Ben paced the guest room after unpacking his things. Noe Ortega may have been missing, but his absence hung around like a nicotine stink you can’t quite scrub out of the carpets.

Across from the guest bed stood a teak writing desk flanked by white paint-chipped bookshelves. Sipping his coffee (from a BEST LIFE EVER mug Sister Dahne had ordered off “one of them online shops run by a sister”) Ben sat on the brownish-orange office chair and flipped open the research binder headquarters had provided.

The binder was fatter than a phone book and, Ben realized about a half hour into the flight into Ohio, about as relevant to a man with internet access. All the various articles from The Watchtower and Awake!, encyclopedic passages from Insight on the Scriptures, pixelated PDF scans of out-of-print books from the Society’s history were, however nicely organized, available already on the organization’s website. Ben could have just as easily pulled up the archives and typed in keywords himself.

There was, however, something about the pen-and-paper approach that struck Ben as Godlier than scrolling on his phone. He recalled paintings from the publications, ones which lined the halls of Headquarters: The Kings of Judah writing the word of Jehovah God in their own hand, Christ reading from the Torah in the temple as a child, the first century apostles scouring scrolls for ancient wisdom. The contrast struck Ben as meaningful, intentional, as all things were with Jehovah: the design and construction committee had the ensured that between the cubicles, where men in suits and ties typed on keyboards and forwarded memos over Microsoft Outlook, there hung reminders of the humble origins of Pure Worship, reminders that Jehovah and His people, until quite recently, were quite content with the analogue.

Ben suspected he might more easily be led by the spirit by writing notes in the margins of printed out pages from Jehovah’s favorite website instead of typing them into his Notes app.

Bold, all-caps words from the top of the next page drew him in.

There was a small comfort in that last bit of phrasing: “bullies.” Invisible inschmisible, the demons weren’t gods, they were bullies. Ben Duncolm had dealt with bullies his whole life, not many with “superhuman strength,” no, but strength enough to drag Ben by his hair behind the schoolhouse to the swing set and kick Ben in the stomach for his voice having a “fagcent.”

Jehovah had helped Ben deal with those bullies, he knew with hindsight. True, at the time, God’s help had been imperceptible. True, for long stretches of time all through school Ben had felt alone, abandoned, confused, hateful, ashamed…but Jehovah must have been keeping him alive somehow, for here he was, not dead and (thanks to the Theocratic Ministry School) no longer afflicted with an effeminate lisp.

Darrin. Ben went to unlock his phone, slowly, like he was lifting up a floorboard to see what rot lie beneath. No new texts. He kept reading:

Ben scribbled in the margins: “difference between demons and sickness.” He already knew this, but he wrote it down, because that’s what Bible study was for Ben: writing down things he already knew. From time to time The Organization would release new information, “new light,” “clarifications” or “adjustments” to previous “understanding[s].” More often, study was repetition, just as meditation was repetition, as were meetings, as were field-service presentations, as were the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each of whom told the same story with “adjusted understandings.” Which, come to think of it, each included a story of demonic possession.

He scanned the Insight Book entry on Demonic Possession, skimming past vague details about Christ Jesus expelling demons. Of course Jesus H. Christ could do it; the question was, could Benjamin B. Duncolm?

See? Ben told himself. Jehovah can use any old human to do His will. Anyone except certain imposters. Good thing Ben was not an imposter. Good thing the brothers had sent him here, despite his protestations, despite his inexperience and recent sins. If Ben wasn’t supposed to be on this assignment, if his (very) recent sins had not been forgiven, he wouldn’t be there; Jehovah would have stopped him.

He felt sweat drip down his back, felt his face flush, and between breaths Ben was in the shower in the Bethel dorm again, feeling Darrin grow harder in his gripped palm, feeling for the first time the pulse of another man’s cock like a heartbeat as it swelled with blood. Even in the hot water, through sweat and steam, Ben felt the heat radiating from his penis as Darrin slid it, squeezed against his own, comparing, caressing, aching—

Nope. He prayed, then and there, but his pleas were muffled, drowned out. No longer did Ben feel connected to or enveloped by Jehovah’s holy spirit; he was stuck on page four of a four-hundred-page tome, and moreover he was stuck on a word. One little word was stuck in his craw, like that popcorn kernel you can’t get out of your gums:

Imposter.

If an imposter attempted to expel a demon, it was reverse-Uno on Ben; “I’m rubber, you’re glue,” that sort of thing. Ben was not an imposter. He’d even asked, repeatedly, to stay right at Bethel where he belonged. Jehovah wants you to be here, he told himself; he just wished Jehovah could tell him face to face. That would clear up a lot.

Second-best option was to go to Jehovah’s house. Ben would need to borrow the ministry-mobile.

***

DAX: Uhhhh hello? Is Liv ok??

KORA: Idk…

DAX: dude! What’s going on! (btw at my sister’s and can’t talk on the phone, but I can text under table. Talented that way.)

KORA: she’s alive and shit but idk she’s got really bad mood swings. She called Jill a ‘coward’ for killing herself.

KORA: yes I know your hands are talented that way ;)

DAX: jesus fuck this conversation is a roller coaster. Getting whiplash.

KORA: my life is whiplash.

DAX: okay fair. Not fair what Liv said tho. Even though she doesn’t know better it still hurts. My nephew says mean shit to me. Kids have no filter.

KORA: it was more than ‘no filter.’ I know ‘no filter.’ This was cruel. Then she said I should kill myself.

DAX: JF. She sounds like me when I was her age.

KORA: Dax? A troublemaker? Impossible.

DAX: ikr. But yeah, I had really bad temper tantrums. I would say mean things. Grief hits kids differently than adults. Or maybe they’re just more honest than adults? They don’t hide their feelings under so many layers of politeness.

KORA: she’s not experiencing grief, though. I am.

DAX: with family everyone feels everyone’s shit. If mom’s in a bad mood everyone’s in a bad mood, etc.

DAX: and then there’s her dad…

KORA: she never knew her dad

DAX: never knowing is a kind of grief. And there’s the whole deal with your mom

KORA: mom chooses to keep her distance. She can see her granddaughter any time.

DAX: but she doesn’t. only ever texts Liv religious stuff. that’s hard for a kid.

KORA: sometimes I think liv NEEDS religious stuff…

DAX: dude. After all the shit you’ve been thru?

KORA: it’s complicated

DAX: no, it just sucks. It’s actually very simple but it sucks.

KORA: you don’t even know what ‘it’ is

DAX: …

DAX: don’t go back

Read 7:53pm

If Kora was going to thank God for anything, it was for her daughter being well-behaved enough to be trusted. Liv could be (and had been, more than a few times) home for a couple hours by herself. After a flurry of hectic texts in the parents’ Facebook group, Kora arranged for Liv’s friend Asha’s parents to drop her off at home.

Were Asha and Liv still friends? The text exchange with Asha’s mother, Aliya, had hit an awkward speed bump when Kora was “reminded” of Asha’s birthday coming up on Thursday. Liv had not mentioned the birthday once–very unlike her daughter. When was the last time Liv had had a proper play date? Kora tried to swallow the memories of her own nineteen years of pointedly-uncelebrated birthdays, tried to focus on the nine lovely birthdays Liv had enjoyed, and the coppery scent of blood and enzymatic wafting through Decontamination.

Holding the phone with a rubber-gloved left hand and talking through a mask and face shield, Kora told Liv over the phone that it would only be for a couple hours, and she had to promise to not go near the stove aaaand to text mommy every thirty minutes to confirm she was still alive. Please. Pretty please and thank you.

Over text Kora told Dax that she felt irresponsible.

DAX: She’s 9 dude. Not a toddler.

KORA: yeah but she was going through my old JW stuff. The pen was from a convention.

DAX: you guys have conventions? Like comic book conventions?

KORA: nevermind

DAX: they gave out pens?? Lmao

KORA: ‘they’ didn’t, some people just made them as gifts, shut up lol

DAX: you’re not irresponsible. You told her not to go near the stove right

KORA: she had to verbally pinky swear

DAX: damn. that’s legally binding.

When Kora got home Liv was reading a picture book on the couch in the living room while SpongeBob played on the TV.

Instantly Kora felt silly for worrying about the stove, the pen, whatever else. Her daughter had never given her a reason not to trust her. Her curiosity about Kora’s past was only natural. Slightly unnatural was the way Liv looked at Kora when she walked in the room; Liv’s eyes widened and twitched, and she swiftly slid the book under the cushion beside her.

“Hi, mom!”

“Liv-meister. Whatcha reading there?”

“Um…Don’t be mad.”

Why would she be mad? Kora was not like her mother, who had brought down the wrath of God on Kora for attempting to read just about anything not written by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society or Laura Ingalls Wilder. “Olivia Tuffingsbottom Kershner, my sweet summer child,” Kora, said with a fake British accent, “I just walked in on my lovely daughter reading a book. Not only do I promise I won’t be mad, I may submit myself for a mother of the year award.”

Liv did not laugh, even out of courtesy. With a sallow look she pulled the book back out from under the pillow. It was a yellow hardback with red lettering:

MY BOOK OF BIBLE STORIES

Ah.

Pulsing heat in Kora’s burns; a wave of panic. She was determined not to let it take over. Kora would keep her promise to Liv not to be mad, but went ahead and withdrew herself from any awards consideration.

“So you have been going through my old stuff,” Kora said, sidling up to Liv carefully. Kora took the book and looked at the inside cover and there was her name: Kora Kershner scrawled in her childhood self’s blocky penmanship. The child who’d written her name in that book had no idea that twenty years later she’d look back on this same signature stuck in the same un-Armageddoned world, in the same Old System, mortal and fatigued and (like her own mother) keeping secrets from her daughter. Kora was holding the same book but felt further away from Jehovah than she’d ever been.

“Whatcha think?” Kora asked as casually as she could. “Any good? Gonna read the sequel?”

Liv shrugged. “I don’t understand a lot of the stories.”

“...I didn’t either. I just liked the pictures.”

“…”

“What made you, uh…want to read it, sweetie?”

Another shrug.

“You know, this book was already super old when your grandma gave it to me, when I was a kid. I always thought the yellow cover was cool. Some of the pictures were kinda scary, though.”

“…”

Fine. Kora would force the conversation.

She took the pen out of her sweatpants pocket, which she’d sealed in a biohazard bag. Kora had done this only to keep the ink from spreading, but now she couldn’t help but feel like she was a detective holding up a piece of forensic evidence to the suspect of a crime—not the energy she typically liked to give off as a parent. It was, come to think of it, the sort of thing her own mother did to her when Kora was Liv’s age.

“I found this in my pocket today,” Kora said. “The ink got everywhere.”

Liv’s mouth began to squirm, like she was fighting off a smile.

“I’m not mad, and I know this is a silly question but…did you put it in my pocket?”

Liv just stared as a smile overtook her face.

“Wait…” Kora staggered a bit. How had she not realized? “Those were in my scrub pockets. From the locker room, at work, how did you get this in my--?”

“Splithoof.”

Kora had not expected…that, or the look on her daughter’s face.

“Uh. What?”

Liv kept grinning. “I’m not supposed to show you yet.”

“Splithoof, is that one of those cartoons from your YouTube Kids, creepypasta creepyshits? Sorry.” Kora cupped her mouth. “Sorry, swear jar, I know we’re working on cursing.”

Still smiling, Liv softly said, “You’re already cursed, mommy. You’ve always known that.”

“...What did you say?”

“Do you think Jill will get to come back from the dead? Or do cowards not get resurrected?”

“What did you just say to me young lady?”

“I said, ‘hi, mom!’”

Then Kora walked in the door again. Again, somehow, and saw her daughter reading on the couch, again. The yellow cover, again. Kora marched over in a daze.

“Hi mom!...Mom, are you? Hey!”

Kora snatched the yellow hardback book out of Liv’s hands. It was…

Curious George. (Curious George Goes to the Hospital, to be specific)

“I know, I know,” Liv said. “I’m a little old for it. But I’ve been feeling nostalgic.”

Welp.

Kora had no idea what the fuck was going on in her life and her body hurt and even if she understood what the fuck was going on she had no idea what the fuck to do about it. So she slumped down on the couch next to her daughter and laid her cheek on her head.

“Mom? You okay?”

Had Kora been dreaming? Daydreaming? She wasn’t drunk; Kora hadn’t drunk during the workday since– “Yeah….No. I don’t know.” Kora fought the urge to lie like her mother would have. “I thought you were reading a Witness book.”

“Oh…”

“...have you been going through my stuff?”

Liv’s head retreated into her shoulders. “You got a secret box in your closet, I’m only human.”

Kora was briefly relieved that she had not, at least, dreamed this particular fact, even as she quietly grew distressed at the things she had dreamt.

“It’s not a secret,” Kora said, “we just don’t have enough room on the bookshelf for all that crap.”

“If it’s not a secret, why did you always tell me not to look?”

Kora’s hand throbbed in agony. She felt sick to her stomach, and sure, a lot of that was the fact that she hadn’t had enough water, and she hadn’t eaten lunch, and she’d had to work overtime to make up for being in the emergency room for a mishap with a bitterly nostalgic pen. But some of the nausea was this conversation, the one she’d been avoiding since Liv first learned the word “why?” Eventually she said,

“I keep all that stuff packed away because I don’t like to think about that part of my life.”

“But don’t you think about it every time you see the box?”

“I don’t know, okay?” Kora snapped. “I don’t want to throw it all away, but I don’t want to think about it all the time, and I told you not to look in there, and you did.” Kora winced at herself, collapsed further into the couch. “I’m sorry,” she sighed. “I’m just tired. And I found that pen in my pocket, and I don’t know how it got there, maybe I wore scrubs into work today and forgot…buuuut…nope, I’m wearing sweatpants now, which meant I did not wear scrubs into work, so…”

Liv beamed and inched playfully toward Kora. “It’s okay, mom.” She hugged her mother around the waist. “I just wanted to play a little game. They told me you don’t have to play yet if you’re not ready.”

Kora sat there frazzled. The dream and the present were overlapping, as if the two worlds were only light sketches on tissue paper.

“They?” Liv nodded and nuzzled her head on Kora’s shoulder. “Is this...Splithoof?”

Liv tilted her head. “Who?”

“Never mind. Your mom is just losing her—who was ‘telling’ you stuff, baby? You said ‘they told me you don’t have to play yet.’”

“All the angels, mommy. Can’t you hear them?”

That did it. “Okay,” Kora said, straining to hoist herself to her knees. “We’re going to the hospital. You need your head checked, sweetie. Or maybe I do, but–”

“No!”

Liv’s voice was low and angry.

“My head is fine mom,” Liv insisted. “It’s just…grandma sent me that video from your old church.”

“Oh…”

“I didn’t like it,” Liv said. “I mean I really, really did not like it. But it did make me think, you know…maybe I should pray. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. It’s just like writing in a diary, right? Except out loud?”

“Sure…but you know, you already have a diary, sweetie, and—”

“So I started praying,” shrugged Liv. “And I think you should know that. So you don’t find out later and get mad at me.”

“I’m not—why would I—” Kora held her head, like she was trying to keep it from floating away. “Who are you praying to?”

“Well I wasn’t praying to anyone, not at first. Just whispering out to the world, to whoever’s listening.”

“So, not God?”

Liv performed a massive shrug this time. “I don’t think I believe in God.”

“But you do believe in—”

“Angels, that’s right mommy. Sometimes when I pray, the angels pray back to me. And it turns out you can pray all the time in your head. Now I can hear ‘em singing everywhere. They like to sing and play games, and they taught me a real fun game today. I just didn’t know what to call it. What was that name you said? Sort of a funny name, right? Splithoof? I sorta like the sound of that.”

***

In her bedroom closet Kora parted the hanging clothes like theater curtains and reached back, feeling with the tips of her fingers for the edge of the—there it was. She dragged the plastic tote out with her left hand. This wasn’t the first time she’d reached the “drag out the tote” part of the process, but not since closing the lid on the tote nine years ago had she worked up the nerve to open it back up.

Maybe she still hadn’t. Her body felt stiff and stuck in place, like her toes were sprouting roots and burrowing their way into the carpet. For a long time Kora had lived under the delusion that not opening the box would leave the past locked away. Now her daughter had opened it for her, and the past was coming after her anyway, leaving inky stains, causing Liv to act erratically, and ruining perfectly good make-out sessions.

The plastic lid made a snap as she opened it. A stack of books by The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, magazines, leaflets, a leather “call book” where Kora used to write the names and addresses of people she’d talked to in the ministry. From the messy heap of yellow, navy blue, dark red book covers, one stood out to her: it was bright pink. Pocket sized.

Her mother had read it to her as a child, before Kora had learned to read or pronounce the bright green words spelled out on the cover:

LEARN FROM THE GREAT TEACHER

Flipping through the pages of Learn From the Great Teacher was like watching one of those arthouse films they project onto white walls in museums; startling words and images flashed at Kora just long enough for her brain to recognize but too quickly to process the meaning. She sat on the floor of her bedroom, aimless anger and shock and bitter nostalgia damming up her tear ducts.

The words and two-tone pictures flashed at her from the flipping pages: Jehovah Jesus God God Jehovah Jehovah Jesus Christ holy spirit new system paradise earth She’ol heaven 144,000 heavenly throne abyss Jesus feet Jehovah chains God feet—she stopped on that last flash. Why the fuck was this children’s book talking about—riiiight.

Chapter 2 told the story about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, which (supplementary literature assured) was preserved by God in his Word to illustrate the depths of Christ’s kindness. To Kora there had always been something a bit nauseating about this story, especially as a child. Twelve perpetually-sweaty men in ancient times, long before the advent of deodorant and sneakers, all lined themselves up and stuck their hairy piggies out so their best bud Jeez could scrub ‘em down after a long day of hiking.

BZZZT. Kora’s cell vibrated: a response from Dax. She’d been so ensnared in her own thoughts that she’d forgotten she even texted Dax after what happened with Liv.

KORA: Hey you have a nephew and a niece right?

DAX: yep. Ready to pull Liv away from those pen-pranking hoodlums at school? Set up a playdate? (Speaking of which- don’t forget our plans with my sis this weekend :) )

KORA: do they ever say anything weird? Not ‘kids say the darndest things’ weird, like REALLY weird?

DAX: really weird in what way?

In what way? What had Liv actually done that had so upset her? Kora typed out a few words, deleted them, tried a few more, but the answer was some version of: she wants to know about Jehovah’s Witnesses.

She said she listens to angels singing, which, however oddly she said it, is not exactly a symptom requiring a head CT. She asked if my dead friend would be resurrected in paradise, which is, frankly, the exact thing I’ve been asking myself. But Liv said it very creepily, see, and I’m worried about her praying, because she says she’s not praying to God, and that means…

As Kora attempted to dodge the end of that sentence, she looked back to the book and saw something that made her smile: atop the ink-and-watercolor picture of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, Kid Kora had drawn wavy stink-lines and flies with a ballpoint pen. A simpler time, when Kora’s biggest problems were being bored at church and being unaware of the concept of blasphemy.

I was never going to last, she thought to herself. Kora’s mother had spanked her in the Kingdom Hall lady’s room when she found Kora’s ‘additions’ to the illustration of foot-fetish Jesus. “Jehovah’s people draw those pictures for us!” Mom had scolded her. “When you deface Jehovah’s art like that you may as well be spraying graffiti all over Bethel.”

Then Kora thought of Liv, then baby Liv: baths in the kitchen sink because she was just that small; washing and wiggling her baby’s impossibly adorable toes. The dam began to crack.

Kora turned back to the beginning of the pink book:

“I know something wonderful,” chapter two began. “Would you like to hear it?—”

It ended there, with a long dash after the question mark. Kora had forgotten about this particular quirk of The Great Teacher book. The book had been designed to be read aloud by a Witness parent to their child, like a bedtime story, and the many dashes streaking the pages were “stop signs” for the grown-ups to pause and get a response from their little JW-in-training. Kora had learned the hard way there were right answers and wrong answers. (The right answer in this case was easy: “yes, I would like to hear something wonderful, oh Parental Guardian of mine.”)

Next, the book explained the allegedly wonderful thing:

“Look at your hand. Bend your fingers. Now pick something up. Your hand can do many things, and it can do them well. Do you know who made the hand?—It was God.”

Yep, you nailed it, God, Kora thought, eyeing her bandages. Maybe consider making hands fireproof, though, if you get on another creation kick and decide to make some improvements. Also, this might be a good chapter to skip if your kid is an amputee.

Her phone buzzed: Dax. “What’s going on?”

Kora did not answer. She did not know the answer, not to Dax’s question nor the one on the page, but whatever it was required a more complicated response than “yes, I would like to hear something wonderful.”

At the time she couldn’t admit it to herself, but Kora was looking for something in that little pink book: a word. After she found it, she’d wish she hadn’t kept reading, and after she’d read it, she’d wish she could forget. And long after the point where they were stuck in her head—the words and pictures and voices—when things had gone too far, Kora would wonder if things might have turned out differently if she’d just thrown out this stupid book and the box in which she’d packed it away so long ago.

So far, though, Kora hadn’t found the word: just stuff about Jesus washing feet and how wonderful hands are, if you happen to have hands and they happen to function.

Flip, flip, flip. She found an ink illustration of Adam and Eve, their bodies naked but strategically covered by foregrounded tree branches. In a way, Jehovah’s Witnesses’ entire religion, she realized, was based around what happened with those two nudist rubes. To Kora’s surprise she discovered she still knew the whole story and its theological connotations by heart despite having been disfellowshipped a decade ago. It was like hearing a song on the radio you haven’t thought about in years and realizing you somehow still know all the words.

Which is to say Kora did not so much read the words on the page so much as she did recite them:

“At first Adam and Eve did obey God,” the book said. “But then a serpent or a snake spoke to Eve one day. Of course, a serpent cannot speak all by itself. It was an angel that made it seem as if the serpent was speaking. That angel had begun to think bad things. He wanted Adam and Eve to worship him. He wanted them to do the things that he said. He wanted to take God’s place.”

