The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

by Stephanie Oakes

  A hand darted out and wrenched the apple from the branch. The stem was green and unbreakable still. The hand had to pull so hard that, when the apple came free, the tree shook its boughs like arms waving in anger.

  Above me hung the face of a man with pebbled eyes, peering through a pair of thick, yellowed glasses, a heavy beard patched over his cheeks. He looked normal, like any of the paunchy dads in the neighborhood who drove beat-up trucks and tuned their TVs too loud.

  “Here you go,” he said, holding the apple by the stem.

  I reached for it and he placed it on my palm. My fingers closed around it.

  “Aren’t you going to eat it?” he asked.

  “It’s not ripe. They don’t taste good yet.”

  He plucked the apple from my hand, stuffing it into his mouth whole. He watched me as he chewed and swallowed.

  The screen door opened with a screech. My father was standing on the back porch. He said something odd then. He told me this man was holy beyond understanding. That I was to do whatever he asked. That I was to believe everything he said.

  Because he spoke to God.

  Chapter 17

  I walk down to lunch with Angel and Rashida. It’s become easier since I discovered that, even without Angel around, the girls don’t mess with me. In fact, they avoid me. It’s my shoes.

  They gave me Velcro shoes because of my hands, but Angel told me most of the girls who wear them aren’t allowed real shoes. She says they’re the ones who will kill you if you look at them wrong. The ones who can’t be given shoelaces for fear they’d hang themselves or strangle someone else.

  “Why do you never eat the chicken nuggets, Rashida?” Angel asks. I’ve been staring down into my watery red trough of tomato soup. I glance over at Rashida’s tray which contains only mounds of coleslaw and fruit cocktail.

  “Why do you care, Angel?” Rashida asks.

  “’Cause you eat more’n anybody here, and everyone knows the chicken nuggets is the closest thing to appetizing we got.”

  Rashida’s smile drops a couple notches. “I been in the prison when they electrocuted somebody. Visiting my uncle in Deer Lodge. After they cooked the guy, you could smell it in the whole place, and it smelled just like it does here on chicken nugget day.”

  Angel’s face is serious for a moment then splits open in a laugh. “You’re lying. You’ve never been to Deer Lodge in your life.”

  “I have too! And I could smell the guy’s brains being cooked inside his skull, bitch.”

  “I think your brains got cooked a long time ago, Rashida.”

  “I’ll have you know I’m passing all my classes,” she says. “Miss Bailey says I have a unique intelligence that can’t be defined by normal standards.”

  “You’re abnormal, she means,” Angel says.

  “Who’s Miss Bailey?” I ask.

  “My reading teacher,” Rashida says. I nod. I’ve seen the guards watch me sidelong, trying to decide if I’m ready for school. During the day, there’s not much to do except stare out the bars. Angel’s brought me a couple of comic books from the library, and I make my way through those pretty quickly, even if I don’t know half the words. Sometimes, from her cell next to mine, Rashida describes what the weather was like outside the classroom window that day, and I can usually persuade Benny to tell me about the book she’s reading, always some time and place I’ve never heard of, but mostly I’m alone with my thoughts and my rememberings.

  The closest I’ve gotten to school, besides those weeks with Bertie, were the mild, green-smelling days in the Community when the Prophet taught the children beside the pond. He read aloud from the Book of Prophecies, tales of sage believers garbed in golden feathers fighting the hell demons of the Gentiles with swords made only of God’s light.

  One afternoon, when I was eight or nine, the Prophet called the children for a lesson. Constance walked, hand in mine, in that jerky way of almost-babies, and we arranged ourselves around the pond. In the distance, men thunked axes into wood, and nearby my mother breathed through her nose as she stared into the murky surface of the pond. She couldn’t do much else, so she was put in charge of the children while the Prophet gave his lessons.

  From his billowing cloak, the Prophet extracted the Book of Prophecies.

