angels.

Mother collected these little angel statuettes.

She had forty of them, scattered about the house like small, stone-gray Easter eggs. I remember the number because I once counted them—and then four times more I recounted them, convinced they were slowly multiplying. But the number was always forty. 

I was also convinced that they moved about the house while the rest of us were in bed. Strictly, I was raised on Mother’s homeschooling and the Bible, with not much knowledge of life beyond my little family and our faith; I figured angels could very well exist among us, as they did, apparently, back then. 

 I didn’t sleep well most nights, as I, for the first eight years of my life, was afraid of the dark; I’d stay up for hours on end, curled up fetally beneath my blanket—and I’d hear movement: dull creaking, guttural humming, the occasional humanlike whisper. Mother said the house was just old and adjusting, but I was not convinced. 

One sleepless night, at three in the morning, I heard a rather loud crash, nowhere near the usual soft clicks and clacks of the night. Quickly on the verge of sobbing, I crawled beneath my blankets and waited for Mother or Father to go inspect. But the house had returned to absolute stillness. 

Three minutes passed in agony. I waited, I prayed—I did all the things Mother said I was supposed to do when I felt scared. But nothing happened.  

At some point, I convinced myself to climb out of bed, my eyes wet with tears and my heart chiseling away at my ribcage. I would knock on my parents’ door—that was the plan. I would tell them I heard a loud crash. I would be back in the comfort of my bed in minutes. That was my reassurance; it echoed like a broken record in my head as I crept out into the hallway. 

I tiptoed away, each little step carefully planned. My legs trembled; I moved like a baby deer, or Father when he came home from his poker nights. 

Mother and Father’s bedroom was at the opposite end of the house, down the hallway and through the living room. Mary’s bedroom was right next to mine; I wanted to stop, to check on my baby sister and ensure she was all right before pursuing Mother and Father—but I didn’t. Mary was only four. She got frightened easily. I’d rather she slept soundly through the night, granted that she didn’t also wake at the sound of the crash. 

I peeked around the corner into the living room, ensuring no intruders were in my presence before sneaking towards the hallway Mother and Father’s room resided in. My tiptoe became a quiet speed walk, then a sprint, my footsteps thundering in the silence for about all of three seconds. 

Because I stopped dead in my tracks, with Mother and Father’s bedroom door in my line of sight, safety just a few feet away—for I saw something.   

Or a lack of something. 

I approached the windowsill—the windowsill which, on a normal day, sat one of Mother’s statues. A cherub with a creepy little smile and a flower in its hands. 

But that cherub was missing. 

Before I could wrap my mind around the disappearance, my attention was drawn elsewhere. Through the window, there was a flash of light, of movement across the backyard—an animal? A pack of raccoons picking through our garbage? It wasn’t small, this flash of light; it was big and white, like a polar bear. A polar bear in the middle of Oklahoma—that didn’t seem right. 

I moved closer to the window, pressed my nose to the glass—but I could only see the vacancy of the backyard and the spreading fog of my own breath against the pane. The darkness stared back, however, and that was enough to get me to back off. 

I stood there for a bit, and remembered a time when I was six, and Mary was two. One night, there was a shadow in the corner of my room that looked like a man. I screamed bloody murder for a few good minutes before Father stormed in, turned on the lights, revealed a corner without a shadow man, and told me I shouldn’t be so scared all of the time. I had a little sister to protect, he said. I had to be braver than that, he said. There were things scarier than shadows in the night—I needed to be ready for that, he said. 

At that moment, standing by the window, I figured that maybe he was right. I couldn’t unlearn my fears, but I could pretend. That, I could do—and I did it well. So I put on my bravest face, threw one last glance out the window, and marched out the backdoor. 

Youth and adrenaline was a dangerous mixture: it made you stupidly brave and stupidly curious—and just outright stupid, as I, being eight, wasn’t exactly convinced Oklahoma didn’t have polar bears. But I had a sister to protect, a father to impress—I was brave, stupid, curious, but I also cared too much.

The cool August air chilled my bones, seeped through my pajamas and mismatched socks. The vast plains that surrounded our little country home were cast in shadow, a black fog that fell over the land. Crickets chirped, ravens cried—their collaborative song felt like a warning of sorts, an omen to run inside. Or maybe that was all in my head, my brain telling me to run back to bed. 

I heard croaking behind the shed, where Father stowed his lawnmower and went to smoke his cigars without Mother knowing—what sounded like a wet, throaty breath. Animal or angel, I was unsure, but my heart was about to collapse, and I needed to know. 

So I peeked around the shed.

And saw.

She wasn’t a baby-faced cherub, but a woman, thin and gaunt and unnaturally tall. Stark naked and skeletal, she looked sickly, with cheeks that caved like eroded rock and dark veins that pushed up against her almost transparent flesh. Her eyes, she wouldn’t let me see; she hid behind her wiry fingers and scabby palms the moment I had emerged from behind the shed. 