Sometimes the pictures in Witness books showed Satan as a giant, looming maniacally above the earth. Invariably Satan was depicted as an old white man with a fluffy white beard, because all angels were depicted as old white men with fluffy white beards, but Satan T. Devil had a custom set of darker robes and eyes. In such depictions, Giant Satan’s bony fingers dangled marionette strings to the world below, puppeteering priests and politicians and violent criminals and, worst of all, apostates who hated Jehovah’s Witnesses. Yet Kora was not any of those things—not only did she not hate Jehovah’s Witnesses, most of the people she’d ever loved and laughed with were Jehovah’s Witnesses! Now, she was mourning one. Kora even loved her mother, even though she didn’t like her mother, even though her mother had assured her the feeling was mutual.

It struck Kora then: just minutes ago in a fit of anger she had hurled a book about God across the room in front of her own daughter. Kora had yelled at a little girl, discouraged her from reading an innocent book she was enjoying and stormed away. Was that the sort of mother Kora was on track to becoming—a mom you can only love but never like?

She read on:

“Eve had no right to believe what the serpent said. Everything she had was from God. But now she began to want something that God had not given her. She ate from the tree. Then she gave some to Adam…”

Okay, but why make a tree that nobody can eat from in the first place? a part of Kora wondered—the part of Kora that had graffiti’d stink lines on the disciples’ feet and kissed girls from the Hall and much later, fucked a variety of strangers of various genders, including the man who was, technically, Olivia’s father.

Another part of Kora responded, the tree of knowledge was a test. It was a simple test: do anything you want, you two lovebirds, except this one little thing.

Not unlike how Kora wanted Liv to do whatever she wanted, except one little thing: don’t go through mommy’s personal stuff.

You have a secret box in your closet, Liv had said. I’m only human.

Maybe that was the start of the trouble: Kora had only raised Liv human. Jehovah’s Witnesses raised their children to be more than human, better than and different from other, lesser humans who give into their fleshly desires to kill and maim and rape and steal and have casual sex with people God specifically told them not to have casual sex with.

One voice in Kora’s head asked: So would you condemn your daughter and every future daughter for the next gajillion years to death? It was just a fucking piece of fruit. Would you take away Liv’s immortality just because she ate the wrong goddamn banana?

The other voice said: Children never learn unless you set boundaries and rules; you must explain the consequences, and then if the child breaks the rules, you as the parent enforce those consequences. It’s basic parenting.

The voices in her head could not come to a consensus:

But good parents don’t kill their children.

By breaking the rules, Adam and Eve killed themselves.

Jill killed herself. Hillary killed herself. Had they broken the rules?

Jill, Kora could attest, had certainly broken one or two.

I didn’t really know Hillary.

But Hillary knew Jehovah; and she killed herself anyway.

That doesn’t mean they deserved to die.

The Witnesses taught you this, Kora: our very existence is an undeserved gift. Sin makes all of us worthy of death. Everyone deserves to die.

Not Liv.

Of course, Liv. What makes her any different?

She’s my daughter.

You were your mother’s daughter. Don’t you deserve to die?

To settle the argument Kora figured she’d best read the rest of the chapter:

“What was the result? — God had not lied. Life does depend on obedience to him. So Adam and Eve died. And they brought death to all mankind.”

Ain’t that just the whole history of shitty parents? a voice said. They fuck up their own lives and then bring kids into it to pass on the misery.

I’m not a shitty parent.

Then why do you hate yourself?

I’m not miserable.

Why do you hurt yourself?

Liv isn’t miserable.

Because she’s too young. But she’s learning. Liv is the best thing about your life and you are without question the worst thing about hers.

Tears blurred Kora’s vision; screams under her skin. The book, for all the pain it caused, was forcing her to untangle thirty years of knots she’d tied up in her head. For the first time in 24 hours, Kora wasn’t distracted by the pain in her palm. And it was then that she found the word: the one she’d been looking for but not really wanting to find, yet knowing full well she’d find it anyway:

Satan.

“The Bible tells us that the angel that lied to Eve is called Satan the Devil. He is the enemy of God. And he is our enemy too. He wants to make everyone disobey Jehovah. So he tries to put bad ideas into our minds. He says that nobody really loves Jehovah. He says that you and I don’t love God and that we don’t really want to do what God says. But is he right? Are we like that?—

You don’t love Jehovah.

Maybe I do. Maybe I just don’t like him.

She kept reading:

“The Devil says that we will quit serving Jehovah if someone makes it a little hard for us. He says that we obey Jehovah only when everything goes the way we like it. He says that everyone is like that. Is he right?—”

***

Knock knock knock…knock…

“Can I come in?”

Kora pushed Liv’s bedroom door open slowly. Liv was on her bed, facing away, writing in her Rey from Star Wars-brand diary. The sight both alleviated and depressed Kora. Alleviated because writing about one’s problems was mature and healthy–Liv did not throw temper tantrums. Never had, even as a toddler. She had always been quiet, introspective. Depressed because when Kora hadn’t been looking, Liv had somehow shot up to the age where kids resent their parents and keep secrets.

Whatever Liv was writing, it was probably not something like ‘dear diary, my mother had a very normal reaction to seeing me read an old book today, and I’m not at all concerned.’

Kora sat on the bed next to her daughter, who closed the diary and slid it under the pillow, just as she had with the Bible Story book an hour earlier.

“Sorry I went through your stuff,” said Liv, head hanging.

“It’s okay,” said Kora. “I’m sorry I have a weird box of secret stuff in the closet. That’s like crack to a nine-year-old.”

“What’s crack?”

“Oh…it’s, well,—”

“I’m kidding. I’ve seen movies, mom.”

Kora smiled, but only briefly. Her daughters’ earlier words and actions had been so…cruel. “You said some very, very mean things about my friend, Olivia.”

Liv’s head sank. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

“People who hurt themselves are not cowards, okay? They just need help.”

Liv stared blankly ahead. “But your friends didn’t hurt themselves. They killed themselves.”

“They needed help,” Kora said again. “They just didn’t get it in time.”

“You’d never kill yourself, would you mom?”

Kora ignored the screams beneath her skin. “Of course not, sweetie.”

“Even if someone told you to?”

“…What? No, why would—?”

“Even if I told you to? Even if I really wanted you to, you wouldn’t do it? If I told you over and over again, kill yourself mommy, kill yourself mommy!”

The screams grew louder. Kora’s chest burned. “What has gotten into you, Liv?”

And then, strangely, Liv gave her mother a hug. She nestled her head on Kora’s breasts and said in a sweet voice, “Just the voices of the angels. They taught me a song, a sort of prayer. Here, I’ll tell you the words. The prayer goes: please help mommy kill herself, please help mommy kill herself!” Liv started cackling, fell on her back and held her stomach, she was laughing so breathlessly. “Please-help-mom-my-kill-herself!” she clapped once after each syllable, like it was a chant. “Please-help-mom-my-kill-herself!”

Kora shot up from the couch and headed to her room, muttering to herself: why is this happening, why is this happening?

Liv called after her, still screaming with laughter. “Because you fucking left.”

“Jesus fuck!” said Dax, nearly spitting out their Diet Coke. They hadn’t quite yelled, but the hospital cafeteria was small enough that it turned a few heads. Dax pulled Kora’s hand closer and studied her charred right palm and fingers. “What did you do, grab the sun’s dick?”

“I told you,” Kora said. “Enchi-fucking-ladas.”

“And Liv’s hands were--?”

“Fine,” Kora shrugged. “Totally fine.”

Dax shook their head. “That makes no fucking sense, dude.”

“Trust me, I checked like twelve times. Got up a couple times during the night, too; checked ‘em while Liv was sleeping in case, I don’t know…in case it takes awhile for burns to set in?”

Dax pointed their half-eaten ham sandwich at Kora. “A slow burn?”

“Ha. But no, because apparently that’s not how burns work.” The matter of “how burns work” would not leave Kora’s head. How could it be that her right palm looked like a slab of barbecue ribs while her daughter’s hands were perfectly fine? Kora speculated aloud:

“Maybe the oven’s busted–like, half of it? So only half the pan cooked?”

Dax chewed, nodded. “Everything in your apartment sucks, so the theory adds up.”

Kora hoped it added up. Math wasn’t her strong suit, and she’d passed her dearth of abilities on to her daughter. Increasingly, Kora worried about what else she had passed on…

“And your frickin’ mom,” Dax added, shaking their head in disbelief. “And your high school buddy died? That’s a world-class shitty day, K.”

“About that,” Kora started. She needed to tell the other half of that half-truth she’d told Dax last night over text. “It was more than just a high school buddy. Like, we did go to the same high school. And middle school. But we also went to the same…you know.”

Dax’s sandwich nearly fell out of their hand. “Ohhh.”

Kora pushed her leftover enchilada-mush away from her. No appetite.

“Yeah,” Kora said. “It was…yeah. Unexpected.”

Immediately Kora knew the word that had thrown Dax off, and it wasn’t “died.”

“You mean a friend from…?”

“Right. Back in the day.”

More than anyone, Dax knew about “back in the day.” Not because they’d been a Witness, but because Dax was the only person Kora had told about “back in the day” other than Liv’s father (and Dax knew better than to ask about him). She hadn’t even told Dax all of it, hadn’t necessarily intended to share any of it to begin with, but Dax was easy to talk to, easier still on the eyes, eager to listen, and in their presence Kora found herself word-vomiting.

A look came over Dax’s face. “Not Jill…”

A different look came over Kora’s face. “How did--?”

“Dude. Your first crush! You told me at the—”

“Yeah, no, I know, I just…” Through the malaise of grief and exhaustion Kora managed a grin. “I didn’t think you’d remember her name.”

“Is this your way of telling me you forgot my first crush’s n—?”

“Stanley.”

Dax flashed a god damn it look. “Ugh. I loved that little dweeb.”

“Flat Stanley.”

“The Manley,” Dax added. “Flat Stanley The Manley was the envy of Hayes Elementary, I’ll have you know.”

“And now you’re the enby of Hayes Methodist,” Kora said.

“Damn straight.”

Dax slugged the rest of their Diet Coke, idly checked their sandy brown hair in the selfie cam of their Samsung Galaxy. Controversial upon its initial reveal, Kora had grown to adore her best friend’s textured, curly mullet with soft layers. Kora slid out her phone, attempted to disguise the selfie-check by pretending she was reading a text message. Kora realized she could not remember the last time she had lingered on her own reflection for any length of time. Her skin was paler, frecklier, tired-er than Dax’s. Dax experimented with a new hair style every three or four months; Kora had kept her light orange hair in the same straight, nondistinctive shoulder-length cut since high school, hadn’t been to the salon in seven months and had an increasingly dire split-end situation. Those dark circles under her eyes weren’t getting any lighter, either.

Noting Kora’s sour reaction to her own reflection, Dax took Kora’s right hand again, studied it, unbothered by the ugliness of the wound. “You don’t meet a lot of Stanlies these days,” they said. “All these cowardly Stans. Embrace your full self, I say: Stanley.”

“Mhm,” Kora said. She watched Dax’s silky hand run gently over her burnt one. “You know, you should become a grief counselor. I’m totally over my friend’s suicide now.”

“Fuck. Suicide? That fucking sucks, Kora.” Their eyes found Kora’s and lingered. “For the record, I just draw blood, man. You...like, legitimately you should see a grief counselor.”

Kora broke eye contact. Dax’s silver-green eyes were annoyingly pretty, like a melody that gets stuck in your head and it’s so catchy that you keep it there.

“Therapy’s not for me,” said Kora.

“Yeah, I can’t afford it either,” said Dax. “You put some Alocane on them digits?”

“Cortisone,” said Kora. “All I had. I didn’t have time to go to the pharmacy.”

“Lucky for you,” Dax said, drawing Kora’s eyes back to theirs. “We have one on the third floor.”

***

The outpatient lab was on level three along with the pharmacy, so Dax’s badge opened most of the doors. In the supply room the two sat crisscross on the floor between rows of plastic bins on metal shelves as Dax stacked the relevant supplies in their lap.

“I like coming in here,” Dax said, taking a roll of gauze from the wound-care shelf, “I think it’s a thin place.”

Kora looked around absently. “It’s not that small.”

“Dude. Not literally ‘thin.’ It’s a spiritual thing.” They gently unraveled Kora’s bandages; her palms were swollen and currant and the air on her skin made the pain pulse. Dax leaned over and pulled a tube of ointment out of a plastic bin. “Thin places are this Celtic spiritual idea that there are certain spots on earth where the barrier between the spirit world and our world is so thin you can just sort of…slip between them. Oh, uh. You’re gonna have to—”

“Right.” Kora slid her scrub-jacket sleeve back as Dax scraped some dried blood off her forearm with an alcohol pad.

“Are those anything like liminal spaces? Because YouTube keeps telling me to click on ‘liminal’ shit and I have thus far refused.”

“Sort of similar, but thin places are more ancient and mystic and…I don’t know. Irish. Now stop squirming.”

Dax poked the back end of a cotton-tip applicator out of its wrapper, plucked it out, and used the soft tip to dab the gel on Kora’s palm; with each gentle streak, the pain rippled along the jagged scars.

“Usually,” Dax said, “when the Celtics talk about thin places—or, okay, when this dude on shrooms I met at a Hop Along concert last year was telling me about them—they mean spaces in nature. Forests, fields, earthy shit. But there’s indoor thin places, too. I checked. So when I walk into a room and I get that feeling that something’s a little bit off, but not bad off? I think to myself: that’s a thin place. That’s why I like this closet. It’s like I can feel the other side: the spirits, the past...”

“Dax. No offense—shit that stings—it’s just, today of all days? I’m a little maxed out on feeling the past.”

“Not your past—everyone else’s. S’just my theory, but I think in a thin place…it’s like a little piece of everyone who’s ever walked through gets left behind for us to find.”

Now Dax reapplied fresh bandages, slowly winding the cloth around Kora’s trembling hand, one circular motion at a time. More pain.

Kora sucked in air through gritted teeth. “Wouldn’t slipping into the spirit world be terrifying?”

“You tell me, Kora,” Dax said, looking into Kora’s eyes. “Are you terrified right now?”

Kora felt her face flushing. “In this closet? No.”

“Exactly. But there’s an energy, right?”

Kora’s eyes briefly darted away then wandered back to Dax. “Mhm.”

“Sorta sad and happy,” Dax said, “and distant and close?”

Kora said whisper that turned into a kiss: “Sorta.”

This was how most of their conversations ended, and since meeting two years ago at HealthOhio orientation the two had had a lot of conversations. Early on in the friendship make-outs had replaced goodbyes, and making sense of what the make-outs meant felt precarious. Thin, maybe.

A warm and dreamy moment outside of time—but then, like a flash bulb in the dark came a memory of Jill, a pang of guilt and an eye of judgment which became an instinct: Kora pulled away.

“Everything okay?” Dax asked.

“Yeah,” Kora lied, “I just gotta get back to—shit!”

“You gotta get back to take a shit?” Then Dax felt it: the moisture. Dax touched their cheeks, their temples. “What the fuck!”

Smeared along Dax’s face were black inky stains.

Trembling, Kora looked at her hands—her fingertips looked dirty and soiled, and oily sludge trickled out from under the nailbeds.

“Okay fuck it, K,” said Dax, “you’re going to the fucking Emergency Room.”

***

There must have been a day in school, Kora often suspected, where other children were taught how to be normal. How to smile with your teeth, make small talk, form friendships: these were all things everyone else had learned at the “how to be a human” class Kora had missed.

It was a suspicion she had reiterated so often in her mind that it had, at some point, become knowledge. She knew, just knew, she was wrong for this world, wrong for others.

Cursed.

When she was nine and a half (inspired/incepted by reruns of Scooby Doo she’d sneakily watched, as they aired the old cartoons early in the morning before her mom woke up for work) Kora became obsessed with the circumstances of her birth, asking her mother questions like “was I conceived on Friday the thirteenth?” or “did you give birth to me under a ladder?” or “is there any chance a black cat slipped into the nursery?” Superstitions aren’t real, her mother would tell her, those are lies from the Devil to make you afraid.

“But I’m afraid of the Devil too,” Kora said.

Kora said this only once, for her mother’s answer disturbed her:

“Well, you should be. The devil is a hungry lion seeking to devour us for serving the true God, Jehovah. Don’t worry about a silly thing like a black cat or opening umbrellas indoors.”

This was the first time Kora had heard the thing about bad luck stemming from indoor umbrellas, so she’d avoided doing this too ever since.

Mom didn’t even have to ban Scooby Doo for Kora. Watching it scared her after that.

All this, of course, was back when her mother spoke to her about anything other than arranging babysitting for Liv. All this was back before Kora was disfellowshipped, shunned.

Kora had moved past superstitions, past fears of the Devil, past “The Truth,” and all that was left was the truer truth, the truth she’d always known, the truth she’d never doubted: she was cursed. Not cursed in some superstitious sense, mind you, no confluence of bad luck had made her this way, nor God, nor magic (and Kora was no longer certain that there was a difference between believing in God and believing in magic). No, Kora was cursed arbitrarily, unintentionally, irrationally from the cosmos itself. From the chaos of an infinite and expanding universe, it just so happened, for no reason at all, that Kora was wrong for this world.

“Enchiladas?” the doctor was asking. The one benefit of being a hospital employee is Kora got through the majority of the E.R. rigamarole in only three hours instead of seven.

“It was more the uh, pan,” Kora said.

Dr. Costin stood at the end of her bed. “Well, keep doing what you’re doing for the burns—over the counter stuff should be okay but I’ll send you’s a script for something stronger, just in case. The pan gotcha pretty good, but it’s second degree—low end.”

“Low end?” Kora had only ever heard of first, second, and third degree burns. “There are degrees of degrees?”

Dr. Costin smiled. “There are little nuances to everything. Even enchilada burns.”

“Pan.”

“And your daughter is…?”

“Fine. So, about the fingernails--?”

“Ah. Generally this sort of blackening and discharge is associated with a fungal infection, and I was about to ask you all sorts of questions about the standards and practices of our central services department, but upon closer inspection…”

The doctor smirked and pointed his pen at Kora’s waist pocket in her scrubs—black splotches everywhere.

Kora scolded herself: fucking idiot. Pinching her fingers she pulled a broken pen out of her pocket. Damn thing probably got smushed when she was pressed against the sink in decontam. Or pressed against Dax’s body in the supply closet…right? Had to be.

“Happens to me all the time,” said Dr. Costin with a laugh. “I once went through three white coats in a year.”

Kora instinctively went to smear her face in embarrassment but then remembered the ink on her hands. “I am so sorry.”

“Not your fault. They don’t make pens like they used to.”

“No, I mean–it was weird, the ink was like…” Kora’s medical terminology failed her, “goopy.”

“Goopy ink, another problem with the modern pen. Sorry, unique fixation. Always say I got into the wrong business.”

“Well. I’m glad you’re a doctor. My friend sucks at wound care. And I’m even worse. Also I suck at knowing when my pen is leaking, apparently.”

“Well, my old man was a doctor,” Dr. Costin said. “Med school was like joining the family business.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Your parents worked in sterile processing?”

Kora gave a dismissive head shake. “Never mind.”

Kora texted her manager, Shane, that she was done in the ER, and Shane said she’d have to work the three hours she’d missed. On her way out the door Kora grabbed a tissue from the counter and used it to take out the inky pen from her pocket. She hesitated before dropping it in the trash; there was some print on the pen, the name of a bank or corporation. Wiping off some goop with her tissue-wrapped thumb, she saw the words:

Deliverance at Hand!

2006 District Convention of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Kora hadn’t seen this pen in ten years.

Ninety minutes after takeoff the plane landed at Cleveland Hopkins International, and Ben texted Brother Wilder per instruction. He picked up his bag from the carousel and met the couple with whom the Branch had assigned Ben to stay: Sheridan and Connie Dahne. With their elegantly wrinkled smiles and perfectly pressed business outfits the two stood out from the crowd of OSU jerseys, blue jeans, and sweatpants.

“Hi,” Ben said, walking up to them, “Are you—?”

“Eyyy, bring ‘er in!” said Sheridan. He took Ben’s hand and pulled him in for a good ol’ Christian Side Hug. Sheridan was a wiry man but he side-hugged like a bear.

“He’s a hugger,” said Connie. “And I really hope you’re Benjamin Dun-Something because otherwise this is about to be very awkward.”

Ben laughed and politely stepped out of hug-range.

“Ben Duncolm,” Ben said, “like done-comb your hair.”

Sheridan raised his bushy eyebrow above his wire-frame glasses. “Done-comb my hair? Is that an expression?”

Connie turned to Ben. “Sherry’s just sensitive because he hasn’t had hair to comb in thirty years.”

“See what I deal with? This is the sort of persecution Elisha had to endure.”

Ben smiled. “Does that mean we’re about to get attacked by bears?”

“Oh, I like him,” said Connie. “He’ll get along here just fine.”

“Come on, then, Benny boy,” said Sheridan, jerking his head toward the exit gate. “Won’t see no bears but if you like cows and sows you’re in for a ride.”

Ben immediately liked Sheridan and Connie Dahne. Friendly, hospitable, a sense of humor—these were Christian ideals often lost on the pious. There was a difference between righteous and self-righteous folks and if you asked Ben, Bethel tended to self-select for the latter.

The three loaded into the Dahnes’ grayish green minivan (“the ministry-mobile,” Sheridan called it) and after a few turns the hazy mirage of downtown Cleveland behind them faded. The freeway turned into a two-lane road along an endless plane; as far as Ben could see in any direction there was nothing but yellowed grass and cornstalks. Occasionally they’d pass some rotting farmhouse, sagging slightly forward like Ben’s dad with his bad back. When Ben was in wide open spaces like this, on long drives when he could see just how much of the world wasn’t filled up with humans and concrete and steel, he imagined the coming paradise earth: humans never quite did fulfill Adam and Eve’s command to fill it. There would be plenty of space for those resurrected from the dead.

“—used to be nothin’ but horizon but now it’s all built-up,” Sheridan was saying. “Out here’s the last bit of Jehovah’s creation ‘hasn’t been bought out by Wal-Mart.” Ben had been distracted by the cumulative strangeness of the past 48 hours and only heard bits and pieces of Sheridan’s tour/monologue.

