The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

Comfort cannot exist in such a place. What is brutal survives. What is cunning lives until morning.

Everywhere I walked my fate walked with me, sewn to my feet with red thread. All that will ever be has already been written long before it happens. There is nothing we can do to stop it.

The blood cried and wept and cursed, for its victims did not give up their lives easily.

I would have been willing to do anything for the glory of God as I walked through the gate, except forgive Him for what I had lost.

I leaned over and placed my mouth on my daughter’s bruised lips. Her last breath entered me, and I held her spirit inside me as I had before she was

Many have said that the angel of rain comes to women in their dreams. It is Beree who causes them to cry when they feel they have nothing left inside, no soul, no tears.

But now I understood that, although words were God’s first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

We breathed in the bones of our people—their desires, their petty differences, their faith—all martyred, vanishing into the dusky, murderous air.