But all that, I noticed moments later, as I, for a few seconds, could only stare at the pair of bent, broken wings protruding from her bony back. They weren’t pretty wings, either—not the pearly white dove type of wings, no. She had the wings of an old, old buzzard that had seen too much in her day. Patches of bald flesh and open sores where too many chalk-white feathers had been plucked. 

She looked so meek and pathetic, I found myself not as afraid as I figured I would be. Despite her height, thrice my size, she cowered like a hurt child. Knees buckled, narrow shoulders hunched, pale and cracked lips quivering. 

“Hello,” I said softly.

I took another step forward and she receded, with the stumbling gracelessness of a newborn deer. She crouched, cradling her head in her hands, forearms over her eyes. 

“I’m…Elizabeth,” I told her, shaking in my skin. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

She gave a low moan. Lowering her gangly arms and turning her head to the ground, she began palming the dirt. I watched her, no longer afraid, just confused. She tore up grass, sifted through mud—then, found a flower, hidden beneath foliage. A tulip that she uprooted and held out to me, in cupped and trembling hands that she lifted above her head, like an offering. 

I took the flower in my hands, and felt a little less afraid of the dark.

idolatry.

I could barely keep my eyes open, let alone focus on the flashcards Mother was holding three inches from my face. 

The clock read eight o’clock precisely, and the morning sun was beaming through the windows, casting the living room in a blinding, white light. I barely had time to brush my teeth and wipe the crust out of my eyes before Mother dragged me from my bedroom and plopped me down on the couch for my first lesson. The first flashcard read 8 x 7. Mother hated when I tried counting on my fingers; she told me smart people do equations in their heads, not on their hands. But I wasn’t very good at math. I always lost count in my head; it was hard to keep track of numbers, especially now, with the tired haze fogging my brain. 

Mother asked why I was so tired, and I did not lie to her. I told her that I, last night, had been talking to my new friend. I had started to answer the humanlike whispers I heard in the night, mostly to brave the fear of the night I was slowly beginning to overcome; I knew not what to expect, but a friendly voice in the night was a pleasant surprise. My new friend didn’t have a face, nor a body, but she had a beautiful voice; a soft and cooing whisper, as gentle as a lullaby. She didn’t speak English though; she spoke another tongue, one I somehow understood with the fluency of a native. This language was delicate, flowing like a church hymn. It was strange, but she was nice—so nice, so kind. She called me special. She said I was beautiful. 

I looked for her in the morning—I tore apart my closet, peeked underneath my bed—but found nothing but a messy room, vacant of life. 

Mother told me not to be silly, and shook the flashcard at me impatiently. 

I answered fifty. She sighed in disappointment. 

morningstar.

On the highest shelf of the mahogany bookcase, Father’s leather-bound Bible rested. A thick layer of dust covered the old tome. I stood a few paces back, held at bay by the seemingly divine power radiating from its frayed threads and worn pages. I could see the old book, just barely; only five foot four, my head stopped just below the highest shelf. 

Father once told me that it had belonged to his father, and before him, his father’s father—men who had passed long before I was ever born. He rarely ever pulled it off the shelf, reserved for religious holidays and mournful anniversaries. 

This Bible was much different than that which Mother had me read a few verses of every morning and night. Mother’s Bible, bought at a bookstore and bound in faux leather, did not seep such sacred energy, did not carry the weight of generational eminence. The two read all the same—same version, same words, same lessons—but Father’s Bible had always piqued my youthful curiosity, and with him at work and Mother working with Mary on fractions, I was determined to satiate this curiosity. 

Balancing on the tips of my toes, I reached for the Bible, taking the heavy book in my hands. I blew the dust off the cover, particles floating through the air like glitter. The spine was a little flimsy, the pages a little loose. But its divine power surged through me, flooded my veins and made me, momentarily, weightless. 

Cracking open the book, I flipped to a page at random. I had never read the Bible in full—not yet. I knew only the sections Mother had me study, the verses Deaconess Amy recited. Bits and pieces, until Mother decided I was old enough for the full story. 

My eyes found a familiar passage, and tracing my finger along the line of text, I quietly read. I did not quite understand every word, but Mother once told me, when I’d stutter through verses, that Jesus’s love was what mattered most; the words were just vessels to convey that love. All I needed to understand was that love. 

Leafing through the pages, I came upon a section unknown to me; I continued reading, trying not to become lost in the words I could not quite pronounce, the phrases I could not make sense of. I knew I was not meant to read this far. Mother was strict about which verses I read. Some sections, she told me, were not meant to be read by children; some sections, she told me, were too mature. But almost twelve, I could not help but disagree. 

Curiosity and a hint of rebellion—a dangerous mix.

I turned the page, and the divine energy shifted, became…something else. Heavier. Darker. Not quite holy. The verses on the page blurred, then faded completely. Taking shape, one verse, repeated a hundred times, took its place among the pages, becoming warped with each line echoed. 

Matthew 25:41. 

A verse I had not yet read, a verse that Mother steered me away from. My finger stopped on the line, the page suddenly warm to the touch. “Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”

My head was spinning, my chest burning. 

