Folly is an unruly woman; she is simple and knows nothing … Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious!” But little do they know that the dead are there, that her guests are deep in the realm of the dead. Proverbs 9:13,17-18
Enzo was flourishing under the tutelage of Mrs. Eliana at the Seven Pillars Project. Carpentry had given him a craft; programming, a future. But Folly, like a loud and seductive woman, had not given up on him. She would sit at the door of his old life, on the overpass above the train tracks, and call out to him.
Her voice was that of Cadu, his old friend.
“Hey, Enzo, long time no see,” he said, approaching him at the project’s exit. “Still in that granny’s little school? Real life is happening out here.”
Cadu was the spokesman for the “foolish woman.” He was boisterous, full of promises of easy excitement and quick gains. He knew nothing about building, only about taking.
“Hang with us tonight,” Cadu invited, his voice low and conspiratorial. “There’s a new scheme. Easy money. A quick buck is so much better than sweating for it.”
The “scheme” was simple and dangerous: using a card-cloning app to make online purchases. The “stolen waters,” the money that did not belong to them, seemed sweet. The thrill of the forbidden, the adrenaline of secrecy, was what Folly offered.
Enzo felt the pull. The life of hard work, though rewarding, was slow. Cadu’s promise was a tempting shortcut, a glimpse of the consumer life he saw on social media.
He hesitated. The voice of Wisdom, the calm and firm voice of Mrs. Eliana, echoed in his mind. But the voice of Folly was louder, more urgent, more seductive.
“It’s just for one night, Enzo. No one will ever know,” Cadu insisted.
That night, Enzo found himself back in his old world, but now he was different. He saw things more clearly. He sat with Cadu and the others in a dark basement, lit only by the screens of their laptops. The air was heavy with the smell of smoke and the feverish energy of transgression.
They were laughing, bragging about the expensive products they were “buying.” But Enzo could not laugh. He looked at his friends’ faces, animated by the excitement of the moment, and he saw no life. He saw an emptiness. They were loud, but their souls were silent.
He thought of the carpentry workshop, of the smell of wood, of the satisfaction of creating something with his own hands. That was life. He thought of the computer screen at the Seven Pillars, where he built code to help people. That was life.
What was happening in that basement… was not life. It was its opposite.
Suddenly, the basement door burst open with a crash. Two police officers, with blinding flashlights, stormed the place. Panic erupted. Cadu tried to run but was tackled. The laughter turned to screams, the excitement to terror.
Enzo, who had not actively participated, was taken along with the others. At the police station, under the cold, impersonal light, he looked at his friends. They were no longer the braggarts from the overpass. They were just scared, handcuffed kids.
One of the officers, an older man with a tired gaze, looked at Enzo. “You don’t seem like the others, kid. What were you doing there?”
Enzo could not answer. He was seeing, with a terrible clarity, the secret of Folly’s house. Her feast was a fraud. Her guests were not the clever, the cool. They were the dead. Dead in their dreams, dead in their freedom, dead in their future.
Mrs. Eliana came to pick him up the next morning. She did not scold him. She just hugged him, a hug that said, “welcome back to life.”
As he walked away from the police station, Enzo looked back. He did not know what would happen to Cadu and the others. But he knew that he had been in the depths of hell, and that, by a hair’s breadth, he had escaped. Stolen waters might seem sweet for an instant, but the aftertaste they left was that of death. And he, now, only thirsted for the fountain of life.
(Made with AI)
This story is part of my book Everyday Wisdom
https://books2read.com/u/3knogL