“What about you, Brother Duncolm?” Connie asked. “How long you been a Bethelite?”

“Coming on six years now,” said Ben.

Sheridan whistled. “So they haven’t kicked you out yet?”

“If you can believe it.”

“I’m sure you get this all the time,” asked Connie, “but once you said the name, I realized…any relation to Governing Body Dun-Comb Your Hair?” asked Connie.

Ben had been suppressing a sigh since I’m sure you get this all the—.

“That’d be my dad.”

“Well, shoot!” Sheridan turned to Connie. “You shoulda said something! You know I can’t remember all them brothers’ names. I’d’ve been on my best behavior.”

Connie eyed Ben in the rearview. “This is his best behavior, sadly.”

“Prolly why ol’ Noe ran off,” Sheridan exhaled jokingly. “My deplorable behavior.”

Connie punched Sheridan’s arm. “Hush.”

“Was that insensitive?”

“’Course it was! Jehovah above, we got a son of one of Christ’s brothers here in the back seat and you’re making jokes about a man who might be dead.”

“Does that make Ben one of Christ’s nephews?”

“We have a rule,” Connie said to Ben, “that it ain’t a curse word if it’s in the Bible. Which is why I feel no guilt in calling this man an ass.”

Ben reassured them he hadn’t been offended and that most Bethelites had stumbled upon a similar rule. It was all very jovial until Ben’s phone buzzed with a text from Brother Wilder.

COBE informed of elders 2nite at@ 7:30pm so the De-48 form can b completed by all in attendance. Ty brother wilder

Tom Wilder was like most of the old guard: quick to correct a brother’s grammar during a Sunday talk, but texts like a bad impression of a middle schooler.

In addition to reminding Ben of the looming unpleasantness of (all elders meetings but especially) tonight’s elders meeting, Tom’s text also reminded Ben that he was here for an assignment: an investigation.

“So he stayed with you before he disappeared?” Ben asked. “Brother Ortega, I mean.”

Sheridan made a left down a dirt road. “Well, he didn’t stay with us,” he said. “He left us, that’s the whole trouble.”

“Oh, hush,” Connie said. She turned her body as best she could to look at Ben eye to eye. “Brother Ortega did stay with us, in our little guestroom you’ll be bunking in. It’s a good thing we’re all Jehovah’s people otherwise you might worry the room is cursed.” Nobody laughed. “He’s a very nice young man, Noe. Early forties? A little quiet. Hard to read. ‘Course we never saw him all that much, with how busy you C.O.’s are, but we had him ‘round the firepit and he was as nice as anyone. And then you got the fact that hubby and I are very loud and easier to read than the Bible Story Book.”

“That,” said Sheridan, “and she ain’t the best judge of character.”

“Case in point. So…nobody’s found him yet?”

“No,” Ben said. “Still missing.”

Bits of life interrupted the farmland and after a few miles the van was passing through what apparently counted for civilization way out here in the boonies.

They came up on a little township, two rows of short brick shops. A sign on a lamppost said WELCOME TO LARCHWOOD. Frosted onto the windows of storefronts: BOOKSHOP. BREAKFAST. PSYCHIC. This, Ben thought, is what cowboys in movies were referring to when they talked about a “two horse town”; the whole strip was no bigger than a four-way intersection back home in Brooklyn. Though, now that Ben thought about it, Brooklyn would not be his home by the time he got back from this assignment. He’d be in Warwick…

Ben was a gifted repressive; he could put off reckoning with a thing until it was staring him straight in the eye. As this hardly felt like a god-given talent, Ben assumed his suppression skills must be a result of some evolutionary survival instinct. And oh yes, Ben believed in evolution, he’d have you know. Prayer and personal study had led Ben to many conclusions which did not align perfectly with the Organization’s theology–the current “teachings.” These were easy enough to suppress given his evolutionary advantage, not to mention dissent in a congregation can create “divisions and causes for stumbling” (Rom. 16:17)

Ben was no apostate. He knew he had the Truth. He knew he had a Heavenly Father, with whom he was closer than his fleshly father; a Father whose love was more enveloping, whose forgiveness was more complete. Ben had personally felt Jehovah’s love, personally felt the forgiveness made possible by His son Jesus’ sacrifice, personally felt the benefits of living in imitation of Christ.

What Ben had not felt for the preceding 26 years of life was the devil.

He struggled with the reality of Satan, the tangible, supernatural malice that demonism implies. Lord knows the Organization had painted myriad pictures of the power of demons–literal paintings, Lord knows, which lined the 7th floor of the Brooklyn Bethel complex. The devil was at once a serpent, a dragon, a pair of disembodied hands puppeteering Christendom and the United Nations like marionette dolls, a roaring ghost-lion looking up to the heavens and taunting God because a weak-willed JW man had succumbed to watching internet pornography, glowering face peering through a dark green mist, skeleton hands working voodoo on a fortune teller or psychic.

And anyhow, that’s what was going through Ben’s head when he saw the sign that PSYCHIC, those frosted glass letters above a neon, glowing eye.

Ben had felt the eye of God’s judgment, and the arms of his forgiveness, but he had never felt any body parts associated with the devil. It was tempting, in Ben’s bespoke and “nuanced” theology, to view the devil as a symbolic figure. A parable or allegory, like the story of Noah’s flood, or Adam and Eve. Ben, being a nuanced Bible Understander, could appreciate how a story could be figuratively true and eternally important but not literal history. Ben was not like these Worldly Christians who never read their Bibles, nor was he like those literalists who were so quick to throw away science and poetry in one careless toss. Jehovah God is real. The devil, Satan, may be more like a literary device.

Yet Ben did not feel a literary device as the Dahne’s ministry-mobile rumbled past the Larchwood threshold. He felt an itchy discomfort in a prickly wave along his sweaty skin as the van rolled into suburbia, a feeling like he’d walked through an unseen cobweb.

The van turned left at a street called Straight, which Ben clocked, but even if he hadn’t, there was Sheridan:

“Can you believe it? A street called Straight.”

Ben gave the requisite chuckle. Sheridan had doubtless said this ten-thousand times. It was his “done-comb your hair.” In Acts chapter nine, Jesus appears to a disciple named Ananias, and says, “Get up, go the street called Straight,” and sends Ananias to go looking for a man named Saul, who will later become Paul–widely regarded as one of the main characters of the New Testament.

“A street called Straight,” Ben repeated.

“I don’t know if you believe in signs,” said Connie, “but we always say it’s either a good one or a bad one. Ha!”

Sandwiched between two other places just like it was the Dahne residence: a ranch-style place with faded white paneling and one drooping tree in the front yard. Here was a little neighborhood where all the houses were old and needed a fresh coat of paint; they’d been built quickly and tiny and close together, like teeth in a rotten mouth.

Halloween decorations marked the homes owned by the Worldly–cobwebs and Jack-o-lanterns and a stuffed witch pinned to a tree. (Ben marveled at this last one: You could only see the backside of the witch, and her arms were outstretched, making it appear to unsuspecting passers-by that a real, broom-flying-ass witch had crashed into the trunk.)

“Three days now, right?” Sheridan said, pulling up the driveway.

“Four now,” said Ben.

“Welp,” he said, and even after he turned off the car it was, for a few seconds, the only thing he said. Welp. Just one word that wasn’t a word but was also somehow a whole sentence. “We got prayer and the resurrection,” Sheridan said. “Either way Jehovah’s got Noe covered.”

For the first time in two hours, Connie didn’t argue with him.

*

The first place they showed Ben on the tour was the liquor cabinet. A Woodford, a Dewars, some cheap tequila and vodka Ben didn’t recognize. They told him to help himself, and he told them he would. The Dahne place was cozy and firmly 1970’s which was, in spite of being born in 1993, to Ben’s exact liking. He found there to be something comforting about a place that managed to stay exactly the way it had always been for a very long time. If a home can stick around for a good while in this wicked old world, that means it’s supposed to be here, and when you go inside you feel it because home is a place you’re supposed to be.

The Dahnes gave him the tour, which was no more eventful than any house tour ever is. They had lots of pictures and hanging décor, and the fridge in the small kitchen was dotted with scripture-magnets and a child’s crayon drawing and graduation photos of their “spiritual grandchildren” from the congregation. Down a hall between closets there was a door that led downward.

“Long set of steps there,” Sheridan said, pointing down the long set of steps there. “Ain’t complicated but it’s a nice little setup. Got yourself a bathroom, shower, little living room there with a Roku stick for Netflix.”

“Annnd JW Broadcasting,” Connie said.

“And my grandson’s old Playstation but I do not know which number and I do not know how it works. I have been assured it plays DVD and Blu Ray.”

“All we got’s a couple Pixar movies and Casablanca, but heck, you can watch ‘em. I did venture down there earlier today to sweep up, but you Bethel brothers pack light, so there wasn’t much. I just set aside his clothes in ca—for when Noe comes back.”

“And,” Sheridan said, growing pointedly solemn in his demeanor, “we will stay out of your way. We know you got serious business, and we’re surely blessed to have you. That’s our gift to Jehovah—he gave us this place, so we give it right back. And we will not be offended if you keep to yourself.”

The shift in tone took Ben aback, only because Sheridan hadn’t shifted his tone once in the past few hours. But it was, in Ben’s experience, the sort of thing Witness couples tended to say to him at the end of house tours. This wasn’t the first time he’d been assigned to stay with strangers, and it wasn’t the first time the Dahnes’ had had a stranger sleep in their basement.

“I appreciate it,” Ben said. Then he added, “But I will be offended if you make me drink alone.”

Connie nudged Sheridan. “I told you he’d fit in.”

“Only condition is you gotta come up to our level,” Sheridan said. “Doc’ says me and the missus need to treat our knees like they’re the only ones we got. We tried to tell him about the New System but he wrote us prescriptions anyway.”

Ben said, “Deal.”

“We built this place years ago,” Connie said, “before age set in. But we ain’t dead yet. Don’t let the old man get you with his sob-stories, we can come down there if you need something.”

“I’m just saying,” Sheridan shrugged, “we got enough dead people in this congregation for one week.”

Ben Duncolm zipped up and watched his cum swirl down the airplane bathroom toilet. As he washed his hands, he begged Jehovah for forgiveness and tried not to look at the ridiculous sight of himself in the mirror: a twenty-five-year-old man with pomade shining his short curly hair, a navy blue suit and yellow silk tie, masturbating 50,000 feet up in the air. It was the stress, he told God. Grant me self-control, Jehovah.

That was the matter troubling Ben more than the act itself: self-control. God’s word had a lot to say about self-control, not so much to say about masturbation, and the truth was Ben did not agree with the Governing Body’s stance on the latter. If Jehovah had a problem with it, why did every spirit-appointed man Ben had ever met in the organization admit (after a few drinks) that they, to use Darrin’s phrase, “jerked it on the regs”? Why, if Jehovah had a problem with it, did Ben keep getting privileges and assignments reserved for men in good standing?

He settled back into his aisle seat in coach and tried not to look at the beautiful, dark-haired woman in a tight Invader Zim t-shirt and tighter black jeans sitting next to him. Somehow, she’d know just by looking at him that he hadn’t gone to the bathroom for numbers one or two. And she might not be as forgiving as God.

So, Ben buried his nose back in the binder he’d been given by headquarters just yesterday afternoon. The whole sequence of events felt like one of those dreams you keep trying to wake up from but just can’t. Those are the worst kinds of nightmares, Ben thought. This was before the visions started, before the seance, before he’d seen the devil with his own two eyes. This was before Ben Duncolm knew what the worst kinds of nightmares really were.

He turned to the green tab of the three-ring binder, which contained, he’s been told, everything the organization had ever written on demons in chronological order. Earliest reference was from the organization’s earliest member, Charles Taze Russell:

These fallen angels, “demons,” have probably very little to interest them amongst themselves;— evil beings apparently always prefer to make game of the purer, and apparently take pleasure in corrupting and degrading them. The history of these demons, as given in the Scriptures, would seem to show that the evil concupiscence which led to their fall, before the flood, still continues with them. They still have their principal pleasure in that which is lascivious and degrading; and the general tendency of their influence upon mankind is toward working mischief against the well-disposed, and the debauchery of those over whom they gain absolute control.”

Ben would have to look up the word concupiscence when he got somewhere with Wi-Fi, but the rest of it was remarkably similar to what the modern Governing Body wrote and talked about with respect to demons. What Ben Duncolm needed to know was, how do demons gain absolute control? What does that look like, as opposed to a chemical/mental imbalance? And if an Appointed Man can determine that a person is demonized…what the hell do you do about it?

There. He’d sufficiently freaked himself out and the slight turbulence was making him queasy. Plus he’d just masturbated, and the only thing on his stomach was a Little Debbie oatmeal cookie from the Bethel commissary three hours ago.

His eyes slipped past the text on the page and got stuck on a memory: Darrin. Ben tried to tell himself the conversation with Darrin yesterday went okay. Not great, but okay.

“I didn’t see you at morning worship,” Ben had said yesterday evening when the two were back in their dorm.

“I was on sound duty,” said Darrin.

“Ah. Back in the old, uh…sound booth, there.”

“…”

“Adjusting the uh. Microphones and so forth.”

Darrin had nodded. “…Yep.” After an awkward silence he added, “And of course I was stuck with Brother Dean and his cologne.”

Ben smiled—the reference to an inside joke felt like a glimpse into a world where they’d put this behind them. “What did we call it?” Ben asked, even though he knew what they called it. “Something about urinal cakes.”

“I think we literally just called it Urinal Cakes: By Dulce and Cabana,” Darrin laughed. The two looked at each other until their smiles faded.

Ben started to say, “Hey, about last night—”

“Water under the bridge,” said Darrin. Ben didn’t know what to make of that response. “Water under the bridge” was something people said when moving past some disagreement or argument. There had been no disagreement last night in the shower. Bringing this up though, had felt like a potentially bad idea, so instead Ben had landed on:

“Hey, just so you know. You won’t be seeing me for a minute. They’re sending me to Ohio.” He added, noting the raised eyebrow on Darrin’s face: “One, two weeks, maybe. I gotta sub in for a C.O. who’s sick.”

As he sat on the plane next to the worldly woman, trying his best to appear like he was just some businessman looking through business reports (or whatever people did outside Jehovah’s service) Ben told himself that he had not lied to Darrin. He’d only told Darrin what his superiors had told him to tell people: that Ben was substituting for a circuit overseer in Ohio who was sick. When Ben had objected to this in the meeting with Bros. Wilder and Dario, Tom had said, “it’s not a lie, Brother Duncolm. Noe Ortega is spiritually sick.”

When Ben had tried to push back, had tried to say that Noe Ortega was not spiritually sick, he was missing, in fact the subject of a missing-persons case with the Larchwood PD, Tom Wilder had said simply that any Circuit Overseer who left his assignment MIA could not be said to be spiritually healthy.

“And about that remaining months thing?” Ben had tossed back at the overseers. “If you made that recording in 2013–”

“It was left in for a reason, Brother,” Wilder had told him. “There are just a few months left, when considered in context of eternal life.”

On the plane, Ben perched the research guide on his knee and looked at the index in the back—S for Sickness. It gave him a reference and he read it. Later that night when he tried to sleep, he’d wish he hadn’t:

With an exhale Ben leaned back in his seat, stared at the panel above him—the fasten-seatbelt light was glitched or dying, causing the red dot to fizzle and blink. Ben had been thinking much about this apparent contradiction in theology: there is no fear in love, but also, true Christians must fear Jehovah. Maybe what his father had told him last night had made sense after all. Maybe God had been trying to tell Ben something, as He so often did, through his fleshly father.

** ** **

Five hours ago, Ben stood alone in the empty space where the Bethel museum used to be. This place—a hall of artifacts and memorabilia long after curfew, long after the sheep had counted themselves and dozed off—had been his Fortress of Solitude for the past six years. Only instead of housing memories of Ben’s own past adventures, it was full of the adventures of Witnesses of bygone eras. He found comfort in history, in seeing the full span of time and his small place in it. Each of the brothers and sisters in those blurry black and white photos and interviews that played on mounted televisions thought they would be the generation to see Satan’s world end. Each had been wrong, but each had been closer; each new generation was less wrong than the last.

The one guilt-free perk of being Hollis Duncolm’s son was the freedom to roam the Bethel halls after hours without too many questions. The security brothers dotting the compound were to usher any wandering souls back to their dorms, but given his father’s spiritual status, security always assumed that Ben had some Extra Important Spiritual Business to attend to. So, when Ben couldn’t sleep, he walked the empty halls to the Out of Darkness exhibit.

“You could turn a few lights on, you know,” said a voice behind him. Ben had been staring at the unpainted square on the wall where a display had been, but he turned around and there was his father sauntering up. So much for that one singular benefit.

“Usually the screens light everything up,” Ben said. It was two in the morning but his dad still wore a full suit with, gasp, his top button undone and his tie loose around his neck. This was about as casual as old dad got.

Dad was nearly 80 now, and his spine looked as if each year had functioned as a one pound weight; in his old age dad was hunched over, every feature of his body from his back to his brow visibly burdened by the responsibility of caring for 8 million sheep. That and the degenerative scoliosis.

They stood and stared at the blank room, allowed the quiet hum of the air conditioning to fill the space. For Ben, the unspoken became louder, and he reckoned he might as well say what was on both their minds:

“You knew about this.”

Dad gave a thin, world-weary smile, which was (as far as Ben had ever seen) the only smile of which his father was capable.

“You know it’s a small world in God’s house,” dad said, looking around the museum. “It’s a fine Thinkin’ Spot, though. Me, I like the library—”

“Not this,” said Ben. “This, this ‘investigation’ I’ve been roped into; that video you filmed years ago. You knew.”

“The Governing Body approves all research materials, videos, and committees, so yes, Benjamin. I knew.”

“You don’t think the brothers and sisters deserve to know about these demonic ‘incidents’?” Ben had wanted to say. “In 2013 you were confident in saying there are only ‘months’ before Armageddon, and yet you never told anyone, not even your son?”, he’d wanted to say. But Christ’s brothers are not to be questioned or challenged, ditto for “appointed men” who were the “head of their spiritual family.” Instead, Ben said:

“Huh.”

Lights hummed and vents rattled.

“I want you to know,” dad eventually said, “You were chosen because you are qualified.”

Dad had left out the implied end to that sentence: not because of your name.

“Yeah, well. I told them I don’t think I am qualified, but apparently not feeling qualified is the primary qualification, so…”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“Why are you here, dad?”

“I work here.”

“Har har. I mean—”

“To see you off. This is a…significant assignment, son. You’re only the fifth elder since the institution of the CDP committee to embark on such an investigation.”

“CDP?”

The look on dad’s face told Ben he had not meant to let the name slip. Or he had meant to, and Ben was falling into the exact conversation his father had planned on having all along.

“Claims of Demonic Possession.”

Ben just shook his head. “Jesus…”

“That’s the idea.”

Ben didn’t even know where to begin. “Who were the other brothers?”

Dad held up a hand like a stop sign. “Their names, like the program itself, like your investigation, is confidential.”

“…”

“Though,” dad added, “between us…one of those assigned was me.”

For the first time Ben looked his father directly in his watered-down-coffee-brown eyes and saw in them a genuine attempt at connection. If Ben didn’t know any better, he’d say the man had been working up to revealing this personal bit of information. Personal information was in short supply when it came to dad. Ben knew all his old stories, his path from Vietnam vet to the top floor of God’s penthouse, but often Ben felt as if he knew the older brothers and sisters at his breakfast table than he did his own father. And when it came to mom…

“You did one of these investigations?” Ben asked.

“I was the first. I piloted the program.”

“Once a pilot always a pilot.”

A smile pushed through dad’s harshly drawn frown lines. “There was a situation in Texas—not dissimilar to your case.”

“Suicides?”

“Well,” dad shrugged. “If the devil is behind the wheel, it’s not really the car’s fault if it drives off a cliff, is it?”

“Wait, are you saying–? Tom and Julian told me the other cases ended up not involving demons.”

“The other cases did not require exorcisms,” dad corrected, “but Satan’s agents are invisible, Benjamin. We cannot say conclusively that the devil was not involved in what happened.”

“You haven’t told me what happened.”

“The specifics are confidential, but also not very important, not for your purposes. We don’t want confirmation bias, Benjamin—we want you to examine every man, woman, and child’s spirituality in that congregation, review all the evidence, so you can make an official determination as to whether demonic activity is present in Larchwood. If I tell you everything I saw, my theories and thought process…it could tarnish your investigation.”

“Brothers keep saying that, but other than filling out some paperwork and praying ‘till I sweat blood, nobody’s told me how an exorcism works.”

Dad smiled to himself. “One step at a time. Keep moving forward, and follow the faithful slave’s direction. What did I tell you your whole life? Do it Jehovah’s way, and you will always be blessed. This is Jehovah’s way, Benjamin. And you best believe he’s a better leader than any man.”

Apparently dad was still dad, which meant well-intentioned but not the most encouraging one of Christ’s brothers. Ben had long since given up on his father ever talking to him as a son instead of a servant.

“Well,” Ben said. “I appreciate you seeing me off, but…I should probably get to sleep.” He put his arm around his old man, something resembling a hug. He walked back toward the exit sign above the black-curtained entrance to the empty museum.

But then, dad said, “I know I’ve kept a lot from you.”

It was enough to get Ben to stop and turn around.

“About my life before the truth, about my…work in Jehovah’s organization. I keep these things from you, Benjamin, because it is God’s way of doing things. I’m only one imperfect man on the Governing Body, and the Governing Body can only follow Christ’s instructions. Now, when I was in the war following instructions…” he trailed off, then collected himself. “Theocratic warfare is another beast. Man’s war? Simple. Chaotic, foggy, violent, yes…but by the time you’re in the jungle most of what you’re doing is muscle memory. It’s only once you’re home that you realize…” He trailed off. Dad trailed off a lot.

“What I’m saying, Benjamin, is I had sleepless nights, too. And not, I suspect, entirely dissimilar in nature, for while your mother and I raised you to be a peaceful servant of Jehovah, make no mistake—we raised you a soldier.