“Depart from me…”

“Depart from me…”

“Depart…”

“Into everlasting fire…”

“Depart…”

“Ye cursed…”

“Depart from me…”

“DEPART.”

I pulled my hand away, my fingers scorched; the Bible clattered to the floor, face down. I leapt a few steps back, as though the book would jump at me—but it remained still, inanimate. I took a moment to recollect myself, to convince myself I was only imagining things. My heart was hammering against my ribcage, chiseling away at bone; once feeling weightless, I had become a stone, sinking in the ocean, dark and frightful. 

Without daring the smallest of glimpses, I returned the Bible to the highest shelf and never touched it again. 

sunday school.

I had blisters on my ankles. 

I told Mother those stupid flats didn’t fit; they were an inch and a half too small. But they were on clearance at Goodwill, and Mother simply could not pass up such a deal. The dress I wore suffered the same fate; a semi-decent discount, but for good reason—it was an ugly shade of yellow and felt as though it was designed to fit a nine-year-old boy, not a thirteen-year-old girl. 

I sat on the wobbly toilet seat of the tiny bathroom in the basement of the church. Outside, in the little recreation room, Deaconess Amy was teaching Sunday school. Above, I could hear the reverberating drone of Reverend Crowe’s voice, delivering one of his usual long-winded sermons. Mary and I did not get to attend worship; we were sent downstairs every Sunday to learn about our religion in a “fun group setting” until we were old enough for worship. It wasn’t fun; it was sweaty and boring, and none of the kids ever talked to me and Mary. We weren’t the only homeschooled kids. We weren’t the only socially awkward kids. But somehow, at some point in time, it was unanimously decided that we were the freaks of the freak show.

I had discarded the stupid pair of flats on the dingy tile floor. Barefoot, I tended to my wounds with the pocket first aid kit Mother insisted I kept in my purse. Sometimes, having a helicopter parent had its perks—not often, mostly never, but sometimes. I coated the bright red sores with thick layers of Neosporin. 

I wasn’t in any rush to return to Sunday school, to Deaconess Amy plucking an old guitar and singing her cheesy songs about the Ten Commandments or why we should abstain from sex and drugs. She tried, and I could respect that—but respect did not equate to interest. With no offense to Deaconess Amy, I would have much rather preferred to spend the next hour and ten minutes camping out on my lonesome in the gross little bathroom than spend it learning more Bible trivia in a cramped room without a single fan in the middle of July. 

There were a lot of graffiti scribbles on the walls, on the mirror above the sink, the sink itself. Some of them seemed pretty old, faded. Some were brand new, freshly painted. My favorite was the crude drawing of Reverend Crowe, an exaggerated caricature of his ancient face, droopy jowls and all. I recognized the handwriting of one—“hail satan 666” in black Sharpie chicken scratch, the sloppy handwriting of Alice Fisher, the fifteen year old girl that stole and smoked her mother’s cigarettes in the same gross little bathroom, and signed the Sunday school attendance sheet in the same illegible scrawl. 

I knew to expect Alice to bang on the door at some point, say she needed to piss. That had happened to me a few times before; the girl was impatient. And had a chronic UTI, apparently, with the amount of times she “had to take a piss” in a matter of two hours. 

I unwrapped two bandaids and plastered them over my Achilles’ tendons. They didn’t stick very well due to the slight overabundance of ointment, but I managed to make them stay in place. The wounds stung a little, still raw, still sore. I reached for my flats and carefully fit them over the bandages; I could still feel the backs of the shoes cutting into my ankles, but the plasters somewhat dulled the pain. 

Only forty minutes or so left—I had to remind myself. Halfway done. You can sit through forty more minutes of Deaconess Amy. 

I—after a moment to myself, absently staring at the grimy wall, trying to make out more lazy scratches of marker and pen out of stalling boredom, echoing my mantra of just forty more minutes, just forty more minutes, just forty more—rose from the toilet and shuffled to the sink, tiptoeing across the dirty tile like an unskilled ballerina. 

The pipes sputtered as I turned on the rusty faucet. The sink water was cold and smelled like pennies; I held my hands under the stream and washed away the excess ointment adhering to my fingertips. The paper towel dispenser was empty; I wiped my wet hands on the skirt of my dress. 

I found myself still stalling as I caught a glimpse of myself in the little mirror above the sink. That one little glimpse became a full scrutiny. Through the thin layer of grime and cracks in the glass, I carefully smoothed out my hair, reapplied my dollar store lip gloss, worked on a pimple forming along the bridge of my nose. Then I just stared at my reflection, waiting for something on my face to mess itself up so I’d have something to fix. Just when I thought I had fully run out of idle trivialities, just when I thought I had to finally rejoin society—

Something below the mirror caught my attention.

A scratch of pencil against the drywall, an eye with a crescent moon in the place of the pupil. Basic line work art. Simple yet peculiar, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I didn’t particularly care, but it was vaguely interesting enough to buy myself at least thirty more seconds of freedom. This scribble was purposeful; the pencil markings were bold and dark, like the artist was trying to break their pencil. 

