Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

Right back to the bottle-she didn’t say it, but it was clear to Cass, and Cass didn’t judge. She knew how it was-the filament that wasn’t strong enough, the way it stretched and stretched before it snapped, leaving you hurtling through the air toward devastation.

Still, there was hope. There were girls in the Convent, and one of them could be Ruthie, and she would find out, but she needed Gloria to focus. They approached an old picnic bench set on uneven ground under a dead pepper tree. “Let’s sit,” she suggested, sweeping dirt and twigs off the splintered wood, and Gloria sat, her expression troubled and confused.

“What kind of talk did you hear?” Cass pleaded, hoping the woman could keep it together a little longer.

“Talk talk,” Gloria muttered. She found a groove in the weathered wood with her forefinger. Her hands were surprisingly elegant, unlined and narrow with long fingers and neat nails. She rubbed at the groove gently, seemingly oblivious to the splintered edges. “They said I didn’t have enough faith. I said they didn’t have enough faith. I know what I know. I watched…the sun painted the rocks and I saw God, I told them that but they said I didn’t have the faith. I wouldn’t drink the essence so they said I didn’t have the faith.”

“Saw God…Gloria, when did you see God?”

Gloria’s skittering gaze landed on her and stayed, like a butterfly on a coneflower, skittish. “Matthew. Before Matthew…before he was gone.”

“Who was Matthew?”

“Matthew?” Gloria glared at her, affronted, and Cass watched her awareness fade in the eddies and whorls of memory. “I married him…we went to Yosemite. I watched God, in the mornings, the way he painted the rocks with the sun. Matthew was there. We were happy.” She startled out of her reverie and seemed surprised to find Cass there. “I married him,” she repeated, sternly. “We were happy. They can’t tell me I don’t have faith.”

Her twitching fingers went to her mouth again, covering, pinching, worrying, and Cass could sense Gloria turning inward again. Who knew what happened to Matthew…maybe he was Gloria’s childhood sweetheart, dead twenty years in an accident. Or maybe he’d been taken, or died of fever only months ago. Either way, Gloria wore the loss like an amulet, a token against the weight of Aftertime.

“I’m sorry about Matthew,” Cass said gently.

Gloria made a sound in her throat and nodded, dropping her hands to her lap. She only wanted to be heard, Cass thought-only that. And for things to be different. What anyone wanted.

But Cass needed more from her. “I’m so sorry to ask. But is there anything else you can tell me about what goes on in there? With the babies, the little girls? How they’re cared for, where they end up?”

Gloria was shaking her head before Cass finished speaking.

“Not little girls, not,” she mumbled. “Not little girls anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“When they’re done, when they’re baptized. They’re only vessels. There’s nothing left inside.”

“WHAT,” CASS MANAGED TO WHISPER, HER throat twisting closed.

“‘Be thou a vessel of innocence,’” Gloria chanted softly. The skin twitched near her left eye. “‘Scoured clean of this world.’ They baptized them.”

“What else did they do?”

“The hair and the dress,” Gloria mumbled. “All the little dresses. White for purity. Purity for innocence. And no talking. No, no, no talking.”

“They put them in baptism dresses?” Cass repeated, scrambling to make sense of Gloria’s tormented muttering. “And there’s no talking during the ceremony. And what happens next?”

“Scoured clean.”

The phrase raised the hairs along her arm. “What does that mean, Gloria? They…wash or scrub them somehow?”

Gloria peeked at Cass, her darting eyes bright with her fevered thoughts. “You won’t know her,” she said sadly. “Don’t go. She’s not yours anymore. She’s innocent now. And they hide them.”

Ruthie was always innocent, Cass wanted to scream, wanted to make Gloria see her the way she had been, in her denim overalls and tiny little flowered t-shirt, falling asleep in Cass’s lap. But Gloria pushed herself off the bench and started walking again, her footsteps unsteady and lurching.

Cass went after her, put a hand on her arm. Gloria yanked away from her touch, crossing her arms tightly in front of her, shaking her head.

“Please,” Cass said. “Just-just tell me what you can. Anything, just help me get in there.”

“You can’t go in. You don’t believe.”

“I-” Cass stopped herself, considered her words. The wrong ones would make Gloria retreat even further. The haze of broken memories and tangled thoughts around Gloria seemed to condense and retreat when Cass was too direct, when she brought up specifics. But specifics were what she needed, a plan for gaining entry. “Did you believe?”

Gloria was silent for a moment. She touched her weathered fingertips to the chain link of the fence and let them trail along the metal-surely Gloria wasn’t the only resident who walked off her next-day ills around this track.

“Two ways,” she finally said. “If you’re a believer, that’s one. It has to show, though. I was real and it showed. God was with me then and it showed. Everyone could see it. You don’t have God on you, so that won’t work.”

Cass was surprised that the words stung. “Do you mean that I…” She struggled to find the right words. “I don’t seem pious enough? I can be different, I can-”

Gloria was shaking her head. “God comes and goes but he’s always there, but they don’t know that. You can’t put God on now-He’ll come back when He’s ready. But they don’t know that.”

“But how do I-what can I do to make them think I’m, you know, a believer?”

“You have to barter,” Gloria said. “You can buy your way in but you have to ask the right one.”

“The right one?”

“You have to ask the right one,” Gloria repeated, enunciating with care, as though speaking to someone with limited powers of comprehension. Her breath, redolent with rot and withered hope, washed over Cass and it was all she could do not to turn away.

“Please, tell me who the right one is.”

Now it was Gloria who wrapped her sunburned fingers around Cass’s arm and drew her into the shade of a clump of creosote bushes growing from a ditch eroded into the edge of the path. Cass glanced around; no one took note of them. They were hidden from the interior of the Box by a series of clotheslines strung on poles, sheets and pillowcases and towels flapping in the breeze. Someone was singing on the other side, a tuneless, wandering melody, too distant for Cass to make out words. The scent of cotton drying in the sun reached her and she inhaled deeply, but she caught herself before she could close her eyes and let the smell take her back to Before.

“It’ll cost you.”

There was a shrewdness to Gloria now. No surprise; thirst could conjure thin moments of clarity. Cass remembered. No matter how far gone you got, you could always get your shit together enough to go to the all-night liquor store when you ran into the bottom of the bottle.

“How much?” she asked, thinking of the bike Smoke had traded, the things he’d bought for them, the merchants with their carnival booths of enticements. She hadn’t wanted to take from him, to shift the balance in the strange and unwelcome ledger of their relationship, but what choice did she have? “I can pay.”

“What can you give me?” Gloria’s words were quick, eager, hungry.

“I don’t know,” Cass hedged. If she made it too easy, Gloria would tell her anything just to get the payoff quicker. “It depends on what you have to tell me.”