“This war we have as Jehovah’s people, Benjamin, this war against Satan’s system of things—the devil can’t be shot or stabbed or bombed or outnumbered. He can’t be captured or tortured or skinned alive. Jehovah allows Satan to run free until the end comes, and the serpent has a six thousand year head start on you or me. When you step outside God’s house…well, suffice it to say the other guy has home field advantage.”

Ben hadn’t heard his father say this many words in a row without a teleprompter in a long time; he seemed out of practice. “This was supposed to be a pep talk?”

“The sleepless nights stopped after my assignment.”

Ben had to make sure he understood. “…By assignment, you mean your—”

“—investigation, yes. There is a phrase I learned on my investigation; one hidden away in our publications I had never previously appreciated. I stayed with a Ghanaian family, the brother—Yao. Yao saw I was all twisted up about the situation I was managing, strange things I’d seen, or thought I’d seen. I was terrified, Benjamin. I admit it. And evidently Yao saw it all over my face, for at one point he showed me this old Watchtower article. It was about the fear of God. Now, his first language was French: saine terreur was the phrase he showed me. In English: ‘wholesome dread.’

Ben chewed on the phrase. “Wholesome dread?”

“That is what it means to fear God,” said dad. “A wholesome dread of displeasing Him. Focus on that righteous terror, son, not the madness Satan offers. How do you think the Israelites felt in Egypt when Jehovah had them spatter blood upon the doorposts to save their firstborn sons? How do you think the apostles felt when they saw Christ calm a storm? Reverence, fear, and love all at once. A wholesome dread of being on the wrong side of God’s miracles.”

The fear of God is healthful; it is an awe and a profound reverence for the Creator and a wholesome dread of displeasing him…

Insight on the Scriptures Vol. 1

Trembling, Kora’s hand slowly went for the latch, and she opened the front and only door to the apartment. A police officer was waiting for her in the gray, carpeted hallway: a stalky and round-faced and crew-cut and straight-backed man.

“Afternoon, ma’am. I’m officer Lange, from the—”

“Uh—hi? What’s—?”

“Are you Kora Kershner?”

“Yes, um—Liv, go inside, sweetie,” Kora gently nudged the tiny spy out of the doorway, knowing full well Liv would just hide behind the living room recliner to eavesdrop.

Every word and shift in weight echoed and creaked down the narrow hallway. Kora used to knock on doors like this too, in her past life. She remembered the way she and her partner silently judged Halloween decorations; remembered the way she had to keep her voice down when giving her prepared presentations in musty, quiet halls of strange apartment buildings:

Hi, my name is Kora, I’m one of your neighbors, and we’re here today sharing a positive message from the Bi—and then usually the door would slam shut.

“Ma’am?”

“Sorry. Kora Kershner, yeah. I’m…she.” I’m she? She winced and kicked away from the whirlpool in her own head. “I’m a little distracted, I just got home from work, I’m trying to get dinner going and—”

“Sorry to bother, Miss Kershner. You’re not in any kind of trouble. We tried calling your cell, but…”

“Oh, I—sorry, I work in a hospital basement. Bad reception.” This was true, but it was also true that Kora was dodging debt collectors and she wasn’t sure if she should say that because she wasn’t sure if she could be arrested for dodging debt collectors. Probably not, she reasoned—she’d be in jail already.

“No apology necessary, ma’am. You’re a mama bear, bigger fish to fry.”

Behind Kora the oven beeped.

“Chicken enchiladas, actually.” She called back: “Liv, can you—”

“Got it!” Liv sang from the kitchen.

“—Just turn the oven off, please, like I showed you, but please do not take the pan out of the–.”

“Claro, claro, calmate.”

“Well, I hate to bug ya,” said Officer Lange, “but I take it you heard the news about Jillian Ballard and her sister, Hillary.”

Kora’s stomach sank. She thought it had sunk already, but apparently it was an anchor that had yet to reach bottom. “Yeah. I saw about Jill on Facebook this morning, and um. And then I just got off the phone with my mom, she told me about —”

“Facebook, right. That’s why I wanted to follow up with you. Turns out, you were one of the last people Jill contacted. Exchanged a few messages, over—shoot, I’m dating myself here— IMs?”

“DMs?”

“That’s it.”

“Right…right. Yeah, Jill did send some weird message the other day, week, whenever that was. I didn’t know what it meant, and then she never explained it. I thought maybe her account had been hacked or something, because it was weird of her to reach out to begin with. Or not weird, but, um, we used to go to the same Kingdom—church back in the day. Grew up in the same religion, but. We haven’t been close in a while.”

Officer Lange was scribbling something on a notepad. “This church, that’d be the ‘Kingdom Hall’ at Grundy and Maple?” Kora nodded. Lange went on: “And you never had any other conversations with Jillian, before or after her passing?”

Kora stared in confusion for a moment. “After?”

Officer Lange chuckled at himself and smeared his face. “Christ on a cracker, I need some coffee. After your DMs, I meant to say. After your Facebook chat, preceding her death, you never spoke on the phone with Jill, exchanged texts?”

“No.”

He hardly looked up from his notepad as he went through his questions. “You do remember the last message she sent, though.”

“The weird one?”

“Indeed.”

“I remember.”

“You responded with three—sorry, four question marks. Just wondering if Jill ever called you to explain it.”

“Nope.”

Even so, Officer Lange read the message aloud to Kora, just to see if it jogged anything, went ahead and showed her a screenshot of the exchange he’d saved on his phone, even though it was a long shot, he knows, he knows—just do him a favor and humor him for a second.

Kora’s skin started burning. Intellectually, of course, she knew she could not possibly be in trouble. She had not seen Jill in years, and still had no earthly idea what Jill’s message had meant. Hence why she had responded with ????

“Meat in due season,” the officer read from the screenshot. “Thought maybe it was a religious thing.”

“Not this religion. Like I said, I thought she’d been hacked and the message was some bullshit advertising scam bot thing.”

“Is there anyone you know who would want to hurt Jill?”

“No. I’m—sorry, I guess I’m confused, did she not…” Kora exhaled; she was going to have to say it out loud. “It was suicide, right?”

“Just doing our due diligence, Miss Kershner. Given what happened to her sister around the same time.”

Same time? “I was told Hillary died after, is that right? I mean not that it matters, it’s just my mom said Jill…was first, you know–”

“We have not made any official statements regarding the timing of the deaths. Can’t trust everything you read on Facebook.”

I just told you I heard it from my mom, not from fucking Facebook. Kora felt her skin screaming, “Sorry, but okay, you’re here asking questions so…you think, what? They were murdered?”

“I do not think that, ma’am, nor did I suggest any such thing. Mind telling me what you know about your friend’s sister? Hillary Yeon?”

“I don’t really know anything about Hillary.”

“You never knew her?”

“I did.” Kora was past frustrated. It was impossible explaining Witness Stuff to normies, which is why she never bothered. What was she supposed to say? Hillary was a regular pioneer, officer: she spent seventy hours a month preaching door to door for zero dollars an hour, which is about as spiritual as a woman can get in God’s Organization (which is what we called it, by the way) and people like Hillary did not tend to hang out with people like me, who was considered ‘bad association, a term which I suppose I also need to explain. Instead of this she said:

“Everybody knew Hillary. But what—”

“Everybody in this church?”

Another exhale. This is where prayer might come in handy, Kora thought, if she had any confidence it worked. “Right, well. They don’t call it a church. And yeah, everybody knew Hillary. Now, everybody knew everybody in the Hall—the Kingdom Hall—but even so, Hillary was…popular, I guess? Friendly, well-liked. But she was also a few years older than us—than me and Jill. And I haven’t been to a meeting in…” Kora caught herself over-sharing and adjusted herself. “What’s this about, then? If it was self-inflicted…”

At this Lange finally looked up from his notepad. “Like I said, we’re just doing our—”

“Due diligence. You said that. Look, I haven’t set foot in that Hall—any Kingdom Hall—in ten years. Jill and I haven’t been close in at least as long, and Hillary was like the goddamn Amish prom queen. The Witnessiest Witness. We didn’t have much in common, I’m saying. Now, I’ve been up since three AM, I just worked for eight hours, my daughter has homework, which means I get to brush up on my 4th grade long division, and my enchiladas are probably burnt, because I’ve got this shitty-ass stove in a shitty-ass apartment, and my legal knowledge stops at Saul Goodman and Associates but I’m pretty sure suicide isn’t a crime. Am I free to go? Or are any other of my old church acquaintances dead?”

Silence filled the dank hall. A few neighbors peeked their heads out of their doors, then pretended they hadn’t and slunk back in.

Lange gave another forced smile. “Ma’am. As I said, you are not in any trouble. Just doing my d—following up on a few odds and ends, that’s all. I’ll leave you to enchiladas and long division, but—one quick question. These Kingdom Halls…anything strange happen in these ‘meetings’? As you call them?”

This was a deceptively tricky thing to answer, as not everyone agreed on what constituted strange. “No,” Kora said. “It’s the opposite. The meetings are boring.”

“No rituals, nothing violent?”

“What? God, no, we don’t—they don’t go to war, I don’t know if they’re even allowed to own guns. They’re pacifists. And the meetings…at least when I was growing up, every time I went it was always dry, boring Bible stuff. Just God and Armageddon.”

Officer Lange gave a police-y nod and slipped his pad back into his breast pocket. He thanked Kora for everything, gave her a contact card if she remembered anything that might be useful, anything at all. Then for some reason he laughed to himself, like he’d just remembered a joke.

“God and Armageddon,” he said. “Nothing violent about that.”

Kora tried her damndest to shut the door without slamming it, but then she smelled something burning. She hustled to the kitchen, where the oven door was wide open, smoke pouring out of it.

“Shit!”

She bolted over, nearly knocking the clear-plastic ‘swear jar’ perched on the writing desk in the hall. She quickly closed the oven door and started to call out for Liv…but Liv came up from behind Kora….

…Holding the 375-degree pan with her bare hands.

“Shitshitshit!”

“It’s not hot, mommy. Also that’s four quarters or one American dollar in the swear jar, little miss!”

Kora scrambled over to grab the pan. “I just asked you to turn the oven off, sweetie, I don’t want you pulling hot food out of the—”

“I told you, it’s not hot.”

Kora grumbled to herself; checked the oven settings with her left hand, took the pan from Liv with her right. “Of course not, because why would anything in this apartment ever work ri—”

HSSSSSSSS

Kora first felt the heat, then the boiling agony. The pan refused to let go of her skin; angry steam hissed out from where her palm met the ceramic. With a scream and a panicked left-handed swat, Kora knocked it down to the floor—an explosion of nuclear non-stick shards and enchilada slop. The whole thing probably lasted two seconds but it felt like for two minutes Kora had stuck her right hand in magma.

Kora, eyes bleary, had not even glanced at her own wound—black and bloody and sure to blister. Instinct brought her to her knees, eye-level with Liv, her quavering fingers searching over her daughter’s tiny ones.

“Oh my god, oh my god, are you—?”

Liv’s hands were fine. Not a mark, not a blister. She said,

“It wasn’t hot for me…”

Blood dripped from Kora’s hands into the red marinara sauce spattering the floor.

Only the blood-letting ones counted as sin-atoning, and for this reason God’s consecrated were forbidden to drink or eat blood.

Equipped For Every Good Work, 1946

Kora’s first words to her daughter had been, “I love you.” Kora’s mother’s first words to her granddaughter had been, “your mom needs to teach you about Jehovah.” Kora wasn’t sure she was the ideal teacher for this curriculum.

“Mom, can you check me?” Liv said from the couch in the living room. This was Liv’s phrase for can you pull up the calculator on your phone and check my answers. It snapped Kora out of the lazy river she’d fallen into chopping chicken for enchiladas. There was something mesmerizing about the blade ripping through the thin tendrils of meat.

“In a minute, sweetie,” Kora said. “Maybe move on to English?”

“Already done.”

“Spanish?”

“Ya he hecho mi tarea, mamacita.”

Kora laughed. “Alright, go play until dinner’s done…por vavor.”

Her daughter never had to do flashcards or stick post-it-notes on all the appliances around the house with the Spanish words for each (which is what Kora had had to do when she’d taken 8^th grade Spanish. That’s how far the public school system had advanced in the time since Kora’s stint–there was now such a thing as 4th grade Spanish). Liv had not so much learned it as she had absorbed it from a young age from Dora the Explorer and Pocoyo on YouTube. Meanwhile Kora’s 8^th grade Spanish had atrophied well-below first grade levels, leaving only a few stray niños and baños behind.

Kora’s daughter had, as Dax put it, “the sponge brain thing.” When Kora was a kid her sponge-brain-thing was soaking up Bible stories and prophecies involving the United Nations and how Satan wanted to trick children into worshipping him by watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy and something-something Evolution something-something-Pokémon.

For you see, Kora had to “learn about Jehovah.”

Learning about Jehovah, in Kora’s experience, meant learning about all the things you can’t learn about Jehovah. Kora didn’t have a first memory, just a messy smear of smaller memories, running together like watercolor paints on a wet paper canvas. As she prepared dinner, she allowed herself to fall into swirl of colors Walking to Grandpa Lee’s house in the snow, bundled up tight in swishy winter clothes. Kora’s mom had taken her sledding, but she couldn’t remember the sledding part. No, she remembered the walk, from the bottom of the big hill in Miller Park to the row of squat, brick apartments. She remembered the smell of her grandfather’s house—like cinnamon and old books. Kora couldn’t have been older than three, but already by that point, she had learned about Jehovah. Her mom used to tell her, “I played Kingdom songs for you when you were just a little thing in mommy’s belly.”

Kora folded tortillas over the shredded chicken; the memory swirl became like a whirlpool, pulling her to Jill, summer memories awash in sunset, kissing beneath the neighbor’s trampoline, stopping. Jill’s voice, her breath warm and near: if we die tomorrow, will God bring us back? In paradise, I mean?

Learning about Jehovah meant learning about paradise.

“See out there?” her mom said, at some point in the swirl, lifting Kora up to her bedroom window. “Soon Jehovah’s going to make the whole world a paradise. There’ll be friendly lions who won’t eat nobody—they’ll be friends with the lambs, like big kittens.” It was easy to imagine, because Kora had been given books that imagined all this for her. My Book of Bible Stories, with its hard yellow cover and majestic red cursive font. It looked like all the other fairy tale books on the shelf at the library. But this one had the best stories, mom had told her, because these stories were real. These stories were promises, and Jehovah keeps his promises. The pictures in the book showed those promises—the earth bright and green, docile cheetahs and pandas in the backyards of log cabins. The humans were white and smiling, wearing business-casual clothes and carrying fruit baskets to one another. The driveway out Kora’s bedroom window would be gone, as well as all the neighbor’s houses, as well as the library down the street and the Aldi next to it. Just people and animals and fruit baskets and smiles—a promise. Kora asked her mother how to trust the promises of a man she hadn’t met. Mom said God wasn’t a man, he was God. The Only True God. Kora hadn’t even known there were false gods to be worried about, nor did this clear up who this not-man was.

And so, Kora used to run to her bedroom window every morning to check and see if there were friendly lions in the front yard, to see if Jehovah had transformed the world into a paradise overnight. At some point her mother had to tell her, “there’s a few steps before we reach paradise, baby girl.”

Kora was then shown a different book with different promises, its cover like the inverse of the lovely Bible Story book. The Revelation Book (which was not the Biblical book of Revelation, but a book written by “Jehovah’s people” about what all the prophecies in Revelation really meant) had a blood red cover and golden lettering. Inside were all those missing steps before paradise: all the violence and death and gnashing of teeth that must take place before lions and pandas could be friends.

Learning about paradise, it turned out, meant learning about all the ways you could fail to enter it.

Now, in the strained conversations Kora forced herself to have with her mother to arrange babysitting, mom often said “Kora, you know Jehovah.” Always said like it was the end of something, the period at the end of the few small paragraphs of Kora’s life. Kora wasn’t sure she did know Jehovah. The brothers and sisters in the congregation growing up, the other kids who were friends with each other but not Kora, not really—they knew Jehovah. Seemed to know him anyway, talked about him like he was their Canadian girlfriend who definitely existed. But Kora never knew Jehovah; she knew about Jehovah, the same way she knew about Abraham Lincoln–as a towering, white monument sitting upon a throne.

About Jehovah Kora knew only factoids she’d been taught, knew the questions she was not supposed to ask, not if she wanted her mom to stay in a good mood. And Kora did feel, quite acutely at times, the eye. The distant glare of a being who was not a man, but who made man in his image, who was as judgmental and violent as any man Kora knew. “The publications” depicted Jehovah, in oil paintings shrunk down to fit the pages of the literature, as a man in his Lincoln-Monument throne. The artists’ never did paint his face. This, Kora had to be reminded a few times, was because God’s word tells us Jehovah’s face is so bright no human could see it without going blind. Why have a face in the first place, then? This was the sort of question she’d learned not to ask.

She never had to ask about the eye.

She felt the eye, hiding behind the too-bright light of a face that couldn’t be seen, upon a man who wasn’t a man. She did not feel the eye all the time, or even at the worst times, or maybe there was no good time to feel someone watching you—watching not just your actions, but the thoughts inside your head at the coiled mishmash of half-formed ideas and terrors and fantasies.

Kora would be scrubbing scabs off mayo scissors, thinking about, say, stripping—not making a plan, mind you, not putting in a job application at the local strip club, not even making the effort to go online and research how exactly one becomes a stripper or if, in fact, strip clubs still existed and weren’t just things she’d heard about in movies. The thought would pop up in her head—we’re broke, I have a daughter, and Uber’s not worth it with the price of gas. So, for a split second—stripping. And then, within that same second, the burning gaze of the eye. Prickles on her back, like fingernails drumming along her skin. Jehovah saw that thought—saw that brief blur of a sexually-adjacent idea—and judged her for it. Kora didn’t always feel Jehovah, but when she did, she got the sense that He was disappointed. The whole thing felt like a one way relationship—He could see everything Kora did, but she could only glean His divine intentions by whispering pleas and reading ancient words, and the publications that provided the true and proper interpretation of those words.

And yet Kora didn’t not believe in Him…

She felt the eye of judgment, and as “a disfellowshipped one,” she felt the hollow loneliness the Witnesses always said she would feel. Was feeling hollow and lonely and distant from God the same thing as believing in Him? The same thing as “knowing” Him?

Jill is dead.

The oven beeped when it hit 350 degrees, and Kora slid the pan of enchiladas inside. When the heat hit her skin, she thought of Jill’s breath, and hot summers; briefly thankful that Jehovah’s Witnesses had taught her that there was no such thing as hell.

Fiery destruction during Armageddon, yes. But then she’d just be dead, asleep.

This is when Kora thought she should maybe take a nap.

***

Kora couldn’t sleep, though, couldn’t even close her eyes. She stared at a brown stain on the ceiling, one that reminded her of something she could never quite put her finger on. She wondered if she existed, and then wondered if it was normal to wonder if she existed, if other people wondered the same thing, and what they might think of Kora if she asked. Was there a difference between existence and non-existence? There was only one way to find out, an and sometimes Kora felt an urge to test the waters.

That’s all it was, though—an urge. A sinful urge to not exist, which Kora reckoned was different from dying. Kora never let the urges go too far, though; she had been trained up from girlhood to fight against sinful urges.

Pfft. Sinful.

Did she still believe in sin? Did she know what the word “sin” meant, if she really sat down and tried to define it? Did it matter? Did anything? It was annoying to think about. There’s another thing—Kora annoyed herself! Her inner monologue grated as it collided with the buzzing swarm of half-formed thoughts and memories darting around in her skull, like flies trapped in a jar.

That’s why Kora appreciated cycles–a piece of machinery does not have to contemplate existence. It is shaped just right, set in just the right spot, where it can spin along as part of a greater design. She could summon this at work. Scrubbing blood. Purifying. Sterilizing. Let what was once unclean become clean.

Since finding out what happened to Jill this morning, Kora felt her worst instincts bubbling back up. For years–really from the time Liv had been born–Kora had been holding those urges down, strangling them just below the surface. But she had let her grip slacken and now here they were: resurfaced.

The urges wandered, now and then, past nonexistence. Sometimes nonexistence felt passive and nebulous. Sometimes Kora felt she needed to prove she was alive, that she did exist, that she was flesh and blood. And so from time to time she had the urge to tear herself apart.

As she lay there in bed, staring at the stain, Kora imagined herself digging her fingernails into the crook of her arm, splaying it open and ripping the tendons out, like a puppet cutting its own strings. Like the puppet, she’d collapse, lifeless and empty. Her mind kept traveling down this spacious path: in her mind her fingernails clawed deeper, scraping out the muscles from the bone as she gnawed on her cubital veins. The taste of the blood in her mouth as the rubbery veins burst with a satisfying snap. Not just letting out the anger, but letting it win, letting it consume her, destroy her, as she deserved, and the world deserved to see—and this, she knew, they would see. Whoever found her would remember her, whether they liked it or not. Whoever found her would have to talk about it, talk about the woman who ripped out her own veins. And if Kora did this, as she did this, she would finally feel the release, the collapse, the draining.

Instead of doing this she screamed into a pillow.

After Olivia, Kora was generally less uncomfortable being alive, or being alive and angry anyway. But sometimes she just had to scream. Really scream; scream until her throat hurt, until it just might bleed, until she felt herself getting lightheaded.

After she let it out, it was out. Mostly. Like that last bit of toothpaste you can only get out by rolling up the plastic. She needed someone to do that to her body; a good chiropractor, maybe. Or a steam roller.

“Mom?”

Kora dropped the pillow and swiveled to the doorway. There was Liv, peeking in. How much did she see?

“Sweetie? You alright?”

Liv stared at her blankly and said, “there’s someone knocking at the door.”

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Kora thought, head still light and swimmy from the scream, and apparently she’d said it with her face loud and clear because Liv added,

“Don’t worry, it’s not grandma,” she said. “Just a policeman.”

“…may we never become hardened by pride, by a lack of faith, or by “the deceptive power of sin.” (Heb. 3:13; Jas. 4:6) Often, these traits begin when a person nurtures unwholesome thoughts or desires. He may even reach the point of rejecting appropriate Scriptural counsel. Worse still, he may become so set in his bad attitude or ways that he makes himself an enemy of God​—a truly fearful situation!”

