The Hunger Games part II

The search for the teenage years of Jesus

The air was way way tense.

Kamal spitting at Abram hadn’t helped, especially when his daughters giggled at it. It really pissed old Abram off. Here was a hulking huge stud male camel owned by a couple of strange teenage boys spitting at him while he was preparing to defend their virtue to the death if necessary.

And they were laughing at him. Not that you could expect anything sensible from two teenage girls, he knew better than that by now. But really.

Abram could not say, “Jesus Christ” because he was born too early in the historical curve for currency in that particular expression of complete exasperation; but he wished he could say Jesus Christ because he needed exactly that kind of expression right then, and unfortunately nothing of exactly that kind existed yet.

He could feel the deficit, which only magnified his frustration and tempted him to instead yell “motherfucker,” but what presence of mind he had told him that would make a very bad impression overall on his daughters and most especially his wife.

Besides which this. The one devilishly handsome kid with the black hair, that one you couldn’t trust, it was obvious; and maybe you could yell motherfucker in front of that kid because clearly he’d know just why you did; but the other kid.

The other kid.

He was lighter in some weird way, almost glowing or something, and he just didn’t look like the kind of kid you could or should yell motherfucker at.

Abram chilled.

“That’s great!” enthused the mom, Lilah.

Lilah was more trusting of kids in general because she was a jewish mom, and not prone to the same overall levels of paranoia which understandably plagued the males of the race, downtrodden as Jews were in those days. I mean, these were kids, and unlike Abram she knew how to speak kid.

“We’d love to offer you some food, but there isn’t much.”

Abram glared. There she went again, his idiot wife, offering other people food when they were running out themselves.

In those days people didn’t take things out; they brought them forth. It’s difficult to distinguish between taking things out and bringing them forth; the only way to explain it is the action of bringing stuff forth has more swish to it, and that’s what Lilah did: she swished a basket forth, brought it forth in consummate forthbringing style from behind a donkey, and pulled back the finely woven stripey linen cloth that covered it.

Anticlimax.

There was, like, almost nothing in the basket.