By Any Other Letter

I have been alive for seventeen days, and my sister tells me I will never know God the way I’ll know him when we’re together. She is fourteen years, one month, two weeks, and one day older, and so she is correct. I can see it in the way she moves, like angels are dressing her feet, and smiles with pink lips the shape of a whip tail, and in the way the skin of her face is not mushed with the same oatmealed scars as mine. 

Nestled by the jaws of the stream, we watch the mothers as they loop the grassy flat of the hill, white dresses blooming out from the sides of their boney ankles, heads pressed so close that they’re eating up each other’s air. I twine my fingers into the dry stubble of grass and pull, let chalky dirt mottle the rippled skin of my thigh; brown stars constellating a tongue-pink sky.

The mothers wear their hair in long plaits which vine down their backs like glossy serpents and twist as they walk, their steps in tandem. We like the mothers, Bethany tells me this. We like their milky collarbones, their smell of salt and earth, and the way we don’t quite know which one we came from.

On my fourth night alive, I’d asked Bethany which mother was mine. I was still stupid then, gaping with questions, cherry-cheeked, and father had not yet given me my best dress––the one with embroidered hares noosing the hem with their little string paws lifting off the ground.

“Who did I come from?”

I am young, but I know things. I know that it takes a man’s rib and a woman’s touch to make a child and that all gods are men but not all men are gods. I know my flesh was grown from another. I know what my father tells me; that chickens will never fly, that a lamb craves the knife, and that when his father descends from the cottoned walls of heaven, he will turn our sky the colour of molten honey and leave the sinners to choke on their own pasts. I know things. But not this.

“We,” Bethany said, as she dove a needle through the collar of my worship dress, the stitches small and neat, each a perfect cream loop, “We were born the same.”

Our room was all dark wood walls, creeping straight up to the ceiling like slits. Two white-paned windows met in the corner above our bed. We’d pushed a beeswax candle into the corner of the window sill and the burnt-orange light leaked over our floorboards, tremored into the creases of our blousey chiffon drapes.

“Who?” I asked.

“I didn't see. All of them, maybe.”

I thought this over, picked at a splinter on the headboard until it caught under my fingernail.

“Are all sisters born the same?”

Bethany leant back against the wall, the stitching needle still tucked between her thumb and forefinger.

“I think so,” she said, “You're the only one I’ve known.” 

The mothers join now, fingers wefting together like the strands of a braid, looping out to a circle of white cotton, pale skin, neat hair. They close their eyes, lids sliding shut over the world, pink mouths flatlining into a steady hum. They fasten in until they’re forehead-to-forehead, scalps comprising the pistil; bodies the fleshy petals of an opened flower.

Bethany turns her chin into my shoulder, pale hair wreathing her head in the steady wind. Bethany’s hair is the same shade of mine—that of milled wheat, aged fabric, dried chamomile—but whereas mine patches on my scalp, clean white skin peering up through its roots like the squares of a quilt, Bethany’s is a heavy wave. Bethany smells of lavender soap and oregano; I smell of skin, of sour breath.

The lake rolls out its blue tongue behind her; kaleidoscopic with crumbs of sun.

I turn back to the mothers. They hold their stance for minutes, hours, days—I don’t know—time is not our language. It is theirs. And aren’t we the luckiest girls alive, I think, to have been born of so much beauty?

——

Father tells me my name is ‘Elle’.

Father stands taller than us both, with a beard that sprouts from his jaw like coarse wool and a missing incisor winking black in his lower jaw. His smell is that of chemicals and livestock, and in the early morning, when the sun is nothing but a glowing pill in the sky, his voice gravels low like the upset rumble of thunder.

I say to him: “What is ‘L’?”

He says: “You.”

L as in Elle. L as in my tongue hitting the back of my teeth as it dissolves to a wave of sound. L as in ‘lamb’ or ‘look!’ or ‘laughter’. I like the lambs, with their halved-strawberry noses and cotton-wool ears. I like to laugh, the way the feeling grumbles under my rib cage before bubbling over at the mouth. I think L is a good letter.

Father tells me my name is ‘Elle’, so in the meeting room, Elle is what they call me.

