Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Potiphar: Foolish Slave Boy

These barbaric nomads from out in the wasteland are such uncultured oafs. They smell of camels and dung, they can barely read (and most can't read at all) and their behavior - like their humor - is quite crude. Though you can scrub them until they glisten and the stench is gone, and though you can dress them up in Egyptian clothing, when it comes right down to it, they're still barbarian nomads from the wasteland.

And they're good for just one thing: slaving in the fields all day.

Except this new slave I bought from the caravan - I can't quite figure him out. Most of the other slaves are either terrified or filled with rage (and who wouldn't be, having been torn away from family and home by Ishmaelite slave trader scum?) but with this boy there is neither the despair nor the sullenness of the other slaves. He looks around the slave market with curiosity, and when I pay my money for him he looks at me frankly, unafraid. There is no anger; it is as though when he looks at me he is simply wondering how he's going to get beyond me to the next stage of his life.

That's it. That's what's wrong with this boy: he's confident. He is foolish enough to think of slavery as a temporary condition. And the expression in his eyes is not even the cold calculation of a slave who is trying to figure out how to escape; this boy isn't going to try to escape, he just seems to know that someday, somehow, his slavery will end.

Foolish boy.

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