The Watchtower, October 15^th 2008

“East Jesus Nowhere,” said Brother Dario. “Think cornfields and tractor pulls.”

Ben was not thinking cornfields and tractor pulls. Opening the binder, identical to the ones Brothers Wilder and Dario were taking out of their briefcases, Ben’s scattered mind was thinking about the video he’d just been forced to watch, thinking about all the things his Governing Body father had never told him, about everything he’d ever learned about demons from the time he was a child, about God, about last night, about Darrin, about his own sinful flesh.

“We’ll ask again that you not take any notes,” Brother Wilder was saying over the humming static in Ben’s mind, “this meeting remains entirely confidential.”

Ben’s grayish-green eyes were frozen on first page, a title in bold lettering:

REFERENCE MATERIAL:

Scriptural Principles to Apply When Investigating Claims of Demonic Possession

The show was over, the lights were up, but still two minutes later Ben felt like his eyes were adjusting—not to the light, but to a new conception of reality, one where there was a “plague of demons” “working in harmony with Satan himself” to “turn lovers of Jehovah into worshippers of the devil.”

Ben started to express as much, “A-actually, I had a few questions about, uh, the video we just wa—”

“Best save your questions till the end of the tour,” Tom Wilder smiled grimly, “we got to debrief you on before your flight.”

“My flight? To wh—?”

“After the tour,” Tom said again. Tom always smiled more when he was growing impatient.

Ben swallowed, tried to keep himself from shaking. This was, to put it in the theocratic language of a spiritual man, the craziest fucking situation that had ever fucking happened to Benjamin B. Duncolm. And given his sinful state, given his shame, given his brain’s refusal to suppress that shame for any length of time, he felt confident this must be a test. Ben just wasn’t sure what the right answer was. Jehovah God knew Ben was unqualified for this “very special assignment”; but Jehovah God had also put Ben here in this room.

“Usually when such matters come up,” said brother Wilder, “we keep private any fleshly connections to the Bethel family, but it’s unavoidable here given the name: Ballard.”

Usually? Ben thought. The video said this was the first time an event calling for a potential exorcism had ever happened…now ‘such matters come up’? But Ben was still on the tour, so he didn’t say any of that.

“You ever meet Alvan Ballard?” asked Brother Dario.

Ben shook his head. “I just know he’s a Helper,” he said. “Translation Committee maybe? Always enjoy his talks on the broadcasts.” Well, okay: Ben did not “enjoy” Governing Body Helper Alvan Ballard’s occasional sermons on the organization’s monthly production, JW Broadcasting. Ben enjoyed the broadcasts, and enjoyed (in principle) the general idea of Alvan Ballard, who seemed pleasant and hard-working enough and did a decent juggling routine at the Bethel talent show last year; but truthfully Ben felt about Ballard’s public speaking skills the same way he felt about non-alcoholic beer or sugar-free Twizzlers: a fine option for other people but never Ben’s first choice.

“Well, old Alvan calls me this morning,” said Wilder, “which is not out of the ordinary in itself. But this morning Alvan sounds—and this is out of the ordinary—disturbed. Shaken. He says he needs Jehovah’s people to come take a look at a situation involving his granddaughters back in his home state. He says, ‘the demons got the girls.’ I tell him slow down, ask him what girls? But he’s crying and angry.”

“Once you see the report,” said Brother Dario, “you will be too.”

Brother Wilder gave an affirmative throat-clear and eyed Ben. “The whole deal comes down to Brother Ballard’s two granddaughters, Hillary Yeon—maiden name Ballard—and Jill Ballard (never married). Alvan’s son, Paul, goes to the Larchwood Ohio congregation; Paul’s been a spiritual pillar for however many decades now. As is Paul’s wife, Margie, and his daughter Hillary, who we’ll get to. But Jill, Alvan tells me, was always the black sheep: in and out of the truth her whole life, thrice reproved, twice disfellowshipped—fornication and homosexual conduct. Lord knows it’s a thorn in the flesh for some of our brothers and sisters, but this thorn musta spread an infection or something.”

“Gay infection,” joked (?) Brother Dario.

“Or a demon infection. If those are necessarily different.”

Ben was starting to see why he was being asked to investigate instead of an old timer like Tom or Julian: compassion. The organization was trying to soften its image, what with legalized gay marriage and lady presidential-candidates in vogue, but the old timers were raised in an era where “homosexual scourge” might be on the front page of the Watchtower.

Or…

Maybe they suspected Ben’s thorn in the flesh. But why would they send him, if that was the case?

“And yet,” Tom continued, “for all Jill’s fooling around in Satan’s world, the whole Ballard family says they thought she was on the upswing, spiritually. Not to speak ill of the dead, but if you ask me, Jill was what we might call a ‘seat filler.’ She’d sit and listen most Sundays but hadn’t preached in years; might come to a congregation picnic for the free meal. You know the type.

“Hillary, meanwhile? Exact opposite. Brother Ballard said Hillary was the sort of young woman God stopped making after the sixth day: perfect. Hillary was exemplary. Pioneered since she was 16, always got in her 70 hours a month. Only speedbump she’s had (‘sides human imperfection) is her husband. He left the truth, oh, five or six years ago. The man just drifted away from the congregation. You know the type. Even during that mess, though, Hillary never missed a meeting or fell short in her service time. Happy as a clam with ‘a pearl of high value’ (to mix my metaphors) far as anyone knew. Then, two nights ago, she kills herself.”

Tom gestured for Ben to turn to page two, the police reports. His stomach squirmed.

“Some homeless fella finds Hillary lying flat on her face in a pool of blood face down just outside the Kingdom Hall parking lot. The brothers in Larchwood got all of one security camera on the gate and the picture’s blurrier than my vision without my readers, but the Coordinator down there says yep: that’s Hillary, alright. Walking slow. With—and there’s a trashcan in the corner, Ben, in case you’re squeamish—both eyes gauged out of her head.”

Improbably Ben did not feel squeamish. He felt cold, his senses too numb to generate nausea.

Unevenly scanned to the left side of the page were four pictures of Hillary Ballard—black and white inkjet renderings of a woman lying face down in a pool of blood. In the next the woman was turned over, her face blank, her eye sockets hollow. It looked like a printing error, as though the ink just happened to have leaked and blotted around the area where Hillary’s eyes should have been.

“Police are still waiting on an autopsy report,” said Brother Dario, checking some notes on his tablet, “but they’re saying it all points to suicide: the biggest clue being the uh, suicide note. Handwriting matches up, and there’s also the blood: not just all over Hillary’s hands, but caked up under her fingernails from when she allegedly…” Brother Dario attempted to mime the event, holding his hand up to his bugged-out left eye, making a digging movement with his fingers, then pinching the nails of his forefinger and thumb together.

This was Ben’s least favorite part of the tour so far. Brother Wilder and Ben looked on blankly as Brother Dario played a nonconsensual game of Guesstures with the two of them.

“You know,” Dario said, making like he was pulling then snapping the thing that Ben would later learn is called the central retinal vein, the cord that holds your eye in place like the rope on a tetherball. “Like, you know, she had to pinch off the….it’s self-inflicted, is what they’re saying.”

Tom said, “He understands.”

Ben gave a meek nod that affirmed this.

“Nasty stuff,” said Brother Dario, “Our sister here…did all that, then bled to death while strolling to the Kingdom Hall like nothing was wrong. Heck of it is, Hillary had been out door-to-door earlier that same day, seemed perfectly fine. The other sisters in the group all said so: Hillary was her bubbly, happy self, loved Jehovah, loved the friends…then this.”

“And then this,” added Wilder, “the next day…well, let’s see…next afternoon, report says time of death was around 15:30…Jill Ballard is found dead by—you guessed it—suicide.”

Ben looked over to the right side of page three, where more black and white photos showed angles of Jill’s body—emphasis on angles. Maybe it was the numbness wearing off, whatever valve in his body that controlled nausea unthawing, but Ben couldn’t keep his mouth shut any more. Fuck it, when Ben was on tour-guide duty for Witnesses visiting Bethel he let people ask as many questions as they wanted.

“Is that supposed to be her head?” asked Ben.

“Nobody’s head is supposed to be like that,” said Brother Dario.

Brother Wilder just kept going. “Seat-filler Jill killed herself on her own kitchen table. The photocopy makes it disorienting, but what you’re seeing here (according the brothers in Larchwood, and confirmed in the police report) is a lot of tape and plastic. Jill Ballard rolled saran wrap around her head, over and over, then duct-taped over the plastic to make sure the seal was real good. My old man worked construction, he had an expression: measure twice, cut once. Well, Jill measured three times. Police found hot glue on the edges of the tape and plastic because she was trying to seal it to her skin.”

Now that Ben had a better idea of what the shadowy, half-blurred images were conveying, he thought Jane’s head looked like a kid’s art project gone awry—tape and plastic formed a misshapen globe atop a crash-test dummy slicked with glue and burn marks.

“This Jill girl,” Wilder said, “wanted to make sure she died on her first try. If only she put this kind of effort into preaching. Poor Alvan told me the girl still had the hot glue gun in her hand when Margie found her. Imagine doing that to your family. Making your own mother find you in a state like that.”

“Sister Margie Ballard,” said Brother Dario, cutting Tom off, “had a key to Jill’s place and walked in on her like that. She saw no sign of forced entry, Paul and Margie say she had no boyfriend (or whatever) as far as they knew; traffic cam didn’t show nobody coming or going from her place.”

Brother Wilder added this, as if it clarified or mollified any aspect of the situation: “The brothers—of course—were quick on the scene for both deaths. They took pictures of everything, anything useful should be in the binder. But the theme is: the occult.”

Half-jokingly Ben raised his hand. “Is the tour over?”

Tom half-jokingly answered: “No. ‘Cause I already know what you’re going to ask. Turn to the pink tab there.”

Ben turned to the pink tab there.

“That,” Tom said, tapping the page, “is what we mean by occult.”

Ben’s stomach shriveled. “Oh…”

“Pagan symbols, ritualistic signs—it’s Satanism, plain and simple. Pentagram painted around Jill’s kitchen island, you can see all these funky lines painted along the floors and walls connecting it.”

“We sure that’s not a star of David?” asked Brother Dario, apparently not joking. Ben and Tom gave him tired looks.

“Pretty sure,” Tom said with strained politeness. “You’ll see it in those awful demon movies The World makes—I only see the trailers, but you know what I mean. It’s some Satanic constellation, and Jill killed herself right in the middle of it. Hillary died on the street, of course, outside the kingdom hall. But if you turn a couple pages, uh…here, page 35. See?”

On page 35 Ben saw pictures of a normal house, if that’s what Tom was asking.

“That was the state of Hillary’s house when she left it. Clean as a whistle. No pagan nonsense.”

Now the men stared at Ben; they had not formally announced the end of this morbid ten-dollar tour of two crime scenes in Tractor Pull Ohio, but the look in their eyes suggested they were looking for him to connect some dots. A godly constellation, maybe, instead of the Satanic one Jill had painted.

“If I’m following you brothers,” Ben said carefully, “you believe Jill, who was not spiritually strong, passed on some sort of demon to her sister, Hillary—who was spiritually strong.”

The other men said nothing. Ben said some more.

“And this demon caused both fleshly sisters to…commit suicide…?”

Brothers Wilder and Dario exchanged an uncertain glance. “That is what your investigation will determine.”

“My investigation,” Ben repeated. “The investigation which may result in the first exorcism in the history of God’s organization?” Ben asked it with more passive-aggression than he’d intended to let on, but which he unmistakably felt. The brothers looked amused, which only made the aggression less passive. “Even though you said earlier that ‘these matters come up’.”

Brother Dario spoke first: “That video may be a little dated. I’ll betcha it was filmed in 2012.”

“It’s a good thing Jehovah’s people don’t gamble,” Wilder said to Dario, “because you’d lose that bet. It was 2013. August, 2013. I was operating the camera, and it was hotter than a blister.” Tom turned to Ben pointedly. “There was an incident back then which prompted its filming; nothing like this. There had been investigations of supernatural claims before, going back to Russell, and there were some after that incident in 2013, and there may, Brother Duncolm, be investigations after yours. So far, each has turned out the same. No exorcisms.”

“But when we encounter the occult,” Brother Dario said, “we take it seriously. We can’t have our brothers eating anywhere near the table of demons.”

Ben slackened a bit. Maybe that’s all this was: due diligence. He’d take a trip out of town, spend a few days there, encourage the congregation—it’d be like any other time he was assigned to speak at a regional convention out of state. Except with more demons. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe.

“As tragic and, um…gruesome this all is,” Ben started, “my understanding was that the governing body has adjusted our understanding of suicide. And mental illness in general. I believe the current teaching is that such things are, they’re…not necessarily indicative. Of uh…demon possession.”

Brother Wilder smiled knowingly, only Ben wasn’t sure what the man knew. “That’s the ‘teaching?’”

“I…yes, I believe so, yes.”

“Well, you’re right,” said Brother Wilder. “That is the teaching. You’ll find that precise passage in, ohhhh if I remember right, the green tab. This binder here has everything the Society has ever written about demonic possession, spiritism, satanism—from Russell to this month’s Watchtower, it’s all in there.”

Except, Ben thought, exactly how one is supposed to expel a demon. He worded his question carefully:

“So…the video said that saying the name ‘Jehovah’ might not be enough. And growing up, I never encountered any demons, but that was always the teach—the understanding.”

“This is an investigation, Brother Duncolm. There’s quite likely a secular answer for all this. Likely calling upon the name of Jehovah will be enough; it usually is.”

“Could be as simple as a demonized piece of furniture from a garage sale,” said Brother Dario.

Ben squinted. “Simple. Right. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for the opportunity, brothers, but…this sounds like a family problem. A fleshly family problem. These two sisters killing themselves, even if the way they did it is disturbing…I just don’t see why the local Circuit Overseer can’t handle it?”

Tom sipped his coffee before saying, “Because something happened to him, too.”

***

Why didn’t you start with that? Ben wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to appear disrespectful.

“The circuit overseer killed himself?” Ben asked.

“Went missing,” Tom said. “Purple tab: this is Noe Ortega, baptized in ’02, Circuit Overseer by ’09. Got assigned to Larchwood’s circuit in, let’s see, 2014. He was there for his scheduled check-in with the congregation. Technically he should be on his way to Indiana by now to visit the next Hall on the docket.”

“Technically?”

“He’s M.I.A.”

“Monday morning,” said Dario, “like any other CO, Brother Ortega went to the field service meeting, encouraged the flock, did some door-to-door—at least one with Hillary Yeon, the brothers reported—but around twelve-thirty Noe dropped the service group off at the Kingdom Hall, drove off, and…that was 72 hours ago.”

Ben stared at the page, the unbearable confusion and randomness of the day suddenly hitting him all at once.

“Why didn’t you start with that?” he said, after all.

Tom and Julian looked to each other; what, were they twins? Did they have a secret language or something? Maybe the holy spirit just worked through them easier than it worked through Ben, because without speaking they’d come up with an answer.

“To be frank, Brother Duncolm,” said Tom, “we wanted to see if you would ask the right questions.”

Ben didn’t understand, and he told them as much. The two men kept insisting that he’d asked the right questions, that he had what it took, that he was qualified for this assignment. After all, they told him, remember Isaiah’s attitude when Jehovah called upon him for a daunting task: here I am, send me. Here Ben was, and he was very much hoping Jehovah would send someone else.

Ben Duncolm had been appointed as an elder at the age of twenty three. He knew he should not accept whatever assignment involving demons and exorcisms, because such an assignment would require holy spirit, and Ben was not confident Jehovah would freely hand out his holy spirit to a man who did some second-base stuff with another man in His own house. Yet if he expressed this concern, it would guarantee a judicial committee, where Ben would almost assuredly be kicked out of God’s house, and this was a concerning prospect given that Ben had been in Bethel for the past ten years, had no college education, no savings, and a resume that would list only one job, one nobody in The World understood, at a place nobody in The World knew about, and his only potential references would be shunning him.

Tom recognized the conflict on Ben’s face (if not the full, lurid reason for it) and said something that surprised Ben.

“We’re asking you to do this, Brother Duncolm, because you’re the fifth brother we’ve talked to today, and you’re the first one that’s had an ounce of skepticism.”

“And that’s…good?” Ben asked. God’s organization did not typically venerate the quality of ‘skepticism.’

“It is,” said Brother Dario. “As we said, it’s an investigation. Into possible demonic activity. This may sound…counter-intuitive, but a real investigation requires skepticism. Doubt.”

“Counter-intuitive,” Tom repeated his colleague’s earlier words. “We know. But we must, if we’re being realistic, doubt the spiritual qualifications of the elders in Larchwood. What if one of them is dabbling in the occult, even by growing lax in his entertainment habits, viewing spiritistic films. You know these young elders play video games, and I think the whole darn enterprise is from Satan. But you can doubt that; just as you should doubt the conclusions of the secular authorities, who will be looking at the physical evidence, but will be unable to see the spiritual evidence. You need to doubt the spiritual integrity of everyone in that Kingdom Hall, perhaps even the building itself.”

“Or,” Brother Dario added confusingly, because he was always adding confusion, “you may discover that there are no demonic entities currently infecting the congregation. Perhaps whatever star-of-david Satan thing Jill drew was a result of a mental illness, delusions. And even if she was demonized, perhaps the demon died with her.”

“Doubts are, uh…” Ben tried to find the words, but they were all tangled together like a mess of cables in his head. “Huh. To be honest, brothers, the thing I’m doubting most right now is myself.”

“Good,” said Brother Wilder. “That means you’ll rely entirely on Jehovah. As opposed to your fleshly abilities.”

“Just don’t start doubting Him,” said Brother Dario. “Or His word. Or the Organization. Those are your guideposts, your compass bearings.”

“Julian forgot one,” said Tom. “The devil. Don’t dare doubt the devil. Because even if Satan is not involved in the death of Jill and Hillary, he’s still the god of this world. A hungry lion, seeking to devour. And if Satan and his demons are the cause of the suicides, and if you try and stop him…that means you’re going to be his next target.”

“The Catholic Church is currently facing two problems in connection with the Devil. On the one hand, it is having to fight a tendency among modern-day Catholics to doubt the Devil’s existence. On the other hand, it is having to deal with a spate of unofficial exorcisms, or expellings of evil spirits.”

The Watchtower, April 15th 1989

CHAPTER 2

Larchwood, Ohio

“When did all this start?”

Kora stared past the three elders through the teary blur. She wiped her eyes, felt numb and dizzy. She told herself what nurses told patients, as the anesthetic was already pushing into their bloodstream: count backwards from ten. In the movies it never takes the full ten seconds; you wake up and it’s already long over.

Please just let this be over.

The men sitting on the other side of the table were perfectly spaced apart according to height, and she wondered if they’d planned it that way. This is what God’s chosen people do: they plan things.

Kora had not been raised in a religion, but an “organization.” Everything was organized, including (apparently) judicial meetings. Let all things take place decently and by arrangement, the scripture says.

Each man wore a suit and had a sober look on his face, like this was a funeral. It basically was, she supposed. Push that thought out. The one who had spoken was Brother Graham, and his stringy gray hair stuck to the sweat on his scalp.

“Sister Kershner?” he prompted again. “Can you recall the first time?”

Kora cleared her throat. “You mean like the first time I, um.” Another throat-clear. “Engaged in…or like…” She expected (hoped) one of them to finish her sentence or give her a nod, some sort of permission to not say the word. Instead, they stared at her with a blank expectance, none of them appearing uncomfortable. Her eyes darted away, and she snuck it in through a sigh, “masturbated?”

“Correct,” said Brother Hamish. Brother Graham made a notation on his notepad. “Has this been an ongoing situation, or a few isolated instances?”

They stared.

There was a box of tissues in the middle of the table. Brother Hamish reached for the box, and she was momentarily uplifted at the display of kindness…but he just grabbed a tissue for himself and blew his nose into it. Suppressing an eye-roll, Kora slid the box over to her side of the table. Wiped her nose, wiped her eyes.

Brother Hamish repeated the question.

“Um. I mean, it was about…” she couldn’t calculate it, truthfully. Couple times a week since she was fourteen? How many times is that? Mom had taken her doors off the hinges after she got caught last time. Had to do it in the bathroom, the shower. Then mom started timing her showers.

Her uncle had been an elder for a few years. Kora knew the sorts of things that, if said in this meeting, could get her in trouble; more trouble than she was in already. But Jehovah would know if she was lying… “a few times. I don’t know. A few.”

The elders took turns talking now, like it was rehearsed ahead of time. She supposed it was, actually, which made it weirder. These men had sat down in a private room and talked about a sixteen-year-old girl’s jerk-off habits for a decent length of time together.

Graham: “Would you say you’re enslaved to the practice?”

“No. I’ve already quit.”

Neice: “Do arousing images linger in your mind?”

“Sometimes. But I pray about it and they go away.”

Hamish: “What about during this…‘encounter’ with Jill?”

Kora’s eyebrows shot up, pulse quickened. Terror, embarrassment, confusion—who told them about that?

“What, uh—encounter?”

Hamish: “Sister Ballard says she found you and Jill in a ‘state of undress’ together.”

Graham: “Did you touch each other?”

Neice: “Were either or both of you naked?”

Hamish: “Or partially exposed?”

“No,” Kora said. She wasn’t totally lying—they hadn’t been naked. “I told you, Tab—Sister Ballard is, was, mistaken. She just walked in on us changing. It’s just a misunderstanding. Jill doesn’t…she’s not like me.”

Brother Hamish wrote something in his notebook. “How do you know?”

“…I know,” Kora lied.

The words of that fucking song came to her mind, the song her mom said she wasn’t supposed to listen to: This is what you get when you mess with us. Maybe that was Jehovah telling her something. The road to sin starts with small things like that: worldly music, immoral television shows, romance novels. You convince yourself it’s not a sin, or not quite, maybe, if you squint. And little by little you let yourself give in, until you don’t even recognize yourself. Until you’re here.

Neice: “These homosexual thoughts…do you experience them frequently?”

