Ruth: Reimagined

Year

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Year
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For Orpah, happiness was a blur. How come the younger women in her village would ask her. As an old woman, she was made up of wrinkles and regrets of memories and grief. She lived with her younger sister, who had made a good life out of herself, with her husband and three young girls.

Curious as they were, they were cute. Infuriating. They poked at her and questioned all her subconscious habits. They found her bitterness amusing.

Orpah was the talk of the village. That bitter old woman, they would say about her. She was rude. She swore, she spat at the kindness given to her. She barely talked. She was nothing, like the woman she once was.

"You know," her sister once said, whispering to her three girls, as they cuddled up in bed, awaiting a story. "A long, long time ago, Orpah was different. She laughed the loudest. Her smile stole the hearts of many. She lived life, took all it had to give her. She... was happy."

Widened eyes. Shared looks. Giggles and comments flew left and right from the three girls.

"What happened to her?" One of them piped up.

Her sister repeated what Orpah had told her the first time she'd seen her in ten years, a broken woman, changed, with dull eyes, a small frame, and cheeks stained with tears. She told the girls  what  she  told everyone in the village who asked her.

"She lost  everything."

"At night," the eldest said, "we hear her crying, and sometimes she talks to herself and other times, almost every night actually she calls out to a man."

Their mother's face hardened, and she shook her head slightly, displeased.  She'd  have to get the kids a room far from their old auntie Orpah.

"Who does she call out to?" She found herself asking.

"Chillion."

At the peaks of her happiness, the peaks of her life. Time ceased to matter.  It was only ever bliss, pouring out of her soul. The cold river water clashed with her skin. It was only ever, the look in Chillion's eyes. Intimate. Only ever his skin on hers, and her lips on his.

Laughter squeezed her stomach, tore her apart, and watching Ruth dissolve into a fit of her own laughter made hers worse.

Then there was Naomi. Sweet, Sweet Naomi.  With her stories, and her hugs, and those songs they'd sing together, where she'd get some of the words wrong, where she'd create her own lyrics as the music flowed.

Then there was that time, where she thought, she felt, she was—it was stupid to think of now—torturing, she was pregnant. It all went by too quickly, time passed, moments changed, and seasons moved. Happiness, when looking back, was a blur. It was all good until the clock started ticking again. Orpah found that with pain, with grief, she felt, every excruciating second of it.

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"Close your eyes. Close your eyes," Mahlon told her while she giggled uncontrollably.

"I'm closing my eyes. I see nothing!" She waved her hands at whatever space she was in.

"Keep them closed," he ordered, chuckling. "You know what? I don't trust you."

"I'm hurt." Ruth commented as he tied a blind fold around her, then he paused mid-way.

"Is it too tight?"

"It's perfect."

"—And you can't see anything at all?"

"Nothing," Ruth laughed.