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Aaron sees his sister appear on the horizon before dawn breaks, a hobbling form growing larger as the rising sun pulls shadows from the ground to cover the white patches on her skin, the changing expressions on her face.They’re familiar to him by now, Miriam’s faces—they’ve mapped a course throughout the counters of his life. The gritted determination of her brows in the face of a cruel Egyptian slave master. Her mouth open wide in giddy song on the far side of the Reed Sea. The tears on her cheeks as she relayed the news that the daughter of Pharaoh agreed to take in their infant brother.The bags under her eyes, the instant before white scales appeared there, when she opened her mouth in pettiness, to speak against Zipporah, to challenge the supremacy of Moses’s leadership.(They’re familiar to him, Miriam’s faces, and her face in that moment had not been one of indignation, but of weariness—that well-deep ache that he has felt also, has felt for some time, that he is as well acquainted with by now as he had been with the lash of the whip on his back, the type that can draw bitter waters from even the gentlest of souls.)When her paces finally reach him, the sun illuminating her patch-peeling face, the expression there is one that he can only identify as resignation. A met glance—eyes meeting knowing eyes—serves as their only greeting. Words, after all, are often superfluous between them. He doesn’t ask if she is alright.Her lips flatten into a flat line. They’re familiar to him, Miriam’s faces, and besides he knows what it is to bear the weight of expectations, of asymptotic standards—of the People and of the Divine.She doesn’t object when he offers a hand to brace her still-arthritic gait.