This little scribble wasn’t like most of the others. It wasn’t obscene or stupid; it seemed to mean something. What that was, I didn’t know, nor, again, did I care too much to find out. But it was interesting, and well worth my thirty seconds. 

I turned away, but found the image had burned itself into my retinas. Like staring directly into the sun. 

My vision was suddenly hazy. Shadows phased in and out of existence around me; the walls were melting, and the floor was giving way beneath my weight. My head felt heavy. My body was heavy. The air was heavy. 

My gaze fell to the mirror, and I felt ill. I saw horns. Little baby devil horns, sticking out of my head, crimson staining my hair and dripping down my scalp from the open sores they emerged from. She—not me, no, she couldn’t be me—was sobbing, screaming, ripping at her blood-soaked roots, her eyes burning red and bloodshot.  

My vision started to darken, my legs began to sway—a numbness spread over my body and dampened my hammering heart. Was I ill? Was I dying? Was the Neosporin so horribly expired that it afflicted me with nausea and hallucinations? Was that even possible? Did Neosporin even expire?

I gripped the edges of the sink to keep myself steady, hung my head and almost vomited at my feet. My blood was boiling beneath my skin. I tried to lift my head—the fluorescent lights were flickering madly. Beneath the strobe lights, my reflection was dead and bleeding out in the sink. The drain was clogged, the sides overflowing; her head bobbed limply in the crimson. The graffiti on the wall changed before my eyes—shriveled, sprawled, slithered like serpents—it took the form of an ancient tongue and spelled out my doom, and I couldn’t read it. But I knew.

I looked down at the little moon drawing which remained all the same. 

There was a loud knock at the door. 

I nearly jumped out of my skin. Choked on my own beating heart as it climbed up my throat and into my mouth. All at once, everything came back. The lights had stopped flickering. My illness faded. Reality restored. 

I was fine. I was alive. 

“Holy shit, did you die in there? I have to piss,” said the muffled voice of an agitated Alice Fisher. 

purgatory.

I had this dream. 

I met a girl. There was something about her, something off. Her hair was bleach white and ratty, and her eyes were dazed and dead. She didn’t quite seem to know where she was. But in this dream, I wasn’t shy. I wasn’t afraid of her. She introduced herself as Jezebel. 

She wanted to show me something, and I complied. So she reached for my hand and pulled me out of my own body, my spirit separate from my skin and bones. It felt strange, like coming up for air after being submerged in water. She told me to look up at the sky and I did. She laughed at my marvel, but I could not contain my slack-jawed shock. I could see the universe. The cosmos. Everything. All of it, all at once—put on one grandiose display of color and magnitude. It hurt to stare after a while.  

From there, she led me through a wasteland of ancient ruins and wandering souls—they didn’t pay us much mind, they didn’t even look our way. 

“Who are they?” I asked.

“They’re people,” she said. “Like you and me.”

“They don’t look very happy.”

“They’re just tired. They’ve been here awhile.”

“Where is here?”

She laughed and didn’t answer the question. I furrowed my brow and started to ask again, but she continued onward through the mysterious land, and I had no choice but to shut my mouth and follow. 

After a while, we came upon a large ruin that had slowly succumbed to decay. An overgrowth of moss and fungus swallowed chiseled stone and pillars of rock. Jezebel stopped and rested upon the ground. I joined her on the floor and took in everything around me. 

“Am I evil?” I asked. 

She frowned. “I don’t think so. Do you feel evil?”

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes?” 

“Sometimes I see things, hear things. Sometimes I have nightmares about hellfire and burning alive. I told this to Deaconess Amy at my Sunday school, and she said this fear of hell will only strengthen my bond with Jesus, but I don’t…feel a bond with Jesus. I don’t feel holy. I don’t feel worthy.”

“Well, why do you need Jesus to feel worthy?” 

“It’s how Mother and Father raised me to be.”

“Well, then why do you need them?”

“They’re all I have. Mother, Father, Mary, and I—we’re all we have. Mother teaches Mary and I, and Father provides for us.”  

“Sounds lonely.”

“It is. We live so far outside of town—it’s a thirty minute drive just to get to church. And the kids at Sunday school don’t like me too much. They think I’m weird. I have friends at home, but Mother insists they’re not real. So I’m mostly alone. I don’t mind it all the time. But sometimes, it hurts.”

“Well, I’ll be your friend,” she insisted. “I’m real. I know I am.” 

“You’ll really be my friend?”

“Yeah. I like you. If I were still alive, I’d come visit all the time. We’d be best friends.”

I smiled. Hearing that meant the world to me. 

I told Mother about Jezebel. 

She wasn’t listening; she told me I have an active imagination.

crucify.

There was another dead bird in the backyard. 

A mangled mess of blood and feathers—just sitting there, rotting. The stench was wretched, like nothing I had ever known; it stung my eyes, churned the contents of my stomach. A horde of flies and maggots has descended upon its corpse, picking at its exposed innards and unearthing bone. Its wings were crooked, one almost snapped in half; its neck was broken, limp and craned oddly. Its beady little eyes were cloudy and staring right at me.  

