by Hugh Howey
Their town was a small town, nothing like the cities that ate their food, which were loud and bright and unthinkably large. Esther imagined them as the sun, every surface hot to the touch. People burned up there sometimes, and never came back. Her Mama had lived there once, though she never talked about it. Esther had asked once, wrapped in Mama’s arms as they sat by the fire, curling into the familiar smell of her, the scent of herbs hanging on the folds of her dress.
“Hmm,” Mama had said, and that was all there was to say.
The Church was the largest building in town, white and pointed into a single steeple, and Sister Abigail waited by the door every morning, smiling her thin-lipped smile. She was not the only Sister, but she was the oldest, and conversations had a way of stopping whenever she passed by. She hugged each of the children as they passed, her eyes wrinkling with joy. Children were closer to God, she said, their hearts more ready to receive His truth.
Their town was not a rich one, but their Church was like any other, fitted with an enormous circular screen on the wall behind the altar. It displayed a different stained glass window every day, each one a story constructed from hundreds of digitally rendered fragments of glass. Esther’s favorites were the intricate tableaus of great battles carried out for the Lord, the soldiers haloed and triumphant, bursting with color. Sister Abigail explained them all.
Sometimes, the window would reveal a lie, a collective dream that had crept into their minds during the night. Perhaps a field of dying crops, or a rebel attack on a factory, illuminated in the fearsome red that signified a falsehood. The revelations of what was true and what was not were handed down to Sister Abigail every morning from the Church itself, which received them directly from God. Esther wasn’t sure how that happened, exactly, only that every day felt a little bit like a story, one that was always being told in a slightly different way.
“Faith is a progressive revelation,” Sister Abigail liked to say, “and each day our belief is tested by the Great Deceiver.” She would smile then, and lean in toward the congregation, as though she knew a wonderful secret she could not wait to share. “But we are not deceived.”
In school, the children learned how to type and how to write letters and numbers by hand, though writing was discouraged. You could only write things one way, and then what if they were revealed as a dream? Words on a screen could be changed instantly, but written words were stubborn, unyielding. If they became a lie, they simply sat there, unrepentant, repeating their blasphemy over and over again.
THE NEXT SUMMER was hotter than the one before. The long sleeves of Esther’s dress felt unbearable in the heat, but her Mama had insisted that she put it on before going out in the sun. Whenever the grownups waved her away, she disappeared into the woods to the well, where she could have her own dreams and forget them and tell no one.
One day, the well had become a rebel stronghold, and she darted from tree to tree for cover, raining handfuls of gravel down on it like bullets. “Your treachery will never be forgotten!” she shouted, as her ammunition clattered against the metal lid. The sound was so satisfying that at first she did not see the figure that had stepped into view beyond the well. It was a woman, standing very still, and watching.
“How’s the battle going?” the woman shouted. Esther froze. She was not supposed to talk to strangers, especially not alone. They could be foreigners, or rebels that liked to steal little children. She had practiced this so many times, the way she would yell or fight or run, but as she stood there staring at the woman, she felt bolted to the ground.
“I don’t know you,” she shouted finally, trying not to let her voice shake. She had been a soldier only a moment before, and soldiers were not afraid.
“But I know you,” the woman said, leaning against the well. “I’m Jael.”
There was something odd about her that Esther couldn’t quite explain. It was like that game they played in school where two pictures were almost the same, except for tiny differences: a shadow missing here, an extra button there. The woman’s jeans were tattered, the knees worn into holes, and her dark hair was pulled into a ponytail through the back of a baseball cap. Her face was tanner than a farmer, and a backpack hung heavy across her shoulders.
If this had been a story, the woman would be a rebel on the run, stealing through the woods until she encountered the brave soldier who captured her and foiled her terrible plot. Jael was pretty, though, with her dark eyes and her tall, lanky frame, and Esther had never imagined a traitor being pretty.
“Who are you fighting?” Jael asked.
“The rebels,” Esther said, clutching her handful of stones tightly. “At the Battle of the Bay.”
“I see,” the woman said. “Who’s winning?”
“We are,” Esther replied, confused. Who else would be winning?
“Of course,” Jael said, staring at the well. “Isn’t history funny like that, these days.”
Esther didn’t understand what was funny about it, but it felt like one of those things grownups said that wouldn’t have answers when you asked, or they would only laugh. And she wanted Jael to like her, this strange woman with her strange face. Esther wanted to keep looking at it.
“How do you know me?” Esther asked.
“We met a long time ago, when you were very small,” said the woman. That could be true, thought Esther. When you were small, you forgot everything so easily.
“Does my Mama know you?” Esther asked.
Jael looked at her for a moment. “It wouldn’t help your Mama much to answer that question. It’s probably just easier if you think of me as a dream.”
Esther’s hand started to relax.
“Oh. I’ve never known something was a dream, at the time I was dreaming it.”
“It happens to adults a lot,” said Jael. “But no one talks about it, because it’s easier that way.”
