Job (A Primer)
by Karim • November 18, 2009 • Fiction, Theology & Religion • 2 Comments
Winter comes ‘round every once in a while to remind you that you got no one to keep you warm. All that cold breath gives you a cover for your shiverin’ and keepin’ to yourself and holdin’ your books real tight and stayin’ inside.
These nights the black chill comes on real quick—and darker than before—so’s you don’t forget you can’t trust even your own eyes to keep you from stumblin’ over yourself. Nights like these, reason is a little lamp on your nightstand that whispers to your rollin’ ‘round that it ain’t too late to just git up and pour yourself a glass of numb. But it goes down the wrong hole and another, too, and still another, ‘till it leaves you sprawled out in the wet grass thanking Jesus for tall wooden fences and neighbors good enough to pretend they ain’t heard nothin’ last night.
And you cry to yourself and to God for birth and death and the whole rotten show between. And you ask the good Lord why he lets those little demons so close to you and if there ain’t no demons why he gets off on not tellin’ you who you are and what he wants from you. ‘Cause life’s too short to not know what, and if I wasn’t a preacher’s son I was on 4th Street until my cheeks were flush.
And when I wake up in the morning in a pile of my own sick, I wonder what’s the point of being good or bad or anything at all. ‘Cause I done both and I ended up here, while folk better than me have done pretty awful for themselves, while devils in suits get the whole lot in life and pretty tombstones with pretty words on ‘em when they die.
Father, sir, you did a lot of talkin’ about God’s love until I gave you a reason to bring out the belt. And I can’t say I’m mad at you anymore about any of that, ‘cause maybe all you were doin’ all along was showin’ me what God’s love was about. So you beat me. Well, I’m beaten. And I’m red and I’m sore and my eyes are sunk in and so far as I can tell God’s love ain’t nothin’ but a stray bitch on my lawn sniffin’ at my ass at dawn tellin’ me I’m late for work.
I like it. You write well and have done much to provide a modern, easily relatable, personal version with the antique message well preserved.
Thanks so much for your comment. I’m always very insecure about my fiction writing and it’s helpful to hear when people enjoy reading my work.
This was a kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise where I just started writing based off that first line about winter that I had thought up while driving through a particularly cold breeze in the Valley with no sweater and a pang of loneliness.
I realized a few sentences in that I was essentially telling the story of Job, who I think is a pretty relatable character to the maleficiaries (for lack of a real word) of an American recession: a society, composed primarily of Christians, trying to make sense of faith in a world kicking them when they’re down.
I’ve never been particularly religious, but the more I read the Bible the more I find the core of it relatable, if not a bit dated in its delivery, understandably. I’m very interested now in studying the Book of Job more scholastically and expanding on this story into perhaps a novella or novel format.