It was almost a privilege, the sight of them, fingertips slanted like they could’ve been playing the piano. Not many people get to see their bones outside their body. I grabbed the hands between my stumps and placed them in the pockets of my loose trousers, wrist end first.
Behind me, a squeak. I turned. From where I was standing, I saw straight into the only other room, the Prophet’s bedroom. He was sitting up in his unmade bed. I could tell he’d just woken up by the dark half circles under his eyes, puffy with sleep.
He saw me. His eyes stretched wide.
My boots were almost silent on the cold floor. His breath started leaving him heavily, eking from his ribs with a loud, almost-afraid sound. In the heat of the house, water began to drip from my thawing clothes.
I sounded like a cloudburst. I felt like thunder.
“You thought I was dead, didn’t you?” I asked, my voice low.
His breath came louder, like he’d just run a great distance, his fingers grabbing the sheets on his bed with bloodless knuckles. I wondered at this. Did he fear me? The idea was electrifying.
“I’ve figured you out, you know that?” I said. “The way you lied to us. The way you converted us—”
“I didn’t convert anyone. God converted you.”
“You’re sick,” I spat. “You’re a killer.”
“When the children of God become disobedient—” he sputtered. “And idolatrous and wicked—they suffer at the hands of God.”
“The hands of God,” I scoffed. “God isn’t the reason Jude is dead. You are.”
“I act for God,” he sputtered. His breathing grew more beleaguered.
“Did you act for God when you cut off my hands?”
His fingers pulled at the neck of his robes like the touch of the collar on his skin was choking him. This wasn’t fear, I realized. This was something else, something beyond me. He wedged his stiff fingers beneath his mattress. In his hand he held a curious object. Part plastic, part metal. I couldn’t figure it out, until he raised it to his lips and squeezed.
He squeezed again and again but it obviously wasn’t doing what he wanted because he groaned, a high whining sound, and threw the object to the ground. In the next moment, he was keeling off the bed, hitting the floor knees-first with a bone-shaking smack. He curled to the ground, his chest jerking upward, calamitously.
A dial turned in my mind, slowly. “You said God cured your asthma,” I breathed. “You . . . you . . .” I processed this like my entire world was being translated to a different language. “You lied,” I whispered.
His fingers reached toward a dry pine dresser on the opposite side of the room. I walked over and kicked open the bottom drawer. Inside, five more inhalers rolled like wayward spinning tops.
“Please,” he gasped, his forehead pressed to the floor.
“Why should I?”
“You can—come back—to God. He is—forgiving. He will—bestow hands—on you—anew.”
His rib cage buckled under his heaving gasps, fingers stretched toward the dresser.
I stood a long moment, listening to the sickening sound of his throat slapping together.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally.
He turned his head toward me, creases of fear cut into the beardless places on his face. I recalled the photo he’d shown us of him as a five-year-old boy with thick eyeglasses, hiding behind the moon-colored creases of his father’s jeans. The man who made him fear hatchets. The fear that bred fear that bred fear. On this night, I would end the cycle. I would kill it forever.
“I’m sorry. I can’t reach it,” I said. “I haven’t got hands.”
He let out a groan from deep in his throat. I stared down at him, the pale lump of him, the tar-colored beard of him. The spasms grew slower. His eyes began to slide shut.
I might’ve stood there longer if not for the smell of fire. The room had grown hot, but I didn’t notice at first. The heat radiated from the roof, off the thick thatch and pine shingles. The roof groaned loudly, then snapped. A mass of thatch in the main room fell to the floor in a fiery mess. In seconds, the house filled with smoke. I ran from the bedroom, past the aluminum foil on which the gibberish words of God had been scrawled. It was melting, curling away from the yellow thumbtacks that fastened it over the mantle.
I grabbed the door handle between my forearms and tried to twist, but my shaking arms were clumsy and sweating. I heaved against the door as the smoke drove into my eyes, into my mouth, into the delicate pink passages behind my face.
Finally, the door handle turned and I crashed out of the house, down the front steps, onto the cold mud of the courtyard, gasping for clean breath.
Before me, the Community was a circle of flame. Nearly every house was burning from its roof, streams of embers and back-lit smoke wending through the black sky. And in the middle of it all was Waylon.
Chapter 56