I stood there, with its carcass at my feet, meeting its lifeless gaze. A crow, black feathers dull and stained red. There were deep punctures in its flesh, teeth marks around its throat. 

Human teeth. 

I turned around, walked to the shed to grab a shovel. I had been burying them, the dead birds that littered the lawn from time to time. I stopped caring after my fifth or sixth bird, stopped questioning the carnage, the teeth marks that lined the snapped necks of each cadaver. 

I opened the shed door; the shovel was propped up against the wall, covered in dirt and grass and loose feathers. I grabbed it by the splintering handle and slung it over my shoulder; I was beginning to feel like a professional, the groundskeeper of my own tiny, avian cemetery. A few inches below the dirt—six feet was hard to dig with a flimsy, clearance-shelf shovel—were, respectively, a sparrow, a woodpecker, two cardinals, a fat little chickadee, and now, a crow. 

I dug a little hole in the earth, and with the tip of my shovel, scooted the bird in. In its fall, its head moved, eyes no longer boring into my soul. I uttered a quick Bible verse in its wake—Romans 8:38-39, memorized from my prior burials. I ripped a dandelion from the earth, roots and all, and laid it on the mound of dirt. The dandelion from the last burial had started to wither, its stem curled and its petals a murky brown.  

I stayed at the bird’s side, feeling the gentle breeze of September slowly fading into October. The leaves were dying—dying beautifully, changing color and floating delicately from their home in the trees; dying beautifully, unlike some. 

From where I stood, I felt eyes on the back of my head, burning. I glanced over my shoulder, and found my silent observer: 

A sparrow in the trees, watching me intently.

false god.

My little sister, Mary—she got really sick one year. 

Three days, we thought she was ailing with nothing more than a common cold. Sniffles and a dry cough; Mother and Father let her skip church and treated her with chicken noodle soup and jasmine tea for lunch.  

Then, day four—well, the first hour of day four, at one o’clock in the morning—she awoke screaming. Awful, awful cries, bleating like a wounded lamb about her head being on fire. Her head was, physically, not on fire, Father would figure out as he nearly broke down her door with a fire extinguisher, but he (after a quick lecture about not screaming fire) dug a thermometer out of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and, now panicked again, found her temperature to read 107°. 

The second hour into day four, we spent at the hospital. We drove—all four of us, groggy and dazed, going 75 down a narrow dirt road in our old station wagon. In the car, Mother was praying, Mary was crying, Father was white-knuckling the steering wheel, and I was out of my head, staring out the window from the back seat with no sense of reality. At the hospital, Mother was deathly silent, Father was praying, and I still had not woken up yet. 

It was hyperpyrexia, they said, but they weren’t sure what was the cause of it. Not even the slightest idea. But the doctors worked, and eventually, they managed to subside the fever, and we were allowed a few moments to bask in our false sense of security before another code was called. Because Mary’s illness didn’t stop at just a high fever, no. She started slipping into dizzy spells and delirious ramblings, swaying her head back and forth as though she held no control over her own body. The doctors didn’t know what to make of it; they wanted to keep her at the hospital to run tests and monitor her illness. 

 Then I lost count of the days. There were several of them. Several nights, sick to my stomach with worry, praying to a porcelain Jesus instead of sleeping. Several mornings we went to church, and several prayers Reverend Crowe made in her name. Several hospital visits, inhaling the sickly, sterile fumes of medicine and death. Several of Mother and Father’s church friends driving the thirty miles to our little home in the countryside to drop off homemade meals and baked goods, as though we were to eat our grief away.

Mary just wasn’t getting better. Every time progress was made, another symptom developed. The hospital was evidently outright clueless, but they sure did enjoy charging us. At that point, somewhere around the second week, we practically lived there—slept in lobbies, lived off cafeteria food, brushed our teeth in the public bathrooms. Mother and Father, as skeptical as they normally were about modern medicine, spent a lot of time praying for the doctors’ success.

I, with nothing more to do than wait and worry, became a people-watcher. I could not help myself. In my depressive, blurry state, I saw the people around me as zoo animals. Or perhaps spectators—and I, the zoo animal. I had never seen so many new faces before in my life. I overheard someone call their spouse a “cunt” one afternoon; it was like hearing a foreign language. I almost found humor in how quickly Mother cringed and nearly jumped to cover my ears, as though I were still a child. 

This new hobby helped ease my mind, but only in the lobby. At Mary’s bedside, however—that was different. Having to see her was such a chore. Such a mind-numbing, soul-killing chore. Ignoring each wretched cough, the little dribble of blood down her chin—or whatever symptom was currently present, because God knows there were too many things to ignore. 

At some point, Father had started to return to the office, after the hospital bills had begun to pile up more than we anticipated. 