“…Yes.”

Hamish: “Do you think of homosexual acts when you touch your genitals?”

Her stomach sank into a dark pool. “Yes.”

Graham: “Do you penetrate yourself?”

“No.”

Neice: “Do you fondle your breasts?”

The dam was breaking, tears welled up. She was angry now, not with herself, at them, even though she knew she shouldn’t be. Hearing these words, coming from these men…she’d only ever heard of them talk about the love of Jehovah and Jesus, about the joys of the ministry, about paradise . The same sweet man who’d given her baptism talk was now saying shit like “penetrate.”

“…No.”

She fought off the anger. They were God’s shepherds. Doing what they were supposed to be doing, set forth in His word. She should be mad at herself, but it just seemed…no. Another gnat to flick away. It was her fault, all of this.

Graham: “Would you experience an orgasm?”

They stared.

Why the fuck else would I do it? She averted her eyes. “Yes,” she said. She said a quick silent prayer and again apologized for internal cursing. She wondered if God was getting annoyed with her. Jehovah God was more patient than humans, but Kora had grown tired of herself a long time ago. If He dumped her now, she couldn’t blame Him.

The three men looked at each other. In a brief, silent moment they’d reached some mutual understanding. Holy Spirit in action. Neice sniffled and spoke first:

“Do you still love Jehovah?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Does the devil lie dormant inside you?”

“Yes, but he is restless,” she recited. Recited? A numb, prickly feeling fell over Kora. She did not know what she was reciting. She had never heard or said those words before, but they’d fallen effortlessly out of her mouth.

“Is the season yet?”

“No,” she recited, “but it is due.”

“Would you say you have renounced this defiling, unclean practice?”

“I have. Really, I…” Kora broke down. “I’m embarrassed. I knew it was wrong. I just don’t want to...” Lotta ways Kora could have ended that sentence; back then she defined herself by what she didn’t want. Maybe it was still that way. As it happened, she ended the sentence with her hand, covering her nose and mouth. An instinct. It fully struck her then where she was, to whom she was talking. She’d been fuzzily aware of it, but she hadn’t allowed it to be real. It had been forcefully reduced to this splotchy thing in her periphery. But now the ink stain was spreading, becoming indelible.

Now she would be marked.

People would know, not what she’d done, but that she’d done something. Her hands were shaking now. Vomit rose, hot acid in her throat.

“Am I…” she started.

“Lean back,” said Brother Graham.

Kora craned her neck back, let her head hang loose on the back of the chair. If she was lucky maybe it’d fall off. She stared at the lights above her; still couldn’t figure out if they were blinking, or if she was.

Brother Graham’s hands were weathered, spotted with age, but they were perfectly steady. Years ago he had given a comment during the Book Study about his life as a surgeon before finding the truth. Kora had felt quite connected to him when he said that; even though she wasn’t a nurse yet, she would be. She knew she would be, because it the only career option her parents could agree to after “pioneering” and “getting kicked the fuck out of the house.” Now she felt like a different species, some lesser creature condemned to crawl on its belly. She looked back up at the ceiling; it’d be better not to see. She already felt her adrenaline spiking even as her body froze with numb acceptance, and her eyes settled on a brown stain on the ceiling tile. Count back from ten.

“If your right eye causes you to stumble,” one of them men recited–or all them, perhaps, their voices were now all tangled together, “gouge it out.”

The snap of rubber gloves conforming to Brother Graham’s wrists, and suddenly he was standing over her, the light above casting him as a dark contour. Brother Hamish appeared to her left, Neice on the right; they were rubbing their hands together and the sharp smell of alcohol burned her nostrils.

“Open wide,” Hamish said. Kora’s eyes strained, but he wasn’t talking to her. The sudden sensation of fingers pressing against her eyelids, peeling them apart. His index fingers squished against her cornea, passing them, the knuckles pressing hard against the orbital–

“—bone drills out here!”

Kora blinked and snapped to consciousness—shit. She took out her earbud clumsily, her wet rubber gloves struggling to grip it. “Say again?” she said.

Drea was in the doorway, arms folded. “We’ve got like five case carts out here. Hot sheet on the Stryker drills.”

“It’s just busy.”

“No shit.” Drea laughed and rolled another case cart into decontamination, the metal clanking as it collided into another. There were thirty-eight surgeries on the schedule—a normal day had more like twenty—and most days didn’t start with finding out a friend died.

***

Kora spent her mornings scrubbing blood off knives, spent the rest her time trying to figure out how to do anything else. Today, she was trying to figure out how to not think about Jill. But every memory contained her. Now, every drop of blood did too.

Not just blood, and not just knives—laryngeal scissors encrusted with mucus, bone drills dusted with flaky white marrow, ureteroscopes dripping with piss. And still, Kora thought, she preferred this to washing dishes at Chef-O-Nette.

Decontamination in the sterile processing department of Hill Valley Methodist had been a step up. She possessed no college degree and had worked diligently at menial jobs since the time she was nineteen, culminating in a particularly demoralizing stint in the kitchen at a diner called Chef-O-Nette. Chef-O-Nette was a lower-class diner on the middle-class side of an upper-class town. Everything in the township was gentrified and modernized, but the family-owned diner was kept (Kora figured) intentionally shitty to give the locals a place to cosplay as Ordinary Folks. Kora had not known she had a shivering aversion to wet food until she’d taken the job, until she’d had to scrape half-eaten hamburger down the garbage disposal. At least, Kora thought now, blood was supposed to be wet. At least HVM had health insurance. Same shitty pay, slightly-less-shitty benefits. A step up.

A step up to where, though? Her mind drifted sometimes—as it did now, as she scrubbed blood out of the ridges of a hemostat—to one of the few video games she’d been allowed to play as a kid, Super Mario 64, where the Italian plumber is confronted with an endless staircase. If you hadn’t collected enough power stars, you got stuck in an endless loop, climbing red, velvet steps up and up and up forever, for the staircase would never end. Kora had been allowed to play this game because it was free of Satan’s influence—no magic (well, unless power stars counted as magic), no violence (unless jumping on cartoon turtles was violence), no spiritism (that her parents knew of). There was a level called Big Boo’s Haunt, where Mario had to venture through a haunted mansion, and Kora always made sure to play that level only when mom and dad weren’t around. They were just cartoon ghosts, not even called “ghosts” in the game.

“Sounds like you’re looking for excuses,” Kora’s mom had said when she’d inevitably caught her, “to let Satan into this house.”

When Kora’s daughter Liv played Mario 64 for the first time, Kora had not made her skip Big Boo’s Haunt. She let Liv read The Hobbit, even though it had a wizard; she let Liv celebrate Christmas, even though Jesus didn’t really die that day; she let Liv spend the night with her “worldly” 4th grade friends, because Kora and Olivia Kershner were worldly people now.

Maybe since Jill Ballard was only half in Satan’s world, she had a 50% shot at being resurrected in paradise. The resurrection is not guaranteed, because only Jehovah and Jesus know for certain who was wicked in their hearts. Only death is inevitable.

Jill Ballard, then, was always going to die. Whether it happened fifty years from now due to a random heart attack or a suicide yesterday at the age of 29, Jill was always going to die. The question was whether God would bring her back.

Kora grabbed another set of scissors from the dirty surgical set beside the sink, ran it under the water, splayed the handles apart, scrubbed the insides of the blades. She plopped it in the enzymatic tub to soak, moved onto the hemostats. When it was done, she set the instruments back in their trays,F stacked them on the tiered racks of the washer, and slid them through. Started a cycle, water flooded the window. On the other side, another cycle would begin.

This is what she missed about the organization: the cycle. The routine. One of those lazy-rivers that lets you float along a perfect loop. Jehovah’s Witnesses were like that. Sterile Processing was like that. Life, regrettably, was not.

Life was a messy, squiggly line that always ended one way no matter how long it dragged on for: you’re born, you grow up, you make friends, you fuck your friends, it’s never the same, then your family shuns you, God abandons you, the friends you fucked die, you find out on Facebook, then one day it’s your turn to make the evening news.

Well. Let’s be real. Kora wouldn’t make the news. Trees fall in forests all the time, but there’s too many trees to give a shit about all the sounds they make. There would be only silence when Kora died. No ripple of grief would be spread by her passing. Even Liv might be relieved.

That evening Dax would text Kora, asking her if she was “dooming again,” and Kora would smile in spite of herself. Smile in spite of the shame, and fear, and the horrible, wonderful pain she would feel as flesh peeled off her bloody hands.

Jehovah’s Witnesses had a saying: “we are temporary residents of this world.” The end could come any day—the governments and banks and politicians and entertainers would be condemned to a fiery destruction. Good Witnesses, ones who followed all the rules and really loved Jehovah in their heart of hearts, would survive. They would transform the earth into a beautiful paradise, returning God’s creation to its original Edenic state.

This life, then, the nine-to-five and work friends and birthday parties, was not real. It was a thing people said, and she grew to become one of the people who said it: “this is not the real life.” Real life begins after Armageddon, when Jehovah cleans the slate and imprisons Satan in the abyss. But that was only true for those In Good Standing. Those whose hearts were pure, and only God could know that. But the elders had reckoned God knew Kora’s heart was no good, so she’d been disfellowshipped and cast out like a leper. Or worse, actually, because Jesus healed lepers. If you were disfellowshipped, only you could heal yourself. You were shunned to a demonic place that was “not the real world,” with all the people who would die when the fireballs rained.

As Kora scrubbed dried blood off the teeth of a pair of forceps, the music answered through her earbuds. The lyrics to a song:

I’m not living, I’m just killing time

***

Dirty to clean, rinse, scrub, wash cycle, repeat. When that cycle ended the next began: changing out of her scrubs and spraying on deodorant; waiting on the shuttle bus to take her to the employee lot; waiting in stalled traffic at four-way-stops along two-lane roads between vast fields of crops. Hurry up and wait. Always in transit from one place to the next, always arriving where she’d already been. In the pick-up line at Hayes Elementary, the sensation crept up, as it often did, that she was meant to be doing something else.

Kora wondered if she killed Jill, in some roundabout, time-delayed way. Kora had lit a fuse all those years ago, when she and Jill were just teenagers fooling around; they’d told themselves they were only pretending, practicing, daring each other. Kora thought the bomb went off a decade ago, when she got disfellowshipped after a couple reprovals and a marking. But maybe the fuse had stayed lit all that time, winding around corners Kora hadn’t known to be there. Maybe the bomb was going off now.

Children screamed and cheered when the school bell rang. Kids poured out of the red brick building. Kora grabbed a pen from the cupholder and jabbed it into the top of her thigh, pressing it until she felt the ballpoint break past the denim and puncture her skin. It gave her focus, brought her mind back from the depths: she needed to be present. There was someone counting on her, now. Jill was dead, and would continue to be dead after Liv finished her homework and went to sleep.

Olivia. Her daughter, tiny but growing far too fast, was trotting happily with a too-big backpack up to the car with a gummy smile. This was the power of Liv’s smile: it could break through the eighty layers of irony poisoning and depression and cynicism caked on Kora’s soul and let light through.

Liv hopped in and did her seatbelt. “Good day?” Liv asked, noting her mother’s smile.

Kora said, “It is, now.”

On the way home they talked about their days.

“Learn anything fun today?”

“I learned some snakes can hold their breath underwater for 45 minutes,” said Liv.

“That’s…not fun. That’s terrifying.”

Liv shrugged. “Just a fact. They’re gonna show some reptiles in Assembly this week. A man from the Columbus Zoo is coming.”

“This man from the zoo, is he planning on drowning a snake?”

Liv laughed. “I don’t think so. Assembly is only half an hour.”

They sang along to Taylor Swift on shuffle (Liv’s choice) as they drove through patches of suburbia. Kora made a left on Franz, the long road that got shittier the closer they got to their shitty apartment, like it had been built that way on purpose. A funnel straight to the poor side of town.

When an ad came on the radio, Liv asked, “Did you learn anything at work?”

That was the deal. Liv decided last year it wasn’t fair that mommy got to ask what Liv learned, but Liv didn’t get to ask what mommy learned. Kora could not argue with that logic. She also, on this day, was not ready to tell Liv about Jill, not ready to broach the subject of death in general.

“Hmm. I learned that my coworker, Sheryl—”

“Sheryl who smells like old-lady breath?”

“Uh-huh, which is why you gotta brush your teeth, right? You’re not allowed to have old lady breath until you’re old.”

“Eww.”

“Deal?”

“Deal, deal, just tell me.”

“Well, I learned that Sheryl divorced the same man and remarried him four times.”

Liv scrunched her nose. “Why?”

There wasn’t a good answer to that. “Love is weird. You’ll learn that when you’re older.”

“I already know that. I love you, and you’re weird.”

Kora smiled, saw her daughter’s smile in the rearview. “I love you too, weirdo.”

***

Their apartment was like all the others in the three-story building—one and a half bedrooms, one bathroom, a half-kitchen, no dishwasher. Coin laundry in the next building over. Kora wondered what Liv made of the place. Most of her friends at school lived in houses; the cartoons and Disney Channel shows Liv watched did not feature little girls living in places like this, places that were not horrible but rather small and uninspiring. Kora worried Liv thought the same thing she herself did—that the girl deserved something better.

You wouldn’t think it by the way Liv acted. Liv was, by every observable metric, happy. Kora only worried her daughter had not learned unhappiness yet, worried her daughter, like everyone else, would soon realize that Kora had been failing all along.

A cellphone on the “dining room table” buzzed. Dining room and table both seemed like exaggerations but given its utility and location but it’s what Kora had come to call it, and anyway a phone was buzzing. Not Kora’s though—Liv’s. She hadn’t realized it until she picked it up and saw the screen, with the Rey From Star Wars home screen picture. And the name on the text message: GRANDMA.

A geyser of adrenaline burst in Kora’s chest. Probably nothing, Kora told herself, mom wouldn’t…but of course mom would, and of course mom did. Of course, when Kora read the text chain, it was something.

GRANDMA: “A cute cartoon that made me think of you” hug emoji.

There was a link to the cartoon in question, which led to the Jehovah’s Witness website. Some knock-off Pixar-looking thing called “Become Jehovah’s Friend.” Sweet boiling Christ, they have cartoons now.

Liv had responded an hour later with a heart. “Ty gammy”

Before Kora could reason herself out of rage she had already hit the call button—an instinct. Then she heard a voice behind her.

“Oh…”

Kora turned around—Liv was there, looking guilty.

“Did you watch this?”

“I was going to tell you…”

“When? Why didn’t—” Kora composed herself, took in a shaky breath. “I’m not mad at you, sweetie, I just…”

“Livvy?” the voice crackled from the phone.

Fucking hell. Kora forgot she’d already dialed. Liv was flushed red; Kora figured she looked (and sounded) the same way.

“Mom.” That’s how Kora said it, a one-word statement, an accusation contained in the one syllable.

“Oh! Koraline, is everything—?”

“Yep, just…” Kora trailed off as she paced into the living room. “Just wanted to—go work on your homework, Liv, mommy’s talking to grandma.” Liv, who had been lingering in the kitchen, sulked off to her bedroom.

“Mom said, “So, she’s alright?”

Kora collapsed into the couch. “Of course, she’s alright. It’s just that we—” Kora saw Liv peeking out of her bedroom doorway; she snapped her finger and mouthed “homework.” Pouting, Liv closed her bedroom door. “Mom, we—you…” Kora stopped: deep breath. “You remember I told you about boundaries, right?”

Mom feigned politeness. “I do.”

“Liv’s cell…only in emergencies, remember?”

“There was an emergency,” mom said, not a shade of anxiety in her voice. “A cuteness emergency. Did she like it?”

“No, actually, she’s pretty upset by it. Because she knows you and I had a conversation about keeping religion out of any inter—”

“Hmm, well she gave it a heart and said ‘thank you.’ Well, she wrote ‘ty’ which as I understand it is ‘slang’ for—”

“Thank you, yes. Liv was just being polite, okay?”

“How do you--?”

“I’m upset by it!”

Kora let the ugly silence fill in.

Her mom broke it. “Kora…she’s got to learn about Jehovah somehow.”

Knife blades dragged along Kora’s innards. “I can’t deal with this right now, mom.”

“I was going to call you and tell you, Koraline, and I’m sorry that this has been the conversation, but you should sit down. There’s something you should—”

“I know about Jill.” Kora clenched her teeth and forced the tears down. “Okay? I know what you’re going to say, I know what you’re doing, but I—”

“What I’m doing?”

“—need to make dinner, and Liv is struggling in math, so I have to—”

“’The cry of peace and security’ is going to be soon, Koraline.” Mom was holding back tears too. “Everything I taught you about, everything we as Jehovah’s people are still out there preaching about: it’s all coming true. And I’m not just talking about the Ballard girls.”

Wait. What? Kora flinched. “Ballard girls?”

“The great tribulation is coming soon, sweetie. The cry of peace and security is—”

“Mom, what hap--?”

“We just learned at the last regional convention that Russia is the prophesied King of the North, and—”

“Mom!” Kora shouted. “Why did you—Ballard girls? Plural?”

Her mother sighed. Long pause. “It wasn’t just Jill who died, sweetie. Hillary, too. Her sister, you remember?”

Kora felt frozen. Hypothermic. Her tears couldn’t be bothered to brave the cold. “I remember,” she said. “How?”

“If you believe the papers, same as Jill.”

Kora hadn’t read the papers, but the link she’d clicked on which led her to the online version of the Columbus Dispatch said Jill Ballard killed herself.

“12 hours later, Hillary just…It’s why you need to come back to Jehovah, Kora. Because Satan’s attacks are just going to get stronger in these last days.”

Kora stiffened. “Okay. I appreciate you, mom. Okay? I know your heart is in the right—I love you. But…yeah, I’m dealing with Jill, and now Hillary I guess, and dinner, and Liv needs to be able to make her own choices in life.”

“Oh, she will,” mom said. “She will make her own decisions. I know full well a mother doesn’t get to choose who her daughter grows up to be.”

Kora clicked off the phone, annoyed that her thumb didn’t crack the screen when she did it. The knives again, scraping her organs, a scream beneath her skin. She’d need a knife to let it out. Kora walked toward the kitchen.

Her trembling hand pulled open the silverware drawer. She’d had a good run. She drowned the remaining voice, already so quiet, telling her to stop. It wasn’t about hurting herself. It was about letting out the scream. It was about focus, clarity—

“I’m sorry mommy…”

Kora dropped the knife back in the drawer, quickly slid it shut. Turned around.

“Liv, baby—”

Liv ran over and hugged Kora around the waist.

“I’m sorry,” Liv said.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Liv hugged tighter. “I know, but you’re sad.”

At that Kora cried; Liv walked her over to the dining room table that wasn’t a dining room table. They both cried for awhile.

“Grandma makes you sad,” Liv said.

Kora took a shaky breath. “It’s complicated, baby girl.”

“Like dad?”

Kora nodded. There were too many fucking conversations she wasn’t ready to have. “Life’s a lot of complicated.” Liv looked worried, and Kora knew exactly what her concern was. “Not math-homework-complicated,” Kora said. “I promise math is just a thing you have to do in school.”

Liv looked skeptical, even though Kora had told her this many times. “What if in the future everyone has to be a mathematician?”

“We have calculators,” Kora smiled, “so it would be a very easy job.”

“But what if also, in that future, all the calculators came to life and made us our slaves to punish us for making them do all that math for so long?”

Kora laughed, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her hoodie. Liv was funny and kind and compassionate and creative. Kora would give her daughter a life where those qualities could blossom and grow into a future full of options. Kora had only ever been given one; Liv’s innocent joke had brought this fact to mind, or not even the joke itself, but one word: slave.

When Kora was Liv’s age she had been told, over and over: “you are a good for nothing slave.” It was said warmly, as a “loving reminder,” or as chastisement when she (or anyone in the congregation) needed an ego-check. “Luke seventeen-ten,” Kora’s mom would say, and Kora knew this was a prompt for her to recite the verse:

“When you have done all the things assigned to you, say: ‘We are good-for-nothing slaves. What we have done is what we ought to have done.’”

Liv would have a future. She was good for something. But Kora, like Jill, like Hillary, like all Jehovah’s people who fail to stay on the narrow path to salvation, was good for nothing. Good for nothing slaves had only one future, one fate, the same fate shared by all sinful mankind: thrown outside, into the darkness, to weep and gnash their teeth.

“Oh,” Liv said. Kora snapped out of her reverie; her daughter was already working on her math homework next to her on the not-a-table, and she spoke without so much as glancing up at Kora. “Who’s Jill?” Liv asked. “A friend from work?”

CHAPTER 1

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

2016

“Now I just might say that my mother, she was ready to sell up everything in the home, because she thought the end was coming in 1914.”

An old man was saying this on a flat screen display. Dressed in a suit and tie, he sat in front of bookshelves as scanlines from the VHS transfer hissed across the screen.

“And her feelings were that of lot of the brothers back then.” As the camera cut to sepia tone footage of a group of Bible Students, the man’s voice was replaced by an aggressively Canadian voice over:

“Despite such expectations, the distressing world conditions that erupted in 1914 would not mean that the Bible Students’ job was done.” Fade in: an archival black and white photo of Charles Taze Russell wearing a flat-brimmed hat. “Russell felt sure that a great work remained. He wrote: ‘We should lose no time dreaming that the door is shut! There are people who are seeking the Truth—people who are sitting in darkness.’ Yet, Russell would not personally reach those people. On October 31st, 1916, in the course of a preaching tour, he d—”

The screen went black. A young man with short blonde hair, a polo shirt and khakis hoisted it off the wall display, bumping the cardboard cutout of Russell next to it.

“End of an era,” he said to Ben.

Ben smiled and hurried over to help brother blonde with the television. “If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that the past couple months,” Ben said, hoisting his end of it, “we could have afforded to hire a moving company.”

Ben and his fellow worker with Christ carried the television while other brothers and sisters grabbed cardboard displays of sound trucks from the 1940s, framed portraits of the governing body members, and glass enclosures of old tomes by Russell and Rutherford.