  “‘Do not stray into the land of the Gentiles, for they humiliate God with their arts that pay Him no homage, with dances that contort the body in evil motions that defile purity, with the wicked writings that question Him and criticize Him and say He doesn’t exist and never has.’”

  I had heard this passage a thousand times. It formed the rule book for our behavior—the Gentiles do these things, so we do not.

  “Why can’t we write, Prophet?” I interrupted.

  He let the book fall a few inches as his sharp eyes took me in. “Because it is an abomination in the eyes of God.”

  “You write,” I noted.

  “The only people who need to write are those who record God’s deeds.”

  “Then why can’t we read? So we can know the deeds of God.”

  “If you could read, you would be able to read the wicked writings, too, and God does not approve the risk. You have a Prophet to read to you, and that is just as good as reading for yourself.”

  “Why can’t we do painting?” I asked. “Surely that can’t be an abomination to God.”

  He crossed his arms. A darkness darted across his face, a storm growing in his gray-shot eyes. “I’m not sure I can explain it in a way you will understand. You are merely a girl child.”

  “I’ll try to understand, Prophet,” I replied.

  Maybe he knew that the question wouldn’t die without an answer. His eyes roamed upward. “Do you know what the sky is?”

  He raised his hand as though to touch the clear blue expanse above. “It is a great piece of canvas stretched all the way across the world. And on it, God paints. We do not paint because there is no need. The greatest painting of all already exists.”

  “The sky is a canvas?” I asked, turning my eyes to the bright blue that, to me, appeared endless. It looked like a clear pond that went on forever.

  The Prophet nodded, his hand shadowed darkly against the brilliant blue. “God made the sky for us to know Him. When it’s sunny, can’t you feel His joy beaming down? When it storms, you can’t mistake His anger. And rain—what do you think rain is?”

  “Tears,” I said, catching on. “But what about at night? What does the darkness mean?”

  “It means He’s sleeping. It means His eyes are closed.”

  “But what about lightning and—”

  “God’s bad dreams,” he cut in, already one step ahead. “Now, does that answer your questions, Minnow?”

  I chewed on my lip and nodded.

  I barely heard the rest of the lesson because, over my head, the universe was receding, the world growing smaller and smaller, and the Prophet growing larger and larger. Somewhere, far off, I sensed a sound like pressure rising in the air, the feeling that a hinge was squeaking. The next time I looked, the sky didn’t seem so endless anymore.

  I shot a glance at my mother. She didn’t appear to even see us, the way she swirled her toes in the water.

  “But what are the stars?” I demanded too loudly.

  The Prophet turned to me, his lower lip twisted. “Why do you want to know, Sister Minnow?” he asked pointedly. Constance, her body a warm presence at my side, grew tense. “Your questions could lead one to believe that you are doubting God. There are consequences for disbelief.”

  My heart began to thump loudly. “I just . . . just want to know . . . about the world He created.”

  He considered this. “The stars . . . they are a way for God to see us even when He is asleep. They are His eyes. And when you see the stars flickering, that’s how you know He is watching you.”

 
My heart squirmed in my chest, my hands pink and tightly fisted in my lap. Whenever I pictured God, I didn’t imagine an omnipotent force that could observe us from on high. I imagined a boy my age, going to school, living in the world. A boy named Charlie.

  “But—” I sputtered, “but how are His eyes up in the sky if He’s really Charlie? I thought He was walking the earth right now.”

  “Do you think God can’t do two things at once?” the Prophet asked, his voice rising so my mother’s head finally flicked up. “God can do anything. God can watch every person alive at the same time, and even the dead, and He can walk the earth, because He is God, and He is almighty.”

  Suddenly, he snatched Constance up from where she sat beside me. He propped her up on her tiny legs facing me, her expression bundled up in fear. “I said there are consequences for disbelief, Minnow,” the Prophet said, shaking Constance by the shoulders. “But consequences sometimes have a way of missing their target.”