With Father visiting less, Mother had…other company in his absence. A man who seemed to only visit during Father’s working hours, arriving ten minutes after his departure and leaving ten minutes before his return. I wasn’t sure what to make of this man who had appeared into my life from thin air, suddenly taking Father’s place at Mary’s bedside. Mary was polite, said nothing as he infiltrated her hospital room on an almost daily basis. In the lobby, he and Mother were always whispering; it was like this man held the world’s greatest secret, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know it. I didn’t recognize him from church, but Mother insisted he attended—“He sits in the far back,” she said once in his absence; she wouldn’t tell me his name when I asked her. He looked fifteen years younger than Mother and was suspiciously attractive, like a charismatic switch-and-bait salesman—everything about him seemed synthetic, sculpted by man. Even his smile, his laugh, the “I hope you feel better” he once uttered to Mary on his way out the door—it seemed fake. 

His visits became daily. He never left Mother’s side—literally; they stood like sardines packed into a tin, and he was always whispering something in her ear. And it was as though Father knew, because he started working even longer hours. Near fourteen-hour shifts, overnight and overtime, sometimes spending the night asleep at his desk—he was going to kill himself. He was going to be next, and soon I would have no one. 

But one afternoon something had changed. I could feel it, the moment I woke from my poor sleep in the plastic lobby chair—something had changed. Mother was not telling me, but I knew. It was in the atmosphere, in the way people acted around me, from Mother to the doctors to the complete strangers that did not even know my name.

Father returned from work early, and Mother led me to the station wagon. We drove the thirty minutes home in complete silence, and I knew. I knew, I knew, I knew. Nobody would tell me, nobody would trust me, nobody wanted to hurt me, but I knew. 

I withdrew to my room and hid for days, emerging only to use the bathroom and feed myself in the late hours of the night. Our hospital stay had put a hiatus on my lessons; Mother stopped homeschooling me, stopped waking me up for church. I had half expected her to continue, but she seemed equally as drained as myself. She had taken to inviting her new friend to the house. And I—I spent every waking moment of this foggy span of bleeding days unable to look myself in the eye. I had spent the past years worried, figuring myself a demon, a devil, pure and unbridled evil. I didn’t know what I did, what I was, why I attracted strange phenomena with a magnetic pull, why death seemed to follow me—but I saw what I was in that bathroom mirror, all those years ago, and it was not holy. It was not what Mother and Father raised me to be. I was sinful, sinful and oblivious to my own doings; I was afraid to look my family in the eye. 

At two o’clock in the morning, I found the energy to climb out of bed, having lay there so long the mattress was indented with the outline of my body. Sluggish and broken, I left my room and headed to the kitchen to feed myself after days of ignoring my gnawing hunger. Sitting at the kitchen table, across from each other as though in the midst of an important conference, Mother and her friend turned their gazes on me in perfect unison. There was a grimness in Mother’s eyes. 

“Elizabeth,” she said gravely. “I’d like to properly introduce you to my friend, Reverend Edward. We’d like to have a little chat with you.”

resurrection

Rotting. All I smelled was rotting. 

A thick, pungent odor seeped from the bodybag. I kept my nose pinched shut as I walked; Mother was behind me, cradling the lumpy sack of corroded flesh and feasting maggots in her arms like it was a toddler. Edward—I was not calling him Reverend—led the way, pushing through the dense foliage. 

The trees were taller than the heavens and barren of their leaves, their spindly branches naked and brittle. I felt guilty walking beneath them, feeling as though they had eyes that followed us through the forest. They knew what we had done, what we had planned to do; they could smell the sick decay, just as I could. 

I felt ill, iller than I had ever felt before; I was drowning in wave after wave of nausea as I tried to keep up, stumbling behind Edward. Maybe it was the odor. Maybe it was the shame. Maybe it was the fact I had not eaten in days. I looked over my shoulder; Mother held a cold, thousand-yard stare, looking right through me. 

We had been walking for what felt like days. I wasn’t exactly sure where we were; all I knew, in my dazed recollection of the car ride, was that we were two or so hours away from our little country home, and that it didn’t take long for the stench of a cadaver to completely pollute an entire station wagon. 

“Here,” said Edward, halting dead in his tracks; we followed suit. “This should be fine.”

Mother laid the bodybag down delicately across the grass; it settled with a dense, squishy noise. Mother stepped back as Edward raised his arms to the heavens, craned his neck back and addressed the above. He spoke in a language most eldritch sounding; throaty and sinister, like it was born from the molten core of the earth, but somehow, I understood. I wished I was oblivious, but I was not. As he spoke, the night sky became darker, no longer beholding the stars—just a shallow void. 

He finished his incantation, ending with a harsh declaration, the voice of a challenger, beckoning forth a monster. From the trees came a low, mournful groan, then emerged…oh. 

It looked like her, the angel I had befriended so long ago. That foul-looking, dilapidated creature, so meek and cowardly, that I had felt to be my guardian. Though I had never seen her again after that night, I still felt her presence—her cold and lurking presence that filled me with warmth when I was most afraid. 

But this one—it loomed like the trees, godlike in stature, decayed wings unfurled. And this one stared. A thousand insect-like eyes reached into my body, exposing my soul to its wretched gaze. There were universes captive in the angel’s eyes, a prison of stars, moons, voids spiraling and colliding endlessly before me. 

I could not tear my eyes away; the creature would not let me. 