Ben and brother blonde ducked beneath the banner that two brothers on ladders were lowering, the banner that had marked the entrance to the museum for the past twenty years:

JEHOVAH DRAWS HIS PEOPLE OUT OF DARKNESS AND INTO THE LIGHT!

It was a long banner. Then again, Jehovah’s Witnesses had a long legacy; technically, it was eternal.

When the museum had been open to pilgriming Witnesses, the “Out of Darkness” tour at Brooklyn Bethel traced God’s will back to the garden of Eden, then to Enoch, to Noah, to the Israelites, to John the Baptist, to Jesus Christ, to the Apostles, to the guy who invented the Gutenberg Press for some reason, to Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was like one of those passages from the Bible about who “begat” whom, brought to life by artifacts, TV screens, and props. Charles Taze Russell begat Joseph Rutherford; The Bible Students begat Jehovah’s Witnesses; Pennsylvania begat Brooklyn. Now Brooklyn would beget Warwick.

In seven days, the world headquarters of God’s One True Organization would move from Brooklyn to Warwick, New York. Out of the city and into the fields: the Bethel family agreed this was a sensible move given the thinning of the harvest. “The last of the last days” was the new catchphrase around headquarters. “Jehovah was getting His people in place,” was another. Getting them in the right place in time for the great tribulation, which would beget Armageddon, which would beget a new Paradise Earth with perfect health and eternal life. The future was eternal too, and busy.

As Ben and brother blonde trudged the flatscreen through the lobby, construction brothers were removing light fixtures and waiting room chairs. Ben had given a talk last Sunday to the last few chosen to remain at Brooklyn during the transition: he’d compared them to the Israelites moving the arc of the covenant.

“Where they got you assigned?” Ben asked brother blonde. “At the new digs.”

“I’m gonna be—pardon us,” the men swerved around two sisters in full dresses carrying a writing desk, “uh, in security, I think. Night shift.”

“Oof. I did nights on Warwick construction—excuse me, sister—for three months back in Spring. I’m still not sleeping right.”

“Eh. I like night shift.”

“Then it’s a blessing,” Ben said.

Brother blonde smiled. “If it’s for Jehovah, it’s always a blessing.”

They’d reached the threshold of the entrance to Brooklyn Bethel. Through the propped-open doors taxis honked at the Watchtower moving truck pulled halfway onto the curb. A couple Witness men sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups scooted out of Ben and blonde’s way as they carried the display.

Past the uneven skyline way out in the distance stretched the Queensborough bridge. When researching his talk Ben had looked on JW.ORG and learned the bridge was built in 1908, the same year Jehovah had moved His people to 29 Columbia Heights. The next year, both opened to the public. Two major pieces of New York iconography in the same year, like God had connected them with some divine thread. Now that Bethel was moving, maybe the bridge would collapse.

The men walked the television up the ramp of the moving truck and Tetris-blocked it between couch cushions and bubble-wrapped paintings.

“Ben Duncolm,” said Ben Duncolm to his new moving buddy. “Like ‘done-comb’ your hair.”

Brother blonde gave the requisite chuckle. “Denny Clark,” he said. “Like…Clark.” A look of recognition—Denny brightened and snapped his finger: “Wait a minute. Duncolm?”

Ben dimmed—the whole done comb your hair bit had become a reflex, passed down from his father. And Ben was really, really trying not to think about his father this morning.

“He’s my dad,” Ben said. Better to rip off the band aid.

“Speaking of blessings! My dad didn’t raise me in the truth, so lemme tell ya something—you are very blessed to have a father on the—”

“What are we moving next, Brother Clark?” said Ben.

Denny gave him a funny look. “You are moving your be-hind to morning worship. Whole reason we’re here is to support you brothers, so you’s can work during the transition.”

Ben checked his cellphone for the time and his stomach sank.

“Shoot,” he said. The screen was on the last page he left it, the text thread with his bunkmate, Derrin. Ben had sent the last message, and could see that Derrin had read it:

Call me when you wake up? Read at 4:54am. It was now 6:43am. Ben’s stomach sank further. Shit.

“Shoot.” Ben looked up at Denny Clark. “Lost track of time.”

“Just don’t make a habit of it,” Denny said with a smile. He patted Ben on the back and hopped off the back of the moving truck as construction brothers hauled in a desk. He looked back before walking out of view: “After all, ’The time left is reduced.’”

***

Ben knew damn well ‘the time left [was] reduced.’ He knew the phrase was from 1 Corinthians 7:29, too—he’d been making Bible-verse flash cards since Denny Clark was still wiping his snot under the Kingdom Hall seats. The kid didn’t understand yet that it wasn’t enough to “know” the world was going to end. It wasn’t enough for the will to be strong.

None of that is enough if the flesh is weak.

Ben checked his phone again even though he hadn’t felt it buzz. Still nothing from Derrin. Still left on read.

In the elevator Ben fished his tie out of his jacket’s breast pocket and fumbled with the knot—given that all he had in the tank was two cumulative hours of patchy sleep, he’d settle for getting his necktie on straight. The knot in his stomach would keep till after breakfast.

When the door dinged, he stepped onto the main floor of the compound, ready to wade into the sea of Christ’s fellow workers: that soothing shoal of brown slacks and tucked-in shirts, ankle-length dresses, heels and penny loafers clacking in stiff herati carpet.

But today the sea felt more like a pond. Now that the new Headquarters building was completed and the Brooklyn property was sold, God’s house was no longer the buzzing hive of Jehovah’s people darting about with purpose and zeal. The zeal was there; the purpose had not changed. It’s just that a billionaire’s son had signed the title deed so God could buy a nicer house in the country.

Though, really, the hive had been thinned out even before Warwick.

“Cutbacks,” “reassignments,” “The Purge”, whatever you want to call it—and Ben’s overseer would certainly rather he not call it The Purge—there had been a quiet culling of the Bethelites ofter the past five years. This was God’s house, built by God’s people (and sure, fine, a few worldly contractors) to further the work of God’s kingdom. The end was closer now more than ever—every minute really, was closer to Armageddon than the last. Despite the nearness of the end, despite the urgency of the preaching work to warn the masses of the good news—the good news that was only good news if you were on the right side of Armageddon…well, despite all that Jehovah had still seen fit to cut about fifty percent of the Bethel staff back in 2013.

This fact had not so much troubled Ben as it had left him feeling a dull jealously that he had not been one of those reassigned. He had no will to leave Bethel; it’s just that he didn’t want to be there anymore. Those were two different things, Ben knew, even if he couldn’t explain it with words. He hadn’t been able to explain it to Derrin last night, either. Maybe that’s why things had gotten out of hand.

The Bethel halls were mellow gray, lined with paintings from Watchtower literature: Jesus speaking in hushed tones to a gaggle of happy children, the green Judean hillocks rolling behind them in waves; a smiling family in business-casual regalia on a sofa studying The Watchtower magazine together, the visage of Christ beaming above them in approval. Most of the men who got recruited to the art department had never held a paintbrush before they arrived, Ben had heard from several sources. It was not talent but holy spirit that guided them, another miracle of Jehovah’s one true organization.

Holy spirit saw fit to assign Ben to the printing department. Not that he’d ever had the desire to be a painter, it’s just that apparently talent and desire were not prerequisites, and he hadn’t wanted to be in the printery, either.

Ben’s stomach puckered and his eyes grew heavy. He hoped to God above the cooking department had made pancakes this morning and not those slimy scrambled eggs that tasted like halitosis. Then he scolded himself; after last night, he’d earned runny eggs.

“Brother Duncolm!”

Behind Ben a squat man shuffled up—Brother Wycke, iPad tucked beneath his armpit. The two exchanged greetings, shook hands, your fly is down, yours too, no seriously your fly is down, oh sorry guess I need my morning coffee yet.

“I didn’t get a chance to say how much I enjoyed your talk last Sunday,” said Brother Wycke. “The tabernacle connection, really lovely.”

“That was all Jehovah,” Ben said. This was what he was supposed to say, yes, but it was also true—he had not prepared nearly sufficiently for last Sunday’s talk. He was only substituting for another elder who dropped out at the last minute, and he told this to Wycke.

“Well, Jehovah used you all the same,” said Brother Wycke. He sipped from his styrofoam cup for a beat before adding suggestively: “He’s using me to recruit parking attendants for the regional convention this year…any chance you—”

“I’m already assigned to cleaning,” said Ben.

“Had to ask. You know how it is.”

Ben forced a grin. “I do. I’m going to start asking strangers at the door if they can help scrub the mezzanine toilets.”

In the dining hall Ben took his assigned seat at his assigned table—315, the same one he’d been at since he arrived at the complex eight years prior. At each seat there was a small drawer hidden behind the spot where the lattice draped off the table, and from this he removed his notebook and Bible. Maybe that would quiet the thought darting around his brain all night like a fly trapped in a jar:

Dad can’t find out.

Nobody can find out, but dad really, really can’t fucking find out.

Instinctively Ben turned to the Psalms, hoping some encouraging, affirming verse would leap off the page and swaddle his wicked mind. That’s why dad had always taught Ben to start the day with Bible reading: a daily dose of manna to get one’s head straight. Straight being the operative word on this day, as Ben forcibly blurred the mental image of Derrin’s shower-slick calves yesterday morning—every morning, unless he overslept. He dragged the image to a dark corner in the back of his mind. He ignored Brother Chapman across the table, the way his rolled-up sleeves hugged his caramel-colored forearms; he ignored Sister Wilson beside him, her perfect blue eyes, and angled cheekbones; ignored also the sudden invasive memory of his high school crush Sadie Gordon, the only girl in his whole life who had ever told him he looked “sexy” after AP World History. He still, twelve years later, could not tell if she had said it ironically.

Dad can’t find out.

Okay, fine, he wasn’t ignoring any of it; in fact he was actively thinking about all of it, all at once, until the overwhelming buzz of shame and temptation filling his skull weighed it down. He closed his eyelids and took deep breaths. Others passing by might mistake it for a prayer.

Maybe he could distract himself with something else, with the chatter of the mess hall, where each laugh and hearty greeting resounded off the glassware and up to the high ceilings, basking the room in a wholesome glow.

He set the Word aside and let Jehovah God strengthen his resolve through the joy and camaraderie of his brothers and sisters around him. Mostly brothers.

Brothers, Ben knew, who had absconded to this place for the same reason he had: to avoid temptation.

“Lots of brothers who struggle with your…situation,” Ben had been told by his old circuit overseer who (he now knew in hindsight) had not understood his ‘situation’ one bit, “well, lotta them brothers go to Bethel. They get—well not cured. Focused, I should say. Being surrounded by holy spirit, truly doing all things for God’s glory…it changes a man. Focuses him. It’ll drown those sinful thoughts right out.”

Eight years later Ben instead felt like he was drowning in his sinful thoughts. Drowning with all the other “focused” men and women who thought locking themselves in a building full of other tempted people might somehow diminish the effect.

A loud belly-laugh from far back—Sister West, for sure, nobody else laughed like that—somehow low and shrill at the same time. The sixty-something year old Black woman and Ben had been in the same field service group when they were new at Bethel, and every morning they’d hug like it had been a long time since the last one. Sister West made her way to Ben, and he stood up from the table to greet her. They embraced.

“You eating enough these days, young man?” she said, squeezing him a bit tighter at the arms, then his sides before letting go, performing a physical exam Ben was apparently failing.

“Not enough of your muddy-buddies,” smiled Ben, “I know that for a fact.”

“I told you, we call it ‘puppy chow’ back in Indiana. Better name for it, if you ask me—who wants to be buddies with someone covered in mud?”

“Who wants to eat dog food?”

A pleasant ding rang out from the loudspeakers and the chatter died down on cue; the jovial conversation and laughter was replaced with the sounds of shuffling chairs and drawers. Sister West promised a batch of whatever-he-wanted-to-call-it tomorrow, Ben said he’d hold her to it. As he settled into his seat, beside the other men in suits and the women in ankle-length dresses, god’s spirit drew Ben’s eyes to the perfectly arranged lines of long dining tables, and his place among them all.

All heads turned toward the projection screen at the front of the cafeteria where digital numbers counted from two minutes down. It was silent but for interspersed whispers followed by interspersed shushes then interspersed sorrys and then the cycle repeated.

The grind of wood against linoleum next to him—in the corner of her eye he saw a gingham dress flit against the tablecloth as Mandea sat down in her chair. Tall dark and handsy, mid-forties, married. His type.

Everyone was Ben’s type. That was the problem.

Mandea (Sister Belnor, he corrected himself) reached across the table and gently touched Ben’s arm. His heartrate picked up.

“You alright there, Brother Duncolm?” she said as her husband sat down next to her. She retracted her hand. “You look wan.”

“Oh sure,” Ben said. “Just up late.” He gave a polite nod to her husband, Dan, who worked in personnel department because boring people were assigned to the personnel department no matter how improbably beautiful their wives were.

“Gotta get that sleep,” said Dan.

See? Boring. “Noted,” said Ben. Sister Belnor gave Ben a kind smile and her husband an even kinder one, the sort of smile that can’t be faked (and on the subject of fake smiles Ben was an expert).

“Oh hey,” said Mandea Belnor, turning back to Ben one last time. Her eyes were bright and excited. “Tell your dad we loved his talk on the Broadcast this month.”

There was no better way to kill a boner than the mention of Ben’s father. “Sure thing,” he said.

Why did Ben fall in love with every half-attractive person he saw? He could so easily envision himself in other people’s lives, a piece of furniture to be plucked off a shelf and set in the living room. When he tried to picture the sort of person who might want to be in his life, imagination failed him. He could not imagine being someone else’s fantasy.

“Good morning, brothers,” said the voice on the screen when the clock hit zero. There was Fred Garett: an older brother with the raveled accent of a man who’d never settled anywhere but faraway places; South African, maybe, with an Australian tinge. His face was weathered and cracked, deep rivulets tracing his jawline.

“Before we begin our morning worship,” said Brother Garrett, “The branch has asked us to consider the following announcement…”

The mood in the dining hall chilled. There was only one kind of announcement that pre-empted worship:

“James Briar is no longer one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

A low roar of murmurs and barely-suppressed gasps.

“James Briar was escorted from his Bethel assignment on Sunday, October 11th, 2016...”

Brother Garrett let the solemn silence take its space. Ben had heard the name before but could not put a face to it. Briar worked in, oh, what was it…laundry? It was tough to memorize all the members of one’s spiritual family when there’s two hundred of them and they all work full time in different departments. Bowing his head, Ben begged Jehovah once again for forgiveness for his own sins. In the dreadful, simmering pause between the words “announcement” and “James,” Ben had been certain somehow he or his roommate had already been caught and tried in the Hague, even though the incident with Derrin had happened only hours ago.

Even though, Ben knew it would technically be impossible. Disfellowshipping had, as did everything in God’s organization, a detailed bureaucratic process with multiple meetings and paperwork filled out in triplicate:

James Briar, whoever he was, had (1) been caught or confessed to committing a sin, (2) met with a group of three congregation elders with no personal bias toward the sinner, (3) the elders had determined that James was not sufficiently repentant for his gross misconduct, (4) James had been informed that he would be disfellowshipped, but also informed of his right to appeal the decision within seven days, (5) should the appeal period lapse or the disfellowshipee refuse his right to do so, (6) the announcement would be made to the entire Christian Congregation at the following meeting.

So sayeth The Sovereign Lord, Jehovah in his training manual designed for Elders’ eyes only, amen.

Don’t worry, Ben told himself wryly, even if Derrin rats it’ll be weeks before you’re out on your ass and shunned.

Ben then said another prayer begging for forgiveness for negative thinking.

Brother Garrett’s voice took over the silence, emanating from the speakers and television screens:

“Such announcements,” he was saying, “may temporarily diminish our joy. But really, friends, they are a stark warning from Jehovah. Look at our theme text for this morning: Second of Timothy, chapter two, verses sixteen and seventeen.”

Ben knew the verse well, but it had until this moment left his mind. Ben said a quick prayer of thanks to Jehovah. (If Jehovah kept a prayer jar the way Ben’s dad kept a swear jar, Jehovah would have an airport hangar stacked to the ceiling with jars of quarters from Ben Duncolm alone). He could not imagine it was a coincidence, this verse being read on this day. As Ben turned to the verse in his own Bible, syncopated with the shuffling of pages around the dining hall, he could feel the eye of his heavenly father watching down on him in paternal judgment.

On the screen, Brother Garret read the verse:

“But reject empty speeches that violate what is holy, for they will lead to more and more ungodliness, and their word will—and note this, brothers—spread like gangrene.

“That is a vivid description, is it not? Now, fortunately for us all, I was asked not to show any pictures of gangrene from Web MD.” Some uneasy courtesy-laughs from the flock. “So, no picture, but I do have a thousand words. Note what was said about this verse in the March 15th, 1986 edition of the Watchtower:

“A fitting analogy indeed! Like gangrene, apostate reasoning is nothing but quick-spreading spiritual death. And since the members of the congregation are like one body, there is a danger that others may be infected. If the one spreading apostate teachings cannot be restored to spiritual health by loving but firm application of the balm of God’s Word, amputation of this member (disfellowshipping) may be the only alternative for the protection of other members of the body. (Compare Titus 1:10, 11.) Do not be infected by deadly gangrene of a spiritual kind! Keep in good spiritual health by avoiding the contamination of apostate thinking.”

Ben read between the bold, italicized, underlined, double-spaced, 18-point font lines: James Briar was an apostate. His amputation was necessary for our spiritual health.

The thought of apostates made Ben squeamish; it was a sickening notion, intentionally turning your back on God. All this morning Ben had been stuck in a depressive stupor, down on himself, chastising his lack of self-control, worrying Jehovah had already given up on him, because maybe Ben was ready to give up on himself.

But at least I’m not an apostate, he told himself. A sinful bastard, but not an apostate.

The next thing Brother Garrett said, at least the way Ben heard it, may as well have been channeled to Ben Duncolm directly from Jehovah God above:

“We are often ‘on the watch’ for sins of the flesh: materialism, sexual immorality, what we might think of as ‘temptation,’ yes? But these are not the sly things of Satan. No, Satan may be content to tempt us with a flashing neon sign for a strip club. Hardly a hidden land-mine, and yet what have some brothers done? They have walked willingly into temptation.”

Ben updated his running tally: a sinful bastard, but not an apostate, and never been to a strip club.

“That, however, is rare,” said Brother Garrett. “Inevitably, brothers and sisters, we will sin, every one of us. Our imperfect human parents saw to that, hm? But in the book of second-Timothy, Paul warns there is one type of sin from which we do not so easily recover: apostasy.

“The infectious yet destructive notion that we know better than Jehovah and His chosen representatives: the governing body. We must be very cautious not to fall into this trap. There is no flashing neon sign. One does not simply wake up and realize one’s arm is rotten with flesh eating bacteria! Like all sin, like the demons themselves, like the rebellion in the garden of Eden, this Satanic infection starts small. And if left untreated, it will spread.”

During breakfast Ben choked down his runny eggs in silence, wondering nervously why he had not seen his roommate or his father during this especially portentous morning worship, thinking all the while that they tasted like what gangrene probably smells like.

***

“And uh, last thing…” Ben said, flipping to the last page on his clipboard, “the coordinator’s committee just wanted me to remind y—us to stay on top of the db-37 forms. We’re seeing more inflow than outflow and…you know, we’re doing real good on the sb-83’s but I think in our adjustment to our workflow after the last audit—sorry, I feel like I’m saying the word ‘flow’ a lot, but uh…well, you know. Just gotta make sure we’re working in harmony with Hebrews 6:11, make sure we have that ‘industrious’ attitude? Also, quick reminder, make sure you are checking Microsoft Outlook on a regular basis. Okay. That’s all. So…Greg? Could you conclude with prayer?”

Greg gave a perfunctory closing prayer and the half-dozen brothers in the layout wing dispersed to their respective cubicles.

By 8:30am Ben was sitting at his desk in the layout wing of the printing department at Branch Headquarters. His cubicle was gray like the others, snug in its corner of the four-by-four grid.

When Ben had been asked to move “upstairs” from the printing press floor to his current assignment, he’d been thankful: being a human assembly line packing cardboard boxes full of Watchtowers was a young man’s game, and when he’d turned thirty last year it was like a near-decade of manual labor hit his spinal column all at once. Days like this though, he missed the balletic mindlessness of doing the same physical motions, over and over. It was like being a literal cog in God’s great machinery; his brain could turn off completely, enter stasis.

This morning all he could do was refresh his phone and wonder why Darrin had never texted him back.

As he was reviewing the cover layout for what would either be January or February 2017’s edition of the Awake! (the department stayed far ahead of schedule, as any day Satan’s world could shut down the preaching work) as his eyes blurred enough to see his own dull reflection overlaying the excel spreadsheet on the screen, there was a knock on the entryway. It was his overseer, or not just his overseer—it was his overseer’s overseer, Tom Wilder.

Knock knock knock knock…knock

“Brother, you’re not in the ministry, you don’t have to knock,” Ben smiled. But inside he was bracing for bad news—morning worship aside, it was never good to see your boss’s boss, he figured.

“I got a story about that,” said Brother Wilder, who was the kind of man who had a story about everything. “I’ll tell you after.

“After what?”

“You got a few minutes?”

“Sure…” Ben felt an anxious flutter in his chest. “Everything alright?”

Brother Wilder nodded to the doorway, past the cubicle grid. “It’ll just be a few minutes.”

Wilder led the way down the hall to wherever they were going.

Past wooden doors to other rooms just like it, Brother Wilder ushered Ben inside a conference room. Four white walls, a blank projector screen pulled down on the far end of the room, and in the middle was a square table and swivel-chairs where the two men would sit—no. Three. Brother Dario was sitting there already—an elder who worked for the writing department. And upon seeing this, Ben thought:

Shit.

Two elders, a surprise meeting, no details. These usually went precisely one way: with an announcement, one nearly identical to the one Brother Garrett had given this morning but with two critical words swapped in:

Benjamin Duncolm is no longer one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

***

The three men exchanged unpleasant pleasantries; none of them was eager to get into the specifics. You keepin’‘em in line there in Printing, Ben? Oh, I try, brother. Forced chuckles. Leather ruffled and squeaked as the men slouched into their respective swivel-chairs, and then the only sound was the low buzz of the fluorescent lights. Dario said nothing. Wilder sat with himself for a moment, opening his mouth, closing it, then opening it again, like he was typing out and deleting a text before hitting send.