Esther thought of her Mama, her voice creeping higher, her hand tight on the bannister. “It doesn’t always seem easier.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” said Jael, laughing a little.
“But it isn’t the truth,” said Esther, confused. “That’s why we don’t talk about it.”
Jael sighed. “Well, that too.” She stretched, adjusted her backpack, and began to walk away. Esther felt a pang of something else, like this moment was a coin that was falling out of her pocket and rolling toward a grate, about to disappear forever.
“Am I going to dream you again?” she shouted.
The woman didn’t answer. Esther watched her until she disappeared, and then once she was gone, remembered she had never been there.
LIFE WAS A sort of knitting, Mama liked to say. Every day was a long series of stitches, each one connected to the next, until you made a mistake and had to undo the whole thing, all the way back to the place where you dropped the stitch. Esther always felt a knot form in her stomach whenever she found one, especially when it meant unraveling hours of work, the loops pulling backward through themselves and disappearing, row after row. It was the same feeling whenever the window lit up in red during the service, and things that had felt so real started unraveling from the world.
Sometimes, she still felt their absence, her mind moving over them like a tongue feeling the socket of a lost tooth. But they were permanent teeth, not baby ones, these untruths. Sister Abigail would tell them what was supposed to fill the space, but they never grew back, not really.
The most common dreams were false histories: events that had not happened the way you remembered. Harvests that had gone badly when of course they had been fruitful, apocryphal fevers that had destroyed entire cities, women who had said impossible things—or women who had never existed at all. A dream or a lie could be as small as a word and as large as an entire life.
Sometimes dreams could leave scars not just on your heart but on your body. One of the farmers had lost a leg that way, in a dream about a battle that had never happened. Esther wasn’t sure how you could lose a part of your body in
a dream, or where it would go, but she thought about it sometimes before she fell asleep. What would it feel like, to have a piece of yourself disappear while you slept?
Once, the whole town had the longest dream about someone named Samaria, a short, heavy woman who worked at the dairy farm. She liked to eat sunflower seeds, and when Esther came to play with her big orange cat, she and Simone would take turns spitting the shells from her porch. No matter how hard Esther tried, Simone’s shells always went further, and she remembered the woman’s deep laugh, thick from cigarettes, saying that she just had a bigger mouth.
Every week, she drove an old truck to the town ten miles west to sell milk. It was larger and closer to the city, and she always came back with stories: what people were wearing, doing, saying. She was there when Esther saw a plume of smoke rising into the sky in the west, a wide, black column that slowly bent sideways in the wind. When Simone got back, Esther found her sitting in a chair on her porch, smoking cigarette after cigarette. There had been a horrible explosion at the steel plant, she said, and the soldiers had poured into the streets looking for rebels.
“There was a boy in the street who shouted at them, only shouted at them, said it was all their fault. That they deserved it. And they shot him, they just shot him,” Simone said. Esther remembered the expressions of the people who had gathered to listen, how afraid they had looked. The way Simone had rubbed her face, her hands pressed against his eyes, like she was trying to wake up.
Or Esther didn’t remember; she dreamed. The next morning, as she stood beside her Mama, there it was in the window. An image of Simone, her wide familiar face on a field of crimson. She was not there in the pews, because as Sister Abigail explained, she never had been. Everything she had been and done and said was all a dream, an elaborate fiction folded into their memories to lead them astray. It was their God-given duty now to set it aside.
“Forget the lie,” said Sister Abigail, slapping the pulpit with her hand. “It is always better to know the truth, no matter how difficult it may seem.” Later, when Esther walked past the house where she thought Simone had lived, she saw the woman they had dreamed was her wife sitting at the table, her head bent.
The lies of the Deceiver were often cruel, said Sister Abigail, designed to test your faith in the most terrible ways. Days later, when Esther stopped to pet the big orange cat that wrapped himself around her feet, she saw it in the dust: a lie. A small, black shell, striped with white. Sometimes dreams left pieces of themselves in the world to tempt you, like tiny slivers of a broken glass still clinging to the floor, even after you swept it. It was their duty to get rid of them before someone got hurt.
THE NEXT SUMMER, Esther was a soldier half the time, and a rebel the other. She played all the parts, and every battle was her against herself. It was fun to be the villain sometimes too, to laugh and shout about all the evil deeds she would commit—knowing, of course, that the soldiers would win in the end.
It had gotten hotter still, and her Mama made her wear a hat when she went outside. The heat was so heavy and thick that it felt like moving through water, and Sister Abigail said the sun was God’s eye looking down on them, a reminder that His judgment could not be escaped.
It did not rain often anymore, so when the storm started, Esther raced outside to play in it, jumping into the puddles that formed in the broken parts of the street. Her feet were bombs, falling on the unrighteous, exploding with a wet fury that left her boots soaking. When she came home covered in mud, Mama said she looked like a wet rat, but she laughed, so Esther knew she was happy too. On the second day it rained harder, but it was still welcome, until the winds picked up and started lashing the rain against their houses, wave after wave.