Edward spoke in tongues to the angel, who did not respond; its jaw was unhinged, hanging loosely as through broken, rotted teeth filling its crater of a mouth. He knelt down beside the bodybag. I did not look; I closed my eyes and shamelessly whimpered at the slow crinkling of plastic and fumbling of zippers.  

Then all was still for a moment, and I almost opened my eyes until the grass began to rustle, the creature began to grunt like a pig, and…oh God—there was a noise like no other, a noise that seized my heart and ripped it from my chest.  

Wet. Ripping. The pulling of flesh from bone; I screamed, and Mother held me close. Her arms did not feel safe; I only felt more afraid, more exposed to the dangers of the world, in her embrace, but I could not find the strength in my weak, broken body to push her away. So I let her hold me, comfort me—like a mother should do.  

The creature feasted, and feasted, and feasted—and I was clinging to consciousness by a thread. I wavered in Mother’s arms, weightless and hazy. “Open your eyes,” Mother then whispered; I violently shook my head, bile climbing my throat. She gripped me tighter. My lungs deflated, chest constricted. “Open your eyes,” she pressed, pulling at my eyelids with her grimy thumbs. “Witness a true miracle of God.”

I gave in. With my last sliver of sanity, through a haze of tears, I watched the angel hold Mary’s unearthed heart to the heavens, digging its jagged claws into the tissue; embalming fluid dripped down its arm. Sobbing, I begged to go home; I begged for Father, for the comfort of my bedroom. I was a child again, afraid of the dark.

The creature held the heart out to Edward, who took it gently in his hands. I screamed and tried to fight Mother’s hold, but she kept me captive in an iron embrace. Edward was frowning at me, the same way Father used to frown when I threw tantrums as a child. The creature returned to the forest, disappeared amongst the thicket. With Mary’s still heart in his palms, he held the organ out to us. 

“Put your hand on her heart,” he instructed; I did not oblige. Mother took my wrist and jerked my arm towards him, and it felt…wrong; a heart was not supposed to be touched. I wept, and I wept, but Mother kept my hand in place. 

“Repeat after me,” he then said; then he began speaking once more in his ancient language. When Mother joined but I did not, he looked at me. “Repeat. After. Me.” 

Mother’s fingernails dug deeper into my skin. I parted my trembling lips and choked out the horrible language. It stung my mouth, bled my tongue—speaking such foul words felt like gargling boiling oil. But I carried through, echoing the words Edward spoke to the heavens.  

Then he knelt. Digging out a little hole in the dirt, he placed the heart in its earthly tomb. He touched the exposed organ one last time and whispered, in the vile tongue, “Into your hands I commit her spirit.” Then, like a seed, he covered the heart with soil. 

And from the ground, something emerged. A hand, an arm, wet with blood and soil, clawing its way from the earth, reborn. Slowly, carefully, the…body broke free from its earthly prison, in strange and awkward angles, as though with broken bones and rubber skin. Speckles of pale flesh amongst the deep red stains. An untamed mess of mousy hair. The newly born body, stark naked and shivering, stood on wobbly legs. Its body sagged, too weak to keep itself upright. Slowly, wearily, it craned its head up and looked me in the eyes. I wasn’t ready, but it was too late. 

The corpse’s eyes were Mary’s, brown and doe-like; it opened its mouth to speak, but only managed a whimper, a choked sounding “Mother?”

Right then, I turned on my heel and retched; my shrunken pit of a stomach churned painfully as a sickly mix of spit, mucus, and stomach acid dribbled from my mouth and into the tall grass. Finally—finally—my legs gave in, and my body tumbled lifelessly to the ground. My heart was erratic; my mind was in ruin. From the dirt, from the grass, I looked up at the three figures looming over me. 

I saw pride in Mother’s eyes. 

Sick, filthy pride. 

sinful.

Mary was standing in my doorway.

I couldn’t look her in the eyes. 

Mother and Father were screaming at each other in the kitchen. Their words blurred together, melding into an obscure fog of syllables and sharp tones—I wasn’t listening. I wasn’t. I didn’t have the strength. I didn’t have the willpower. I was lying in bed, dead to the world. Dead to everyone but Mary, who lingered by the threshold in a dead silence, watching, waiting. 

Stop looking at me.

I could no longer cry. It hurt my chest. 

What do you want?

Mother had bathed her, scrubbed away the scent of decay—it took two baths, four showers, and an entire bottle of cheap, drugstore perfume for the overbearing rot to fade from our household. At least, on the surface. But no amount of soap could wash away the stench of sin that lingered like a plague. The foulest odor—rotting, moldy, wicked. Polluting the air. Blighting my eyes, my nose, my soul. A stench that clung to Mother, a stench that clung to me…

What have I done to you?

What have I done?

This wretched place would be the death of me. 

manger.

My bedroom was stripped bare. 

In the driveway, a cheap car I had bought from one of the old church goers a month ago, with the pocket change I had made mowing the lawns of the clergymen for two years straight, was packed with as much of my belongings as I could possibly fit. What I couldn’t fit in my car, I had to instead fit in Mother’s for her to donate to the church immediately after I left, per her request. 

