Abaddon

The Rainy Day

Do two walk together, unless they have agreed to meet?

Amos 3:3

 It had started to rain and we moved our work into their cabin. I would have braved the rain and walked back to ours if it was just Michael and I, but there were several of the women there and other teens from Abaddon. It would be above reproach from anyone. Michael and I sat apart from the others in the room. He liked to talk to me and he was always respectful to me. I could see the girls from Abaddon look at me with envy. Why is he so interested in her?

“If I tell you about my area, will you promise not to laugh?”

“I’m not going to laugh at you,” he shook his head. “I spend my days bent over rocks, my nights bent over textbooks. I deal with facts all the time. I need some humanity. Facts are a dull companion during days like these. You ever read a history textbook?”

I nodded, “I have been to school.”

“I know, but have you ever just sat and read one?”

I shook my head, “They’re too dull to read for their own sake.”

He smiled, “I know! They don’t tell you about the human experience. What really happened, or what the people believe. Sometimes what the people believe is more interesting than the books we’re taught to memorize. You just get this one side in school and if you’re lucky in college, you get another. Not many people know about Binah. I didn’t know about them until I arrived here.”

“We like it that way,”

“Maybe I don’t,”

“You’ll only laugh at our legends,”

“Why would I laugh?”

“You laughed at the tradition I told you about,”

“I think marrying young seems odd, especially an arranged marriage, and maybe I think it’s a travesty that a girl as brilliant as you will probably never get a chance to go beyond what you learn being around us because of tradition. I’d like to know how your people came here, how these towns came about,”

“You would think it’s a fantasy, just a legend,”

He shook his head, “I’ve heard bits and pieces of this town’s history, of Abaddon. It’s too diluted by the outside, I heard Binah has a more… intact… version of the history since they were the original settlement. And that it theoretically could have happened. Who is to say it didn’t? Do you believe it happened?”

I gave my standard answer, the answer that had been handed down the generations, from parent to child, “I was not there to witness it myself, but I only know what I was told.”

“Good textbook answer, or like something you would repeat in church, or whatever you have. Do you believe it?”

I shrugged, “There’s no way to prove it didn’t happen. It was certainly unusual, and some parts of it sound a little exaggerated, but possible. Even if it isn’t true, I do like it.”

“So do I, from what I have been told, so please, tell me more than the pieces I have heard,”

“What do you want to know?”

He leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on the table, “I want to hear the story of the Binah from one who was raised in the culture, not from some European, as you call us, recounting the snippets they were fortunate enough to hear, or the Abaddon people who don’t embrace it but seem only amused by it.”