  He shook Constance again, a whimper escaping her mouth. “If you ever have a question, Minnow, the answer is always God. Anything you wonder about the earth or the sky, the answer is always God. Always God,” he repeated. “If you doubt, the cure is God. And if you continue to doubt, the fault is yours, not His.”

  A heat had crept into my face. I nodded because I knew enough to do that. He turned Constance’s body toward him, smiled broadly, and let her slump back down near me. I could feel her body shaking.

  “Remember, God created you and that means you owe Him a life. Yours,” the Prophet pronounced firmly. “You will be in debt to God for the rest of your days.”

  Chapter 18

  Valentine’s Day just passed. We never celebrated in the Community, but I remembered what it was supposed to look like. Some girls got cards in the mail and some smuggled little candies inside and passed them around beneath the cafeteria tables, and the guards pretended not to notice the wadded-up red foils littering the floor. A few boyfriends visited and passed over fistfuls of carnations wrapped in wet paper towels and, even if they weren’t allowed to touch, the girls looked buoyed for days afterward. They wore the flowers in their buttonholes till they turned brown.

  In the Community, holidays frightened me. The one I liked least—Saint Jared’s Day, which celebrated the killing of the last giant in America—called itself a festival. It was always in winter, with a bitter wind that flung the eerie chanting of our voices up into the frozen air. “Killed the giant, yes indeed. Cut his throat, oh yes indeed. Fell to Earth, oh yes it did. Died in agony, oh yes it did.” My feet frozen as a glacier, I carried an icicle in my open palm while the little children made to stab the air like they were killing monsters. My stomach fumbled watching them. It was always entirely too easy for us to imagine killing.

  • • •

  “Do those things hurt you?” Angel asks around a mouthful of corn muffin.

  She’s staring at my stumps, lying next to my tray of watery soup and shrunken bread. “Not as much as they used to. Why?”

  “Because you got a look on your face,” she says. “Sorta pained.”

  “It’s just . . .” I stretch my toes out the side of the cafeteria table. “My bones hurt. My leg bones. They feel like they’re being stretched.”

  “You’re growing,” she says. “You’re not the first girl to put on a few pounds in juvie. Most of us aren’t used to three square meals.”

  I’ve already grown out of my first jumpsuit. The new one is roomier and has a zipper down the front with a cord that I can grab with my teeth. Going to the bathroom takes less time now that I don’t need to ask Angel or a guard to fumble buttons back into holes.

  “That’s the problem with this whole thing,” Angel says, waving her arm. “They want you to be contrite for getting thrown in here, but this place makes a fuck ton more sense than the outside, if you really think about it.”

  “Like how?” I ask.

  “Like,” Angel searches. “Like this.” She lifts something yellow from her tray.

  “Is that a banana?” I say. “I haven’t seen one of these in years.”

  “Outside, everything gets so distorted. In here, a banana’s just something they give you because the government says we inmates gotta eat less junk. But, you know what the pastor at my uncle’s church used to say about bananas? They prove the existence of God.”

  “How?”

  “He said they must’ve been designed by a creator because they’re easy to open and are shaped perfectly for the human hand. But you know what else is shaped perfectly for the human hand? A dick, but don’t try telling them that means God intended people to masturbate because that will get you kicked out of Sunday school. I can vouch from experience.”

  A shadow crosses our table. Officer Prosser surveys us, her face beet-colored at the cheeks, tiny orange hairs escaping the knot of her bun.

  In her hand, she holds small squares of paper.

  “Notices,” she says simply. She flicks one at Angel who catches it in the air. With a serious look, she lets a notice fall to the plastic tray in front of me.

  “What’s it say?” I ask Angel.

  “It’s your notice of rec time. The better you act, the more you get.”

  “What do we get to do?”

  “Hardly nothing. The options are lame. You can choose from exercise time in the yard, the library, the TV room, or the visitors’ lounge if anyone comes to visit you, fat chance of that happening. Oh, and youth group.”

