The Priest's Madonna by Amy Hassinger

with her he fell silent, and seemed instead to be listening intently, even if she wasn’t speaking—as if he were listening for the hush of her blood as it maneuvered the particular turns of her veins.
    It was thirty years since the death of Herod the Great, thirty years since rebels had risen up against the empire, thirty years since Varus’s legions had swarmed the countryside, raping, razing, battering, smashing. Everywhere, the synagogues spoke of destruction: columns rose in the open air, supporting nothing; stairways led into emptiness. Old women’s eyes were still glazed with grief for their murdered children, and there were few old men, for so many of them had been dragged into slavery in far-off corners of the empire. They were a people in need of healing. Yeshua spoke to them in what remained of the synagogues, declaring the end of oppression and death. “The hour is fulfilled!” he shouted. “The Kingdom of God is near! Repent and believe in the good news!” Some believed and were joyful; some quietly hoped and yet doubted; some were pained by what they heard as arrogant nonsense; and some demanded proof, a sign from God.
    And so Yeshua healed. He placed his rough palms over the eyes of a blind man, and when he removed them, the man fell prostrate before him, crying, “Light! Light!” He stood before the thrashing body of a boy and commanded the demon to depart; it left with an ungodly roar like the crash of a great wave against a ship’s hull. They brought him their blind and lame, their hemorrhaging and leprous, their maniacal and possessed, and he healed them, one by one. But even these signs were not enough for some, for there had been other healers before Yeshua, and weren’t they all still here, yoked to the Roman plow?
    Miryam, though, was hopeful. She whispered the words of the prophet Yeshayah to herself as she walked, “For a child has been born for us, a son is given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders, and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
    Her father was a chazzan, the leader at the synagogue, and he honored the scriptures above all else. No woman in all of the Galil was as well schooled as Miryam. Her father did not believe, as some did in her village, that women were unfit for study. From the age of four, when her father had first read to her the story of the creation of the earth, Miryam had memorized Torah. Even then, before she manifested any outward signs of her possession, she felt the devils gripping her mind. Only her father’s voice, singing the scripture, had the ability to loosen the grip, to ease her building agony. She asked him to read the words again and again, and then she repeated them. “The Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters,” she recited, and she saw a vast stretch of sea, the Galilee at night, dark and churning in a wind. “Let there be light,” she recited, and the sea glowed from its depths and fingers of yellow light fractured the darkness. “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds,” she recited, and they appeared: ibexes kicking up mountain stones, wild boars snuffling through the cedar, asps uncoiling and spreading their hoods. In this way, she managed to keep her devils at bay.
    But as Miryam grew older, it grew more difficult to pacify the demons. They seized her when she paused to take a breath; her whispering grew faster, louder, and more frenzied. It became clear that no man would have her as his wife. Her mother, feeling Miryam’s agony as her own, encouraged her to devote herself entirely to learning scripture. “Is there not here another prophet of the Lord of whom we may inquire?” Miryam whispered and, “He-man the singer the son of Jo’el, son of Samuel, son of Elka’nah, son of Jero’ham, son of Eli’el, son of To’ah,” on and on. Her affliction had earned her fame in her village, but her devotion made her famous in towns