Chapter Two: The Night Job Cursed the Day
The night was colder than usual, though the desert winds lay still as sleeping serpents. Even the stars seemed to dim, veiled behind a thin layer of cloud, as though heaven itself hesitated to look down on us. Silence wrapped our home like a shroud—heavy, suffocating, expectant. I had grown used to Job's quiet suffering. The way his breath stuttered when pain climbed up his spine. The scraping of pottery against inflamed skin as he tried to soothe the itching torment. The occasional whisper of prayer—thin, weary—drifting into the darkness.
But that night, something different stirred. I woke to a sound that was neither prayer nor pain. It was something deeper—raw, primal, torn from a place beneath words. A sound that made my heart pound with dread. I pushed myself from my mat, joints stiff with sleeplessness, and followed the sound toward the dim glow outside. The lamp we kept burning through the night flickered weakly, bowing its flame as if in mourning. Job sat upright among the ashes, his back bent like an old tree struck by lightning. His face was hidden in his hands. His body trembled—not with fever, not with cold—but as though the earth itself groaned through him.
"Job?"
My voice was barely more than a breath. He didn't answer. The shadows cast by the dying lamp stretched across the cracked walls, bending around him like grieving spirits gathered to witness his unraveling. I took a step closer. My heart tightened as I realized what I was seeing.
This was not the resolute endurance he had shown in the days before. Not the quiet acceptance of suffering. Not the silent, stubborn faith he clung to with bleeding fingers. Something inside him had broken. Or perhaps—something long buried had clawed its way to the surface.
"Job," I whispered again, fear threading my words, "look at me."
But he lifted his face toward the sky instead. And what came out of him was not a scream—it was a ripping, a tearing of the soul, a sound that made the desert itself seem to hold its breath.
"Let the day perish on which I was born!"
The words cracked like thunder. I flinched. His voice—once a pillar of wisdom, steady and tender—was now fractured, shaking like a wounded prophet calling judgment on his own existence.
"Let darkness claim it!" he cried, each syllable trembling.
"Let no light shine upon it."
Each word fell with the weight of stones. I felt them as though he threw them against my chest. I opened my mouth to speak—but the words died in my throat. What comfort could I offer? None. Not when comfort itself had long abandoned us. He rose suddenly to his knees, hands clenched, face lifted upward.
"Let that day be erased," he gasped. "Let it vanish like a shadow at dawn. Let those who curse days curse it! Let the sorcerers who rouse Leviathan call it forth to darkness!"
His breath broke. His voice shuddered. His strength faltered. The world shrank around us until there was nothing but his voice and my heartbeat—both echoing in the hollow space carved by grief. He trembled.
"Why… why did knees receive me? Why breasts that I should nurse?"
His hands gripped the ashes beneath him. They sifted through his fingers— gray, lifeless, choking.
"If only I had died at birth," he whispered, voice cracking on the edge of despair.
My knees weakened. I sank onto the ground near him—close enough to share breath, far enough not to hurt him with touch. His skin was too raw, too broken. Even the brush of cloth could send fresh agony spiraling across his body. His words continued, softer now—yet each one still heavy, like stones dropped into the dark well of his grief.
"There the wicked cease from troubling," he murmured, voice fading as though he were speaking from another world.
"And there the weary find rest."
He spoke of the dead with longing. Deep longing. The kind a man feels for something he has touched before… and lost forever. I felt my throat tighten.
Tears blurred my vision, but I did not wipe them away. In that moment, I understood something terrifying: Job was no longer asking for death. He was asking for never having lived. He did not simply want escape. He wanted erasure.
The grief had shifted. He no longer mourned only what he had lost. He mourned the very fact that he had ever known joy—ever held children whose laughter once filled our halls—ever built a life that could be torn down in a single breath. I whispered,
"Job… my love…"
He did not hear me. Or he heard—and could not bear to respond. I thought back to the days of light, when we would walk among our olive trees in the cool of evening. His hand would find mine. He would speak of God's goodness as naturally as breathing. Our children would run ahead of us, laughter trailing behind like ribbons. Now, that laughter felt like mockery.
"Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden?" Job shouted into the night, his voice sharp with anguish.
"Why life to those whom God has hedged in with suffering?"
The accusation hung in the air. Even the wind stilled. His breath trembled, as though he feared he had gone too far. But when sorrow begins its release, it does not stop until it empties everything within it.
"My sighing comes instead of bread," he whispered.
"My groans pour out like water. What I feared… what I dreaded… has come upon me."
His shoulders shook. His head bowed. His voice cracked like old pottery.
"I have no peace… no quiet… no rest. Only turmoil."
And then, for the first time since the calamities began… Job wept.
His body folded inward with the force of it. His sobs tore from him, raw and unrestrained. Tears carved paths down his ash-covered face. He wept for our children. For his broken body. For the silence of the God he loved. And I sat beside him, helpless to do anything but keep company with his sorrow. If I touched him, it would hurt him. If I spoke, it might silence his needed release.
If I prayed, he might feel betrayed by words that no longer brought relief. So, I sat.
In the ashes.
In the ruin.
In the night that refused to end.
My heart ached with its own confessions—confessions he did not hear: I too have cursed the day of my motherhood, when my children died. I too have cursed the day I became a wife, when suffering hollowed the man I love. I too have cursed every sunset, because darkness always returns with fresh pain.
But this was his lament.
His breaking.
His night of unmaking.
I could not steal it. I could only share the silence.
After a long while, Job's sobs quieted, replaced by a shaking breath. He stared at the ground as though trying to read some hidden message in the pattern of ash. He whispered, "Why does God watch me? What purpose is there in this torment?"
I swallowed hard.
"Job," I murmured, "God sees you."
He shook his head, a single, small movement.
"If He sees me… He does not answer."
His voice splintered.
"I call to Him in the night—but He is silent. I wait for Him in the dawn—but He does not come."
His gaze met mine for a fleeting moment. His eyes were hollow, rimmed with pain.
"Do you know what it is," he asked, "to love a God who does not speak?"
My breath hitched.
"Yes," I whispered. "I know."
He closed his eyes, tears gathering again.
"The silence is worse than the sores."
And I believed him. Suffering tormented the body. Silence tormented the soul.
The night deepened. The stars seemed to retreat behind clouds, leaving only the faint glow of the dying lamp. At some point, Job fell silent. His shoulders slumped. His breath slowed—not peaceful, but spent. As though grief had drained him of everything but the will to continue breathing. I watched him until the first faint blush of dawn crept across the horizon. A pale, reluctant light—as though even the sun hesitated to rise on such sorrow.
He did not move.
He did not speak.
His lament had emptied him. As the first rays touched the ground, I whispered, "Job, I am here." He did not look at me, but I saw his fingers twitch slightly in the ashes—an acknowledgment, fragile but real. So I stayed beside him, wrapped in a quiet neither of us could name.
I was the woman history would later accuse of weak faith. The woman whose words—spoken in desperation—would echo centuries later as a symbol of doubt. But they would not know this moment. This night. This breaking. They would not know the strength it takes to love someone through suffering that has no end. As dawn warmed the sky, I realized something:
Job had cursed his day.
But he had not cursed his God.
And that meant heaven—silent though it seemed—was not finished with us. So, I sat in the ashes beside the man I loved, watching the sun crawl slowly into the sky, waiting for what suffering—or miracle—would come next.