  “Where do you go?” I ask.

  “Library most days, but I’ve read all those books practically. They have to bring books in for me from the county library, but my newest ones aren’t here yet. So today, I guess it’ll have to be the TV room.”

  When the bell rings, we walk together to a small concrete-walled room with stains on the carpet and a television sitting on a low wooden stand covered in peeling wood-printed plastic. The couch in front of the TV is already full of girls, but they scoot off when Angel comes in. “You know,” I say, sitting beside her, “everyone here is so scared of you. But you don’t seem that tough to me. Bet you’re all talk.”

  She snorts. “You’re funny.”

  Angel takes the TV remote and presses some numbers until the picture changes. In the center of the screen, a blue ball hangs suspended on an ink-black background. The black is impossibly black, and the ball is laced with wisps of white.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  Angel turns to look at me, her forehead bunched up. “Earth.”

  “Our world?” I shake my head. “It looks like that? How’d they get a picture of it?”

  “A spaceship or satellite or something.”

  The camera zooms in to the surface and I shut my eyes. When I open them, the camera is beneath the ocean, a dark wilderness of shadows and pockets of blue light. It is vast, much vaster than I ever imagined. My brain is stunned watching it, taking in all the endless blue.

  “All right, Angel. Enough science shit.” Rashida snatches the remote from Angel’s hand. “I’m switching it to my show.”

  “Don’t even try, Rashida,” Angel says lazily.

  Rashida stands with her fists on her hips. “You ain’t gonna beat me up, Angel. You like me too much.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, really,” Rashida says. “I see you admiring my fine body day after day.” She does a quick twirl and slaps her butt. “Too bad I got a boy on the outs. Else, you and me’d make a cute couple.”

  Angel cocks her head. “Please, Rashida, you look like a bunch of chopsticks got tied together with a rubber band.”

  Rashida gasps, her hand flying to her hair, tied back into a puffy bun. “Angel, someday you gonna come asking for me and I’m gonna say, ‘Bitch, I don’t think so, you had your chance.’”

  Angel laughs.

  Rashida falls heavily into one of the ragged,
duct-taped armchairs and punches a number into the remote. The image of the ocean is replaced by a picture of tanned girls shouting at each other.

  “Give that back,” Angel says, tackling Rashida in the armchair and grappling for the remote.

  The screen starts flicking through channels and the pictures fire past so quickly, my brain can barely keep up. An advertisement with a car driving through a forest. And an impossibly perfect-looking family eating dinner. A woman in a doctor’s coat talking to the camera. And—a man with a graying beard in a khaki prison jumpsuit.

  “Stop!” I shout.

  Rashida and Angel freeze where they’ve been shouldering for the remote and look at me sideways. It’s the loudest I’ve spoken since I got here. Most of these girls haven’t heard me say a single word.

  “Go back.”

  Rashida clicks back a few channels. “There,” I say.

  My father’s face peers up from the screen. I slide off of the couch and sit on my knees, so close to the television I can see the tiny squares that make up the screen. My father shuffles slowly into a courtroom, his hands and ankles fastened to a chain around his waist. His beard has grown. Photographers and news people line the back of the courtroom, flashbulbs firing every few seconds.

  “Samuel Bly will be the first of the leaders of the Kevinian cult to stand trial,” a woman’s voice narrates. “The DA is assembling a case against him that includes charges of statutory rape, accessory to statutory rape, endangering a minor, assault, and manslaughter. Bly was reportedly second in command to church leader Kevin Bilson, a self-described prophet who led the group into the woods twelve years ago.”

  The image changes to a picture of the Community, perfectly preserved in a layer of snow and encircled in yellow police tape bright enough to shock the senses. The snow is so unbroken and white, it hardly seems anything unusual happened there, until strange shapes begin to reveal themselves beneath the snow. A large triangle betrays what was once a roof and, just as suddenly, the shapes of fallen-down houses start to materialize, a dozen of them, in a ring.