Part 1 of the Short Story Series, Dear Moses

“And the woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.”
—Exodus 2:2–3

I killed for Pharaoh.

Not just once. Not just the overseer in the sand. I carried a blade for him before that, before I knew who I was. I rode chariots with the king’s soldiers. We fought against Kush. Against raiders from the east. I saw fire in the hills and bodies split down the middle. We killed fast and hard and didn’t bury anyone who wasn’t ours.

I was good at it. My arms were strong. I didn’t flinch. The generals liked me because I followed orders and didn’t ask why. They said I had the blood of gods.

Maybe I believed it. But not in the Gods. Just in the strength of a human willing.

They started to favor me, fed me well. Dressed me in fine robes. Taught me how to sit at court and drink like a noble. I spoke their language clean. Not like the workers. Not like the Hebrews.

That word, Hebrew, it didn’t mean much to me then. Just a name for the ones who built everything and got nothing.

I passed them every day. Men hauling stone in the heat. Women with their backs bent from the fields. Children crying and still made to work. And I didn’t look long.

Not until I did.

There was one man. Couldn’t have been older than me. His hands were bleeding. Rope burns across both wrists. He was lifting bricks anyway. No shouting, no noise. Just working through it. I watched him. I don’t know why.

He looked up at me.

Not in fear. Not hate either. Just a tired kind of knowing. Like he already knew I wasn’t who I thought I was.

I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

After that I started walking the long way through the quarter. Not just once. A dozen times. More. I listened. I saw how the guards talked to them. How they spat near their feet. How they hit them just to be seen hitting someone.

Something started cracking.

I didn’t know God. Not then. I knew Pharaoh. I knew kings. I knew bronze and fire and the way a man’s eyes go when you cut too deep. But God? No.

What I felt was smaller. Human.

I started to see them not as slaves, but as people.

And that was the beginning of the end.

You can’t fight for Pharaoh with the same hands that watch a man bleed and know he didn’t deserve it.

So I stopped going to court.

I stopped showing up at the drills.

I started walking more in silence.

I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know who I was. But I knew I wasn’t theirs.

Not anymore.