The meeting room is circular, with vaulted wooden ceilings and gaps between the wallboards large enough that the yellow of sunrise lacquers woven carpets. Every morning we crowd in; the mothers a gauzy collection of white, father with his right hand strangling a microphone, Bethany and I with our cotton worship dresses––bloomed with blue gingham and strips of stringy lace. We sit side by side, our skirt-globed knees bumping together, the strands of our hair mixing at our touching shoulders.

The microphone crackles and we lean forward as father begins.

I nod, I twist my lips to match those of the mothers’. I don’t understand most of what father says. I don’t know the words––messiah, armageddon, rapture––don’t know how to make them fit properly on my tongue, whether to make them soft or sharp, sweet or sour. But I know by the tears quartzing down the mothers’ cheeks, the way their mouths become the shape of sugarplums, that it's important. Father is smart like this, father knows the things even Bethany doesn’t.

Tacked around the room hang several images which father claims are him; hoisted up in carved wooden frames. I can’t see the resemblance. Bethany tells me that’s not the point but I still can’t comprehend it. The man in the paintings is slender in the waist where father bulges, tanned like a penny where father is the colour of chalk, of milk. His hair is long, head wreathed by thorns. He seems a sad man; father does not. Father tells me that this is the him of past; and when God comes down to claim us worthy, the body will be his again. I imagine his flesh like plasticine; the hands of God pulling at his muscles and slender bones until his form is that of the paintings, until the old and new him are one. I wonder if I'll grow a new body when God descends; one like Bethany's, with a neat mouth and full hair and skin so smooth and white you can see the veins beneath it like fine blue lightning.

Bethany squirms beside me, knotting her fingers with mine. Father says that Bethany is beautiful. Bethany says that I am.

I turn back to father. He is the greatest man in the world, and we are his only daughters.

——

Father keeps lambs in a wooden pen bordering the commune. Their coats are the colour of marshmallow, their ears the size of apples, and sometimes, when I stand with my elbows kissing into the gate and look in, they patter over to me and press their strawberry-nosed faces into my open palm and don’t mind the uneven surface.

I name the best of them; the one with the gash of white over the tip of his nose, the one who’s ears are always freckled with dirt.

I call him ‘L’, because it is the name I know best, and everyday I sneak him an extra carrot, watch as the juice blooms past his tiny mouth and bleeds a sunset through his coiled fur.

Father kills him on day eighteen.

He walks to the slaughter block, led by the rope noosing his slender white throat, and bleats only twice. I imagine him to be saying this:

I’m sorry.

Thank you.

I have never seen blood. I do not expect it; its richness, the way it spreads like cooking oil and stains everything around it scarlet, a colour that has never existed to me until that moment, when suddenly it's pouring into the soil and soaking up the sunlight.

“You have to learn eventually,” Father tells me.

Later, pressed between cotton sheets and stinking of soap and lavendar oil, I hope that heaven has grass greener than anything I could imagine and lambs who live forever, mouths working around an endless stash of carrots, tails never being slashed from their backsides.

I hope I can say to him: L, you don’t need to be sorry anymore.

And his pink-padded ears will understand me.

——

Bethany tells me that, in the big world, there are girls named princesses who are born from rulers. She tells me that these princesses don't wear startched-cotton dresses or spend hours collecting the prettiest rocks on the border of the commune. She tells me they ride in shiny cars, and live in towers that crawl up to the sun so their bedrooms always look like they’re ablaze. She tells me that they wear dresses so precious that, if you were to touch them, your hands would turn black, and your skin would fall from your body like wilted petals.

I sound out the word until it fits comfortably in my mouth:

Pr-in-cess. Pr-in-cess. Pr-in-cess.

I sound out the word until it feels smooth as a marble, until it feels like a new tooth sprouting up from my gums.

I don’t tell Bethany, but we are like princesses, I think, in our own different way. We thread our hair with baby’s breath, stain our nails with currant blood until it looks like we’ve had our claws pressed into the world. Our plates always show the best cuts of lamb, second only to our father’s. We swallow the meat from shined forks and are brave enough not to consider where it came from; brave enough to forget little berry noses. In the evenings, we dance before the twirling fire pit and the embers never dare to bite us, no matter how close we foxtrot. Our mothers’ pet our scalps and wipe us down with rose water and kiss the scarred skin of my cheek double to that of Bethany’s smooth.