“Maybe it’d be best if we opened with prayer,” Brother Dario eventually said. Ben nodded, so did Wilder, thankful for the other man’s suggestion, and the three bowed their heads.

Derrin ratted. Those were the words Ben kept repeating in his head: Derrin ratted. That’s why Ben hadn’t seen him this morning, that’s why Ben sat before these two men now: when sin came to light, this was how these things went.

He knew he wasn’t getting a promotion (also knew he wasn’t supposed to think of new assignments as “promotions”) so the next logical explanation would be discipline.

Morning worship this morning had not been a warning from God to straighten up—it had been His opening argument in the case against Ben’s salvation.

“Jehovah God, our heavenly father,” Brother Wilder said in the pious, sleepy manner typical of his prayers, “we come before you now to ask that your holy spirit guide this conversation…”

They had hardly done anything, Ben and Derrin, not anything they hadn’t already done by themselves at some point. Nobody else knew but the two of them. Except…

“…and Jehovah, we ask you forgive us our sins, and calm our minds for the…”

Jehovah had seen it. Ben’s heavenly father had seen the whole thing (the mental image of God looking down on the scene felt like punishment enough) and the Bethel halls were rife with damn-near supernatural stories of the holy spirit revealing hidden sins.

“—and complete trust,” Brother Wilder concluded, “in the direction of the faithful and discreet slave: The Governing Body. In Jesus’ name we pray…amen,”

“Amen,” said Ben; well, he had attempted to say it but could only cough up some guttural noise. Ben’s heart was a speedbag and his mouth was full of cotton.

“Sorry for interrupting your morning, Brother Duncolm,” Wilder said. “I know it’s all a little sudden and strange. Any consolation, it’s strange for us, too.”

Brother Dario just nodded.

Ben nodded back. If he kept his mouth shut, he couldn’t say the wrong thing.

“Well, Brother Duncolm,” said Brother Dario, half-pointing to the projector, “if you turn your attention to the screen.” A knob on the desk controlled the lights, and Dario dimmed the room.

Was nobody going to explain what the unholy fuck was happening?

“Sorry brothers,” said Ben, “I feel like I’m missing som—”

“Brother Duncolm,” said Tom, “we ask that you just watch the video and hold your questions ‘till the end.”

The room fell, for a slow blink, entirely dark. Before Ben’s eyes could adjust to the blackness, the projector kicked on and whirred, and light beamed out in a flickering cone. The men in the room were shadows now, reduced to silhouettes by the projected image. The image of a man Ben recognized. Sitting at a desk—the desk, in the JW Broadcasting studio—was Governing Body member Hollis Duncolm.

Ben’s father.

“We warmly welcome you,” dad said, “to this special program. On behalf of the Governing Body, we thank you dear brother for your hard work in your assignment. How privileged we are as full-time servants to live in this fortified spiritual paradise—Bethel, which means, house of God!”

Raw nerves aside, so far, this special program sounded like every other non-special program produced by the Body. Aside, too, from the circumstances, which did not feel special in Ben’s estimation so much as ominous. His father’s pale, saggy skin was stuffed into a charcoal suit, white hair coiffed into a precarious slope. Framed in the center of the screen the old man sat, as the Body always sat, stiffly and gravely before a spinning globe graphic, hands folded on the desk. Dad, as always, was aiming for spiritual but hit closer to a newsman long past retirement age, like someone had dragged Walter Cronkite’s corpse out for one last rodeo. Derrin had given Ben the “Zombie Cronkite” line and Ben wondered as he watched if every tiny observation from now on would be a reminder of one stupid mistake with one stupidly attractive man.

“Staying busy in service to our grand creator, in constant fellowship with Jehovah’s people, ensures we are focused on work that brings our heavenly father joy, and helps protect us from the ‘crafty acts’ of Satan the Devil.”

Ben glanced to the other two men, who nodded along in a practiced manner. Dad stretched and exaggerated each word, and the alchemy of Ben’s nerves, familiar phrases, and troubling circumstances slid Ben into a sort of keyed-up hypnosis.

“However,” said Brother Duncolm Sr. on the screen, “we might ask ourselves—if we are working harder than ever, is not The Adversary working harder as well? How true this is! Revelation twelve-twelve provides a sobering warning: ‘Woe for the earth and for the sea, because the Devil has come down to you, having great anger, knowing that he has a short period of time.’”

Graphics from the art department faded in, replacing Zombie Cronkite with illustrations of the Apostle John writing on upon a scroll.

“These inspired words were written in 96 C.E. How much more dire this warning is in our day!”

Apostle John was replaced by American soldiers and tanks.

“Ever since the year 1914 when Jesus began ruling invisibly in heaven, we have seen uncontestable proof that Satan is the ruler of the earth, a ‘roaring lion, seeking to devour’ any lover of Jehovah in the few remaining months before Armageddon.”

Months. Ben’s pulse quickened. The Governing Body had never been that specific before, at least not in Ben’s lifetime.

“To that end, Jesus has directed his faithful slave, the Governing Body, to adjust our understanding of how to combat direct attacks on God’s people.

“What do we mean by that phrase, ‘direct attacks’?

Usually Ben knew the answers to these rhetorical questions. Not here. For the first time in a long time, Ben had no idea what his father was about to say next.

“As Noah in his day dealt with the Nephilim, and our Lord Jesus in his earthly ministry dealt with legions of wicked spirits, the first century apostles dealt directly with demonic possession. Satan was not to content to merely mislead persons—no, his agents, the demons, inhabited the bodies of certain persons, tormenting them and using them as puppets to follow his voice, and influence others.”

Ben was still telling himself this couldn’t be going where it sounded like it was going.

“Insight on the Scriptures Volume II describes demon possession as ‘The captive control and influence of a person by an invisible wicked spirit.’”

Ben was leaning in, eyes wide and unblinking, brow furrowed. They’re going there.

“Should we expect Satan to lessen these direct attacks in our day? On the contrary! As we saw from God’s own word, Satan knows his time left is reduced. The May 1st, 1968 Watchtower gave this frank warning:

‘”Satan the Devil has a real problem where time is concerned. He has very little left. What he would not give to have more time to work out his debased purposes! But he does not, and so is furious. You can be certain that he will use that remaining time to his best advantage in opposing God and his servants on earth.’”

By this point Ben had nearly leaned his entire ass off his seat, unconcerned with but not unaware of the way the two elders were studying his reaction.

“It must be acknowledged,” dad droned, “that thus far, Jehovah’s organization mirrors the first century congregation in almost every way, except one: works of the spirit.

“Yes, Christ Jesus expelled demons. The first century apostles expelled demons. Yet in the 150 years of Jehovah’s organization, we have not performed a single exorcism.

“Until now.

“You, dear brother, are being called for a special assignment.”

ALLEGHENY, PENNSYLVANIA

October 31^st, 1896

Every Tuesday evening and Sunday morning the movement met in what was, until recently, the second floor of a tannery on the east side of town. The group was far past full capacity when mother first brought Abram to a meeting, and in the three years hence the movement’s cup had runneth’d over, spilleth’d over, really—now the huddled Bible Students stretcheth’d down the stairwell and floodeth’d the main floor.

Every day more people were climbing on the arc before the coming flood.

The Pastor said the Bible said that Satan ruled the world, but soon God would kill the devil and all the bad men who worshipped him. Abram had never met a person who worshipped the devil, but Father said that most folks worship the devil without even knowing it. “Those who reject the true God and his warriors,” proclaimed the Pastor last Sunday, “join Satan’s army by default.”

Given his options Abram much preferred being in a regiment armed with King James Bibles and leaflets, and as heavy as Father’s preaching bag was, the old man assured him a rifle weighed more.

So, Abram fought the bloodless war, but the blood, he knew, was coming. Before mother had the good sense to pull him out of school, back when Abram had been stuck in class waiting for the world to end, he would imagine the rapture coming that instant, and the cosmic spectacle of the school’s destruction. He imagined peering down from the clouds at his own hollow body lying peaceful in the rubble while women screamed and men burned and horses ran wild through the streets. All the nasty children who made fun of Abram would die in that divinely cratered schoolhouse, looking up as they burned, skin boiling over, musculature melting. And at a critical interval before returning to dust, before blacking out from choking on smoke, there would be (the Pastor promised) a glorious moment of clarity: every human on earth would realize Abram had been right all along.

The Bible Students had the truth after all.

And the children would die knowing Abram had tried to save them.

This is what Abram was doing three days before he drowned: saving the world. One door slam at a time.

“Not interested.”

One flintlock rifle at a time.

“This here’s private property!”

One sliver of hope at a time.

“Just a nickel, you say?”

Yes, “the time left [was] reduced,” and “the days [were] growing scant.” There would be “meat in due season,” and so certain was the Pastor of this fact that the words MEAT IN DUE SEASON were emblazoned across a banner on the side of the stagecoach. The words stood above a timeline that showed, with arithmetic and God’s word, the year the world would end:

1914

Abram Hinze, age of nine, still had no idea what MEAT IN DUE SEASON meant and feared most onlookers would mistake their divine proclamation as an advertisement for the West Philly Slaughterhouse.

“Look, I appreciate you gentlemen spreading the gospel,” the woman at the door was saying—really, yelling over the cry of the baby in her arms. “But I told you, we have a church.” The householder was paler than Abram’s own rear end and the politeness was draining from her countenance. The Pastor stuck his boot in the way before the door could slam shut. The baby cried louder.

“I have no quarrel with your church,” the Pastor said. “I am not here selling snake oil, nor indeed do our volunteers make a profit. Every penny goes back into the work of the Lord. Take my companion Abram, for instance–”

“No quarrel, he says! Already we can hardly escape your quarrelsome rants in the paper, the radio, now here you are on my doorstep, quarreling!—hush, now, shhh, darling—Now, I’ve a screaming child and my husband is not about, which as a fellow Christian I am sure you—” her face suddenly fell. “Oh, hell. Isn’t that your buggy?”

The woman pointed behind the preachers, and the twin horses stood unbothered as two teenage boys heaved a bucket of black paint o

n the side of the carriage. The inky black spattered over the chart of the ages, the scriptural passages.

Russell turned red, bolted after the hooligans.

A third boy had been crouching by the bushes on lookout. He hopped up and yelled, “Happy Halloween, Russelites!” as he joined the other two, scampering down the brick road, holding their flat caps from flying off. The artist of the trio flung the paint bucket behind and the kids ducked into the alley between the pharmacy and the barber. Russell’s tailored three piece suit was not made for running; he gave up the chase after about five angry clomps.

The baby’s whaling snapped Abram out of his daze, and he realized he had been frozen still on the porch step all this time. He looked to the pale woman behind him—

SLAM.

Awash in anger and adrenaline, Abram joined the pastor back at the buggy.

“Pranksters…hooligans,” Russell cursed between inhales, “and the bloody Irish.”

“Father?”

The Pastor grumbled, gestured broadly. “This Satanic fad. ‘All Hallow’s Eve.’ I say there is no clearer sign of the Devil’s corruption of this world: a pagan celebration for so-called spirits of the dead.” His owlish eyebrows furrowed, and he looked down past the crook of his nose at the black tendrils dripping off the carriage and onto the sidewalk. “Vandalism, theft—all in good fun, the youth say. We say—our movement, Abram, we—”

“Yessir.”

“We say one cannot eat at the table of God and the table of demons.”

“First Corinthians ten-twenty-one, sir.”

Father stared at the paint-smeared carriage, the fine details of the meticulous artwork lost in the black abyss. He wiped his finger along mess, absently traced a crucifix in the paint. It was only much later that Abram would wonder if there had been any significance to that.

“Want me to knock again,” Abram said, “ask the lady for a wash bucket?”

“No. One last stop, and we are running late.” He patted Abram on the back, (accidentally?) leaving a black spot by his shoulder blade. “It may still wash off if it hasn’t set in.” He hoisted himself into the carriage, took the reins. “Let us make like Noah and pray for rain.”

***

Abram understood the general shape of the Holy Scriptures and could give you chapter and verse on everything about God’s day of wrath. But the “meat in due season” thing didn’t make a lick of sense to him, even if he could tell you the phrase came from Matthew chapter twenty four. Even after hearing last Sunday’s sermon, where the Pastor explained (with the assistance of a blackboard) that there would be “meat” (magazines and leaflets and books written by the Pastor himself) in “due season” (right now—the last days, before 1914).

Now, on top of it all, Abram wondered what the Irish had to do with All Hallow’s Eve.

Many of the Bible’s prophecies came down to cold arithmetic. That much Abram understood. Seeing as how arithmetic had been his worst subject in school before mother had pulled him out so they could save the world together, Abram counted himself blessed to have a spiritual Father so divinely gifted in mathematics that he was able to calculate the date of the end of all things.

As the horses pulled the carriage down a narrow dirt path on the backroads of Allegheny, as the trees thinned along the broad fields of deadened, yellow grass, the Pastor asked his spiritual son:

“You ever wonder how God kills demons?”

Abram looked up from the book on his lap. “Kills?” The Pastor nodded. Abram scrunched his nose in thought. “Can’t He just snap his fingers? Make ‘em disappear?”

The Pastor chuckled. “Now you name me one passage where the Lord snaps his fingers. No, the Lord Our God shows a preference for tactile destruction.” He flicked the reins and the horses trotted a little faster. “Liars will not inherit God’s kingdom, Abram. So tell me true: are you reading the gospels like a good boy?”

“Yessir,” Abram said. “Every day, like you tell us. Mother makes sure I read every night, ‘fore my prayers. I like your books better, though. Scriptures can be hard to understand, and you explain ‘em real good.” Abram’s face, sun-beaten and dusty from the kickback of the clomping hooves, had been buried for the past two hours in the book he’d been reading, Studies in the Scriptures. Its author responded:

“They are not ‘my’ books, Abram. Not as such.”

“Your name’s on the cover.”

“They are God’s books,” Father said. “The words God’s words, His message. I am only the vessel. There are two kinds of vessels in this world, Abram. Vessels for the holy spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, and vessels for Satan and his hoards of demons.”

The pastor had a curious and roundabout way of speaking, often starting a conversation with a question that he would not go on to answer until a long time later, when you might assume he’d forgotten he’d ever asked the question in the first place. Abram tried to keep up.

“Am I a vessel?”

The pastor smiled. “You are baptized, are you not?”

“Yessir.”

“Then a vessel you are, boy. You have ‘presented your body as a living sacrifice’ before Jehovah God. But there are others—our enemies, God’s enemies—who baptize themselves in fire. Such ones open up their bodies as a sacrifice to the Satan the devil. And Jehovah will kill those people, Abram. Any day now.”

Abram tried to flip to the chart in the book so he could better understand. “1914 is a few years aw—”

“At the latest. 1914 at the latest. I tell you privately, Abram, between you and me, the flock constantly misunderstands this matter. I myself can hardly be blamed for the confusion, as I have only transcribed what God has revealed.” It felt very special to Abram, having this frank conversation with the Lord’s one, true prophet about a matter not everyone in the movement understood. In all truth, Abram did not understand it either.

“1914 is the end of all things, not the beginning. That fated year is when God’s kingdom will be firmly established in heaven and on earth. But the first day of wrath, Abram, the inciting event—that could come any day. Any hour.”

The horses reared back and stopped suddenly. They had reached the last property in the county line, an old rickety farmhouse that sat way back from the roadside, guarded by looming hemlocks. The Pastor smiled and reached behind him, grabbed his “ministry bag,” a briefcase with a Bible and many volumes of the Pastor’s own books and magazines.

Abram was still stuck on something. “So how is God gonna kill the demons?”

“That,” winked the Pastor, “is what we are here to find out.”

***

It was a long walk through tall grass to get to the house. If there had ever been a path from the road to the front door of this ramshackle place, nature had hidden it away long ago.

“The gentleman living here,” the Pastor explained, “sent a letter expressing great excitement to Millennial Dawn. I confess his compliments may have been merely buttering me up for the final part of his letter, in which he posed a rather irresistible theological challenge. Our man is certain he has found a Biblical question I cannot answer, one that had not been addressed in my sermons or writ–”

And then the Pastor screamed.

Abram looked back in a panic. He had never heard a grown man scream before; not even his fleshly father had screamed when he’d clutched his heart and keeled over three years ago. The sound was quick and piercing, like a gunshot. The Pastor fell down in the tall grass, nursing his ankle, breathing harshly through grit teeth.

Abram raced to the old man’s side but stopped when something squished beneath his shoe. Slowly he lifted it: pressed in the weeds lay a small serpent, its head crushed in by Abram’s left leather brogan.

“It is only a ribbonsnake,” the Pastor winced, sucking breath in through a clenched smile. “No poison, just stings like a bastard.” Removing his palms from his snake-bit ankle, he held his hand out to Abram—his hand, slicked with blood and black paint. “Help me up, will you, son?” Unthinkingly Abram grabbed Father’s hand and hoisted him up, felt the blood as it squeezed between the old man’s fingers onto his own.

“Is that bad luck?” Abram tried to wipe his hand on a wad of tall grass he’d plucked.

“There is no such thing as luck,” The Pastor breathed in tight through his nose. “The whole preposterous idea is based on pagan superstition.”

“Like Hallow’s Eve, right?”

The Pastor looked at the dead snake, the vandalized buggy, then to Abram. “That’s right, Abram. Like Hallow’s Eve.”

Abram suggested turning back, but Father would not hear of it. There was no diverting the man’s path once he became convinced the Holy Spirit had drawn him to it.

“You said the fella what lives here had a Bible question?” Abram finally asked. They had reached the door, and Pastor Russell swept a few brambles off his pantlegs and adjusted his coat.

“Why, the very question I posed to you earlier: How does God kill demons?”

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK…KNOCK

The Pastor rapped on the door five times, landing the final like the exclamation point the good news demanded. For two minutes the two stood there waiting, but no one answered. As was customary, the Pastor knocked again.

Still nobody came, and the old man’s expression fell. He stroked his long, white beard, unsure of what to do next.

“Don’t look like nobody’s home,” Abram said. “Don’t look like nobody’s been home for a long time.”

Though he did not want to say it aloud, Abram was starting to think this whole situation sounded like a prank. Abram knew well that the world was full of blasphemous folk who saw only humor in the things of God. Just last year two boys from class pushed him in the crick behind the schoolhouse and called him “bible boy,” asking if Abram would ever get with a girl before he got raptured up to heaven.

Reaching in his pocket, the Pastor pulled out and unfolded a sheet of stationary. His dark eyes studied the page, then the faded brass numbers on the doorpost above.

“Twenty-sixteen,” read the Pastor. “The fellow even drew a map, suggested a window of time for our arrival, and here we are.” Attempting to maintain his zeal, the pastor forced a smile and stepped off the porch. “I left my pen in the carriage. I’ll fetch it and leave the man a n—”

Knock knock knock knock…knock

Abram and Pastor Russell both looked at the door, unsure if they had really heard the sound. But they had. It had come from the other side.

The final disembodied knock echoed like an exclamation point. It struck Abram’s ear as a clomping, like hoofs of stampeding horses, echoing clatters contained in each thump. Confused, his head jerked to the dirt road far behind them; no mares or carriages were skipping along, no passers-by or policemen. Nobody.

Knock knock knock knock…knock

There it was again, mimicking his father’s earlier rapping. The pastor adopted a stern look, leaned in, and with sly smile knocked back.

Knock knock knock knock…knock…

Slowly the door opened with a rumbling whine, like a cornered cat.

There a little girl stood at the threshold, six years of age, Abram figured. She was short and round-faced like the schoolgirls a couple grades under him. “Round” was the only thing he could say about her face, for the more he tried to study it the more his eyes blurred over.

This is how his mother said the world looked without her glasses, Abram thought, except it wasn’t how the world looked to Abram: just this girl’s face.

“Good evening, young lady,” said the pastor, tipping his hat. “That, I do believe, is the first time in my ministry I’ve heard a door knock back at me!” He offered a polite chuckle. The girl did not return it; Abram could not tell if she smiled or not.

She replied, “That wasn’t me, silly. That’s just old splithoof.”

That was a funny name for a dog, the Pastor told her, but she said it wasn’t a dog. Wasn’t a cat either, but she wouldn’t clarify what it was, only what it was not.

“Well,” the Pastor eventually said, “My name is Russell. Charles Russell. This here is my good friend, Abram. Might your father be home?”

“He’s always home,” said the girl.

More silence followed. Abram wondered what school the girl went to; he had rather unfortunately a penchant for happening upon kids from school when doing the Lord’s work and prayed fervently to avoid knocking on their doors. God never saw fit to answer these prayers, which the Pastor had taught him meant the prayer had not been in harmony with God’s divine plan of the ages. It was God’s divine plan, evidently, for Abram to be bullied and beaten, and for certain young girls to be cursed with a blurry face. Or perhaps Abram’s eyes were just developing some kind of inexplicable condition, all of a sudden. Neither option was desirable; Abram was still young, would prefer to see so long as he was stuck in this fleshly vessel.

“We are responding to your father’s inquiry,” Russell said. “He is expecting us.”

“I know,” said the girl. “We been praying for Satan to send us another one.”

Abram felt his chest grow hot with a terrible dread.

“And look how good the lord is,” said the girl. “He sent us two.”

Pastor Russell straightened his back and took a step toward the girl. He glowered at her from on high.

“Did you just say you prayed to the devil, girl?”

The blur around the girl faded for a too-brief moment, like mist briefly parting, just enough for Abram to see the unpleasant smile that crept in and took over the little girl’s face. There was something unnatural about it, as if it was not her mind or muscles in control of her skin, but rather fishhooks tugging the edges of her mouth.

“Just like you did, Charlie,” she said, “way back when. And you have no idea what the good lord has gone through to bring you home.”

“It began with strange noises in a ‘haunted house’ and first answered a little girl who addressed the unseen author of the noises as “Old Splithoof.”

—Pastor Charles Taze Russell, What Say the Scriptures About Spiritualism? 1897