Scraping

With cold and numb hands I scrape away the November frost from my truck’s windows. I scrape and I scrape, pausing to knock the snow off my ice scraper. Hitting it against my shoe it breaks, the brittle plastic falling to the asphalt. But my windows don’t get off that easily. I pick up the broken blade of the scraper and finish the job.

I walk in and sit down to type, but before I can phrase my first sentence my sleeping roommate asks a question. He probes into my soul, searching out my thoughts, my motivations, my rationale. He’s scraping.

A vespers service full of pain, praise, and knees on cold concrete. I watched the images of starving Sudanese children, the flies buzzing around their bony limbs. I cried out to my God. I fell to my knees. Thoughts of nineties cash and the newest rage flooded my mind. $2 spent on Cokes the night before, and a Sudanese man tells us ten cents would buy a loaf of bread–food for three days. Cries of ‘I want’ turn to ‘I need.’ But I don’t really need anything. I have more than some villages. Orion watches me come in after midnight, again–and God is scraping.

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