We are princesses, so we don’t worry when the youngest of the mothers; the one with skin as satin and Bethany’s and hair like cornsilk, wakes us every morning hurling into the bushes by our window. We don’t worry when the mothers feed her red clover and nettle and settle their conch ears to her smooth belly. We don’t worry because we know our father will heal her, that’s what rulers do.

We don’t worry when one morning we don’t find her in the worship room, and none of the mothers will acknowledge the jagged tear her absence leaves. 

At night, we worm beneath our sheets, warm breath bouncing in blooms back on our faces, quilt tented above us like a teepee. Bethany tells me stories until the sun rises from her bed to lick the nighttime from our faces and I don’t say anything. Sometimes she puts her head in my lap and I thread my hands through her hair like she's some animal and sometimes she cries until her tears soak through the blanket and wet the front of my thighs. Sometimes she says things like father; things I can't understand.

“I don't want you to forget again. I don't want to watch anymore.”

——

I wake with my cheek plastered to cool floorboards and rope snaring my ankles like a daisy chain. Above me, a skylight opens like a mouth, drooling light over me. The moon is fat and full; a perfect, citrused circle. My mouth is dry, sour. I swallow and it catches half way down my throat.

Before me: a mother. Tucked into a cotton robe, her hair spills from her scarlet cap like kitchen grease, pooling over her white-cotton chest. Her hands work over my scalp, scraping over bared skin, untangling my hair and setting it smooth over my shoulders.

“What’s happening?” I say, and the words stick on my tongue, catch behind my shrivelled top lip.

Her hands are chilled and damp with something sweet-smelling, they leave a sticky trail over my temples like a snail. 

A shadow shifts behind her, and when I blink the sleep from my eyes, I can make out the rounded shapes of other mothers, standing shoulder to shoulder in a row as though stitched together, their eyes like paired moons, their robes the colour of sea foam. The room smells of breath, of something earthy and organic. Familiar. 

I struggle against the ropes, twist myself up into a sitting position and the mother shushes me, lays a soft hand to my forehead and pushes me back down.

Candlelight twitches over the walls, grows beneath pillars of wax. It spills over the pews, the mothers, their shifting feet. They move like ghosts, their bodies the palest shade of peach, their chests swelling breath.

The mother strokes my cheek with her odd hands and says:

“You will forget.”

I settle onto the cool floor and let the feeling of chill take me. From the corner of my eye, I see Bethany. She stands in the shadows, her hair braided over her shoulder, a white shift billowing down her torso, the hemline kissed to her ankles. She won’t look at me, won’t raise her chin. Her fingers press into her clothed arms. I can imagine the marks left behind, raw crescent moons.

“Beth-” I start, and the hand clamps down over my mouth.

 The door swings open and the mothers part to reveal father, his arms spread like the wings of an eagle, his robes the colour of soot. I try to say something, to call to Bethany, but the mother has her hand pressed firmly against my lips, her eyes shut and her head bowed.

Father crosses the room, footfalls the sound of stones being thrown at a tin roof.

He stops at the end of the aisle, and I swear I see him smile. The cord of the microphone snakes around his feet. I reach for his ankles and he kicks back at my wrists, the pain staticing up my arm.

“My own daughter,” he says, voice crackled, “Out of ash, and to ash returning. This is God's will. This is the way it must be. Tonight we witness rebirth, tonight we watch our daughter rise from the ashes of sin. The Lord will heal, as I have always healed.”

A murmur unfurls around me, a ripple of white cloth and bobbing heads. Father smiles again, the flash of his gaping incisor, the crinkling of his eyes. He raises his arms and the crowd quiets.

He says: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh.”

The room swims in and out of focus. A hand pulling me up by my bindings. The stench of smoke, of skin on skin on skin.

As father brings the blade to the crook of my throat, I say only two things:

“Stop it.”

“What did I do to deserve this?”

He smiles,

“Child, gifts aren’t always deserved.”

I will not be afraid. I will not bleat like the lesser lambs, the ones with patchy coats and rubbery meat. I will not call for my sister, nor long for a tower. I press my lips together.

“I’ll see you soon,” he says.

He leans closer, gnarled nose pressing at my hairline, whispering so tightly that no one may hear. No mothers. No sisters sequestered in darkness.

“Beyond me, you will never know God.”

Father calls me L.

Father calls me Lazarus.