Kittie’s Littered Musings, Part 2
I have limited focus.
I’ve pushed hard, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. My science ed credits are finished, and I start student teaching in just over a week. That will leave one semester of ESL coursework to be finished.
We’ve also come to a difficult decision as a family. We are indeed selling our current home (while I’m student teaching). However, instead of moving deeper into rural nether regions, my husband has convinced me that we have to go someplace that is large enough to have public mass transportation that won’t cost our daughters half their daily wages.
As a result, I’ve been playing with various short intros to realistic fiction. Tonight I share these. Whichever ones get the most votes or highlights might be what I work on next.
In writing the truth, in speaking her heart, she signed her death warrant with normal society. She knew she wasn’t designed for this era or yesteryear, but she didn’t know if she would ever fit in the brand new world order that wasn’t as new as everyone said (for she knew there was nothing under the Son).
He flipped back the comforter, and her sweatshirt tumbled at his feet. Stunned, he picked it up and shook. She was gone; she’d left town on that bus yesterday. She crumpled his heart when she wouldn’t stay. He buried his face in it, and it all tumbled back… all the rocks they’d climbed, the paths they’d walked, her dirty feet traipsing dusty footprints on his dorm carpet. That dust and the sweatshirt was all that was left of something that should have been something… something big, more, exciting.
Time stood still and her heart shook. She looked into the face of someone she loved, but she saw someone she hated. That child was hers, but he was written all over her. She begged for a way to see only the child of God and not the past, with its shame and guilt.
It was almost time to move again. She’d taken a good job, but the one drawback was reassignment every two or three years. She pulled out a box from the last move and opened it. It contained a few treasures from college — some papers she’d loved (whether her profs did or didn’t), some pictures from roommates and classmates, pressed flowers from various formals, and a few books from friends.
It was an odd collection, but it was who she was: diverse, varied, and globally minded. She had the Bhagavad Gita she got from the Hindu roommate in sophomore year; she had the Quran from the young Moslem woman in her international business class in spring of junior year; that ugly, weird poet kid (he, she, not sure) left her Kahlil Gibran’s The Poet at freshman midterms before disappearing.
Tumbling into her lap was Hinds’ Feet on High Places. Her heart stopped. That guy… premed… he wasn’t gorgeous, but he wasn’t hard to look at. He kept insisting she needed to be closer to Jesus, that she was too worldly.
In a way he was right. In another way, he was backward, awkward, and not nearly as world wise as he tried to paint himself. He was fun to talk to mostly, but he was also infuriating. He had archaic notions about her role as a modern woman. He kept forgetting he wasn’t God; he’d insisted she’d do just as well following him to medical school… which was exactly not what she did.
He was blind. He only saw mission work as Africa, Asia, any place but America. Her heart was American; America needed missionaries just as well as those places. Yet those missionaries almost had to be just as worldly as those they served. And missions wasn’t sermons and medicine… it was car rides and babysitting and just being there in the hard times. It wasn’t a once and done notch on the evangelical bed post of life; it was a long-term commitment that only God could time box.
She took a long drag of her coffee and looked into the older woman’s face. She set her cup down and sighed. She pursed her lips, feeling frustration rising in her veins.
“Why? Why am I the problem? Why is it always me? Why am I unacceptable? Society defines what is and is not acceptable. Society says what I may and may not do. Society uses arbitrary criteria that I have no control over — like whether my chromosomes match. Why can we not let me be as I feel Father God designed me? And why can we not agree that society in its fallen state is really the problem?”