She didn’t take the announcement of my leaving very well. 

In all fairness, I had dropped the news on her exactly one week prior at the dinner table, over a bowl of spaghetti. She wept for an entire day, then gave me the silent treatment for another three. 

I sat on the floor in the middle of my empty bedroom, taking everything in; it felt like meditation. The pastel walls seemed a little duller, the space felt a little smaller—I never thought I would see this room empty. I thought Mother would keep me here forever, waking me up every Sunday morning to do my hair up for church, homeschooling me until I was a feeble old woman in diapers, and her a shapeless blob of crust and shriveled flesh. She didn’t put up much of a fight like I expected her to—I was prepared for an all-out war, but all I got was tears. 

I unfolded my legs and climbed to my feet. Everything was packed, everything was ready—I had a small apartment in Wichita Falls waiting for me, I had a cashier job lined up at a grocery store. All I needed to do—

Was leave. 

Part of me wanted to sneak away without saying goodbye; the other part of me would never forgive myself if I did. I stood in the doorway of my bedroom and silently said my final goodbyes, like saying farewell to an old friend. My only friend. 

It hurt, but I managed to part ways with my bedroom walls. I crept down the hallway. 

Mother was in the kitchen, and I couldn’t look her in the eye. “How long have you got?” she asked softly, as she washed her dishes. 

“I have a five hour drive. I wanna get there before it gets dark.”

“Oh.” She was quiet for a moment. “Aren’t you terrified of leaving?”

“Of course I’m terrified. I’ve always been terrified.”

“Then don’t go.” 

I caved, looking her dead in the eyes. She had gray hairs I had never noticed until now. There was an indent around the base of her ring finger, a permanent reminder of what she had lost. That wedding ring had always been half a size too small; she almost broke her finger, trying to rip it off. 

“You think I have a choice?” I laughed bitterly. 

“No one’s forcing you to go.”

“My sanity is.” 

“And you think running off to Texas will save you from yourself?”

“No. It’ll save me from us.” 

Mother had nothing to say to that. She faltered, opened her mouth to retort—but whatever words she had prepared died on the tip of her tongue. She hung her head and returned to her dishes. 

“Let me help you…” I whispered, moving in next to her. I took the sudsy plate from Mother’s hand. She stood there still, eyes glued to the whirlpool of dirty water swirling down the drain. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you know I have to do this, right?”

“No,” she stated. “I don’t know. I’ll never know. Elizabeth, there’s nothing wrong with us. We aren’t sinners; we’re just…different. We’re still pure in the eyes of the Lord; it’s just…different. These aren’t normal circumstances.” 

“I wasn’t allowed to pierce my ears for eighteen years—but bringing back someone from the dead is okay? It’s just different? Mother, it’s playing God. It’s undoing His word. How…what?” 

“Mary’s death was a mistake. I told you that Reverend Edward—“

“Stop calling him that.”

“I told you that Reverend Edward speaks with God, Elizabeth,” she said, ignoring me. “He told me His mistake. We were only doing what He asked of us,” she said. “Stay home, learn from him, and you’ll be able to serve God. Directly. Like I raised you to do.”

“God doesn’t make mistakes, Mother. This is insane; this—this—is why Father left.”

“Your Father doesn’t understand. He doesn’t have the gift. But we do. Mary too. It’s in my blood, our blood. We’re His chosen.”

“Mother, Mary isn’t…Mary anymore. She’s slow, she’s lethargic, she’s quiet, quieter than before; she sleeps during the day and walks around like a zombie at night. You want to tell me that’s normal. She’s…she was supposed to stay dead. She was…”

My lungs gave in. My voice had tapered off. Tears welled in my eyes; I fought them, I tried, but all to no avail. “She’ll get better with time,” promised Mother, lost in her own delusions. “She will. She—”

“—was brought back a year ago and still is a walking corpse. That wasn’t some holy resurrection; it…it…” I did not have the words, the way to portray just how ruined Mary was. “It was wrong. And I can’t keep staying here with her. Or you.” 

“It’ll get better with time,” she kept saying. “Reverend Edward—”

“—is a fraud. No, not even. He’s a demon. He’s a devil.”

She shook her head in disappointment. “If only you knew…”

She stayed quiet. I set the dish rag down and tried looking her in the eyes—she wouldn’t meet my gaze. I gave up. “I wanted to give you a chance, Mother. I really did. But you’re too far gone. You were my everything growing up, but you…you’re…” The words died on my tongue; I was too much of a coward.

“Come back home when you’re done playing games,” she said, as I stormed for the front door. “I’ll be waiting.” 

“You’ll be waiting a long time then. Good chat, Mother.”

I stormed out the front door and down the driveway, to my car parked at the very end. Jamming my keys in the ignition, the old engine roared to life, chugging noisily; I saw Mother standing in the doorway, watching me with the eyes of a vulture, waiting for its prey to breathe its last breath. 

I peeled out of the driveway and roared down the long, dirt road. 

It was a long fucking drive.