Survival Ch. 2

“Is that what he told you?”

After that, there was nothing to do except to pack up our belongings and come down the mountain. And down we came to Zoar. What else were we going to do? Ben Terah was right. We should have had to come down to the plain anyway.

We took lodgings in the town; Pa, who’d always been a smart man even if he had called the disaster which had befallen our town all wrong, dug out his horde of silver, which up on the mountain he’d had no occasion to spend, and had no difficulty in making it into more silver, and we began to do well in our new home.

Before the fall rains began, we went up the road leading to the ruins of Gomorrah, found a pillar of salt that stood next to it, and buried it.

We gave out that Temara and I had come away from Sodom pregnant by husbands who had refused to believe that the city would be destroyed. As comely widows, with our father’s money to back us, Pa and the stepmother we later acquired found us new husbands, and if we were a little more specific about what we wanted in a husband than many women our age…so? We made good lives with our men, even if we only got daughters from them. Daughters which, incidentally, we don’t let spend too much time with their grandfather.

As for our sons, Ben-Ammi and Moab, they grew and prospered. Temara and I do not ever talk about that time in the cave. I sometimes think about it and wonder—did Pa really believe that Zoar and the rest of the world had been destroyed along with Sodom and Gomorrah? Did he deceive us, or only himself? Did he deceive himself, or only us?

For that matter, what of me and Temara? Did we believe him because we had to or because we wanted to? Suppose we had not? Were we really prepared to wander through an empty world looking for another man to give us children?

Sometimes I dream that I am back in that cave with the big flickering shadows on its rough ceiling, and can hear and smell and feel the man who is thrusting in and out of me, and I wake before it is time for me to scream. I turn to my husband, my love-opening ready and throbbing for the pleasure I still need, and I take his member in my hand and stroke it to hardness. He holds me down and puts it in me, muting my cry with his hand or his mouth, (for the dwellings on our street are close together) and he does not ask what I dreamed, for I will not tell him.

Children get most of their learning from their parents, and if our father taught us how to please a man, our mother taught us what happens when you look back.

Author’s note: There were two reasons I chose to write an erotic story that nary a dirty word in it:

I wanted to see if it could be done. I submit that it can, although it’s hard work. Since the technical terms common to erotic writing nowadays are Latinate and Anglo-Saxon in origin, I felt that had I used them in a story that predated those cultures by millennia, they would have come across as anachronisms.