petals the color of sunlight, sprays cut from blooming tamarisks, and deep-throated hyacinths. Beulah herself had worn orange lilies pinned to her bosom and had applied a pale powder to her cheeks so that when she first approached me, I did not recognize her and thought her youthful.

Marta was lovely. She appeared a softer, happier version of my mother in a red-and-yellow-striped tunic she had cinched tightly with a dark leather belt. And I realized I had never seen Atalyah without a dull, colorless scarf around her hair. She now wore a scarf of bright, banded colors and had applied some rouge on her cheeks, calling attention to how all her small features seemed to gather in the middle of her wide face, too frightened to fully inhabit the space provided.

Yael and a dozen other girls were laden with straw baskets of Galilean roses. Two very young girls, hardly able to speak, reached out their hands to pull at my curls and draw me from my bed. The older women lifted my shift from me so that, without properly waking up, I was already naked among the many different female generations, their hands, gnarled and smooth, working my skin with perfume and my hair with brushes.

“Ah! What lovely nipples,” Beulah noted as she massaged oil into the thin skin covering my rib cage. “Like rosebuds.” I relaxed under her sure touch. Marta was behind me, combing jasmine and myrrh into my hair, the slick perfume escaping her fingers and dripping down my spine.

Someone was burning hyssop. The dense, purple smell coiled into our lungs, turning our exhales into something rich, fragrant, and almost colorful. I imagined I could see the essence of each woman lifting from her lips. The yellow light of the children. The radiant blue of Beulah and the older woman. Marta’s fiery orange. Flower petals crumpled underfoot, adding their own bruised nectar to the air.

Yael pressed a thick unguent of lily oil into my feet. She used both of her hands to circle my ankle, massaging the blue veins that surfaced along my shin.

As the women busied themselves making me beautiful, I couldn’t help but notice their own finery: the simple, rust-colored tunics of the young girls, and the golden earrings that dangled from my sister’s ears. Beulah took an intricately embroidered leather belt and wound it around the shift I was wearing.

Imah was the only one who seemed careless of her own appearance. Her gray-streaked hair was swept back into an orderly plait that she had secured by coiling it into a bun. She wore an undyed shift that swallowed her sturdy form. Yet to me she was the most beautiful of them all because, in her face, I could see Yeshua.

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.