The moon has grown fat and thin like a shepherd’s water skin so many times that Joseph has lost count. Each cycle bleeds into the next, marked only by how the light seeps through the high window, painting silver paths across his cell. These fragments of sky are his only calendar now, his only connection to the world’s rhythm beyond stone and chains.
Time flows strangely here, like water finding its way through stone. Each breath draws in the earthy scent of straw and stone, familiar now as his own skin. His body has learned to read blessings in small mercies – the cool touch of morning air, the way sunlight traces gold across his walls, the rhythm of prayer that turns his cell into a sanctuary. Even in chains, God’s presence weaves through his days like a golden thread through rough cloth.
Memory rises through his flesh like sap through a living tree: Shechem’s springs threading silver through green hills, air so clean it tasted of tomorrow. His heart still beats with that other time, that other place, when each breath promised possibility.
Why did his heart ever prompt him to leave? The question coils in his gut like a viper, cold and restless. His father’s voice echoes across the years: “Go to your brothers.” And his own answer, bright with youth’s terrible certainty: “I am ready.”
Ready. The word turns to ash on his tongue. What was it in him that always stood so eager at the edge of ruin? First the dreams that marked him different, then that journey that led to chains. Now this – another dream interpreted, another truth spoken into darkness, another silence stretching endless as Egyptian sky.
Joseph presses his forehead against the cool stone, seeking anchor in substance. Was he wrong? The dreams felt true as blood in his veins, real as the breath that now catches ragged in his throat. But seasons have turned, and silence writes its own prophecy in the dark.
Or was he simply forgotten? The thought spreads through his chest like ice-water, familiar as an old wound reopening. Forgotten by the cupbearer, as he was discarded by his brothers, as perhaps he has been abandoned by the God whose voice he once thought he knew.
Yet something in him refuses to surrender – the same fierce certainty that made him roll up the sleeves of his father’s gift, that made him walk willing into destiny’s teeth. Dreams still burn in his marrow, outlasting reason, outliving hope itself.
“I am ready,” he whispers to the darkness, the words both prayer and defiance. Ready for redemption or ruin, for divine purpose or mortal folly. Ready, though his readiness has already cost him everything but this – this stubborn flame that burns beneath his ribs, this dream that won’t die even when he begs it to.
