Another long shift at the temple and it’s all bitch, bitch, bitch when she gets home. “I can smell them on you,” Hosea says, sourly, his face wrinkled like an old fig against the incense and cedar water they use at the end of the day. “I know where you’ve been.”

Of course you do, she doesn’t say, you met me there. You lost the faith, found another, and now you’re ashamed of the old ways, your old desires, your old practices. But we were twins once, both aglow with piety. You’ve grown sour with poetry.

“The whole country is rotten as an apple in winter,” whatever that means. “Rancid oil, spoiled cakes.” He has taken up drinking, breadmaking, prophecy, so everything is symbolic, each act a sign, each moment a commentary on the one before. She doesn’t understand where he gets the energy; just trying to parse his speeches is exhausting.

Still. The work is still the work, and gods are gods or they aren’t; all the poetry in the world won’t shift that. She goes to bed weary with a day’s labor well-done, wakes up to a new day of hard, pleasing work ahead. His complaints are smoke rising through the roof on a windy day — tch. He’s infected her with metaphor.