On the third day, the rain started to creep in through the door of Esther’s house, and the electricity went out everywhere in town. Mama said it would be all right, but looked worried every time she looked out the window. When the rain stopped on the fourth day, they ventured out and found that others had been far less lucky. The roofs of two houses had caved in, and most of the crops in the field had been destroyed.
“For now,” said Mama quietly.
As the adults gathered in the street to talk, Mama told her to go off and play, but not to go too far. But the well was not so far, Esther thought. So many things had been lost in the storm, and this was her place, the one that held all her stories. If it were ruined, maybe they would be ruined too. Walking to the woods felt a little like walking to Church. What would be waiting for her, and what would be taken away from her?
She saw it even from a distance: whatever battle this place had fought, it had lost. It was a place of angles now, trees torn in half, their branches hanging at their sides like limp arms. A pine that had once been a tower for her to climb was splintered in half, revealing the pale wood inside.
When Esther walked closer to the well, she stopped. It was no longer closed. A branch had landed with enough force to push the heavy metal lid to the side, leaving a half-moon gap for the sun to shine in. She felt her heart beat faster, felt every story she had told bursting inside of her. What would happen when she looked inside? Would there be a girl, the one she had imagined waiting for her for so long, waiting to be saved?
But when she peered inside, all she saw at the bottom was moldering leaves and a bucket tied to a long rope, tethered just inside the well. That, and nothing else. Esther tried not to feel the hollow ache of disappointment spreading through her chest, the terrible coldness of it. Because she had not lost anything, not really. The girl was not gone, because she had never been there. Esther kicked the side of the well and screamed, and did not know why.
She grabbed a handful of rocks and threw them inside the well, and when she looked down again she saw it: there was something inside the bucket. Her heart leapt. This could be a story too. A treasure, excavated from an ancient tomb, or a secret cache of letters exchanged between two star-crossed lovers. She grabbed the rope and pulled it up. When the bucket reached the rim of the well, she tore the box out of it, flipped open the latch, and lifted the lid. But instead of a treasure, all she found was something like plain gray modeling clay, wrapped in plastic, and several brightly colored wires.
“Are you playing rebel and soldier again?” came a voice from behind her. Esther spun around. It was Jael.
“No,” said Esther, her voice leaping to a higher pitch. She felt afraid, suddenly, of what she had seen inside the box, like she had overheard a secret and not known what it meant. But Jael was here, she was here, and all of it felt as real as anything she had ever felt. The words poured out before she could think about them.
“I wanted to see the woods after the storm and the well was open and I found a box and I don’t know what’s inside it and why am I dreaming you again?”
Jael stared at her a moment and then broke into smile. “I was worried too, after the storm.”
She did not say what she was worried about, but Esther saw her eyes drift to the box as she talked.
“Maybe you and I should play a game,” said Jael.
Esther closed the box. “All right.”
“I’ll be the soldiers,” said Jael. “Except in this game, things are a little different. Instead of being the heroes, they’re the villains.”
“But they can’t be,” said Esther.
“In this game, they can. They tell lies, and they steal the people you love, and if you disagree then they kill you. You can be the rebels. They’re fighting to stop the soldiers from hurting people, from hurting the whole world.”
Esther didn’t say anything.
“And the box you have is important to help them. So you need to steal it.”
“What’s inside?”
“Let’s call it fire. It doesn’t look like fire, but it is.”
“OK.”
“So put it on top of the well, and you go into the woods, and I’ll defend it while you attack.”
Esther nodded. She wanted to do that very much.
/> “Don’t look,” Esther warned, and Jael covered her eyes. Esther tried to be quiet as she hid, but every step she took was followed by the sucking sound of mud pulling beneath her boots. She hid behind a tree, and minutes passed as a bird shouted angrily somewhere above her. She waited for Jael to say something, to start the game. But when she finally worked up the courage to peek out, Jael was gone and the box with her, like they had never been there.
The bucket was still sitting beside the well. The well was still open. What had been real? Esther wanted to kick something again, but instead set out for home and decided not to think about it any more. By the time she arrived, a unit of soldiers had too, strutting around in their shiny boots and ironed black uniforms, their guns mounted in both hands.
“I thought I told you not to go far,” scolded Mama.
“She’s so forgetful,” one of the other women sighed.
“A blessing, then,” said Mama, and said nothing else for a long time.
THE SERVICE THE next morning was more somber than most, as Sister Abigail gave a sermon about the great flood, about how it came because God saw all the lies of the world and wanted to wash them clean. The stained glass window was lit all in blue, the blue of truth, the blue of water rushing over everything—nothing like the mud and filth that had swept through the town. It hadn’t made anything clean, Esther thought. Why would she say that?
“Let this be a test for you, a time to let your own sins and lies wash away, and recommit yourself to His truth,” she said, her voice growing louder. “Because evil walks in the world around us, agents of the Devil and those who serve him, and God has sent this storm to punish them.”
Several people in the congregation nodded, but Mama sat quietly, her face still.
“There are reports of rebels in the area. If you see anyone who you don’t know in a place they shouldn’t be, report it immediately.”