Sophie Littlefield - Aftertime

“It builds a sense of community,” Lily explained, showing her the shelves of towels and kaysev shoots carved into toothbrushes and the rough soap made from the oily center of kaysev beans. No doubt the manufacture of these supplies was part of what kept the convent humming with industry, but it served another purpose, too-preparing for the day when everything from Before ran out.

As the neophytes lined up for the two crude bathroom enclosures, acolytes brought buckets brimming with water and took away tubs heaped with dirty laundry before locking the doors for the night. To Cass’s surprise they were allowed to wear whatever they wanted to sleep in, everything from Giants T-shirts to lacy nightgowns, but she had nothing but the clothes she was wearing.

She rubbed sleep from her eyes and looked around the empty room, surprised that she’d slept through the others’ departure. Most of the beds were neatly made. Her bed was separate from the others, tucked into a corner. The newcomer bed, where Lily explained she would sleep for the first few transitional days. Next to it was a hardback chair and a small table on which a stapled set of pages rested. They were well-thumbed, the edges curling, and they looked as though they’d been typed on an old manual typewriter.

“You’ll have two days to rest before you join the others for daily chores and study,” Lily had said when she showed them to Cass. “Mother Cora likes for newcomers to spend time in reflection. And reading these.”

There were hundreds of pages, single-spaced. “Who wrote all of this?”

“The founders. Mother Cora did a lot of it.” Lily looked uncomfortable. “You can, you know, skim some of the parts. You’ll take your meals here until you’re done. Just try to think of it as room service.”

On the table next to the pages was a plate holding a thin, flat seeded kaysev cake and six almonds, and a tall glass of clear water. Cass put the glass to her lips and drank slowly, feeling the water wash down her throat, lukewarm but clean, the best she’d tasted Aftertime.

She ate her breakfast and washed herself as well as she could. After that, there was nothing left to do but pick up the pages.

WELCOME, SEEKER

DOCTRINE OF THE ORDER

Cass read the first page three times before giving up. The words refused to come together in her mind, the paragraphs swimming before her eyes.

Somewhere, not far away, the children of the Order were being cared for. Fed and clothed and sheltered and kept safe. That was more than Cass had ever accomplished. Much more than she’d managed already, and she’d only had Ruthie back in her care for a single day-a day in which she’d let her be bitten, infected, and nearly taken. A day that had caused her girl untold pain as she turned, then reverted, then healed in that small library room.

Cass tossed the pages on the table and lay back in her bed, pulling the sheet up over her head. Her breath fouled the air under the sheet, and she pulled her arms and legs in tight and made herself as compact as she could. She squeezed her eyes shut and wondered if, in here, her prayers might actually work.

The prayer she would say, if she allowed herself, was the old one, and for that reason Cass knew it was a bad idea. It was the prayer from when she drank. On mornings like this, in beds not dissimilar, Cass breathed her own stink and reviled her own body and prayed only for God to let her forget-the things she had done, the things she had lost, the things she would do tonight. It was not a prayer of hope.

Someone would come, eventually. She had managed to sleep through the other neophytes washing and dressing and preparing for their day, but she would not be so lucky again. She would be expected to study, to eat, to make conversation. Cass had come here with hope and something even better-with thoughts of Ruthie dancing like diamonds in her mind, never far from her thoughts. But that was gone now. Yesterday, as Lily’s kind voice stirred the silt from her memories, she had remembered.

And remembering stole her resolve. Cass wanted to be Ruthie’s savior, but she was the one who had forsaken her.

She wanted to be Ruthie’s everything, but she deserved nothing.

Cass pressed her face to the mattress and felt her tears hot against the cotton. She pressed harder, harder, until she couldn’t breathe, and wished she could stay that way until the last of her life left her.

But her body was a traitor, and as she willed the air from her lungs and her mind went black at the edges, she knew that eventually it would seize deep drafts of air to sustain life, a gift she no longer wanted.

IN THE END, OF COURSE, SHE BREATHED. SHE stared at the pages and ate the food an acolyte brought for lunch, and slept and woke, and when the others came back at the end of the day she listened to their talk and answered when they spoke to her.

Monica offered her a gift, a single sleeping pill wrapped in a page torn from a magazine printed back when there were still celebrities to gossip about. Cass thanked her and turned her down, but she wondered how many times she would say no before she said yes.

“I don’t understand any of this,” she said instead, fanning out the typed pages.

“Don’t worry about it.” Monica sat cross-legged on her bed. She was wearing faded pajama pants printed with penguins on skis, and a white tank top, and her hair was pulled back from her face with a wide band. Her thin brown shoulders and the bangs that slipped out of the hair band made her look like a teenager, though she’d told Cass she was twenty-two. “It’s not like they test you on it or anything. It’s just all of Mother Cora’s crazy ideas.”

“Did you read it all?”

Monica laughed. “ Nobody reads the whole thing. Lily just tells Cora that you read it after a couple of days.”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing, really. You get to be a neophyte. Big thrill.”

“Monica…why are you here, if you don’t believe any of it?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t believe any of it. I believe the basics. Know what I was doing, Before?”

“What?”

Monica glanced around the room. Some of the women were already in bed, others were reading by the light of the industrial fixtures mounted in the corners of the room. No one paid any attention. “I haven’t told this to anyone but Adele, but I was going to go to divinity school. Down at Fuller. I wanted to be a minister. I mean not like right away but…someday. I was saving up.”

Cass remembered herself at twenty-two. The account she started at the bank, where she was going to put away money for landscape design school. The single deposit she made-and the day not long after, when she took it out to buy a leather skirt.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to go,” she said softly.

“Yeah. Well.” Monica smiled and yawned. “Here I am, anyway. I like most of the people here. Even a lot of the ordained aren’t so bad. And three meals a day and a bed sure beats living on the outside. It’s just-I don’t like it when people think they have all the answers, you know? Especially when they make them up and then want to make you believe the same crazy things.”

Early in the evening of the second day, there was a knock at the dormitory’s single door. A key turned in the lock. Cass expected an acolyte bringing her dinner, but it was a gray-haired deacon in a ruby blouse.

She gave Cass a smile that didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. “I’m Hannah. Sister Lily tells me that you have finished studying the Doctrine. Tonight you will join us for dinner, and afterward I will give you your new clothes. Congratulations, Cassandra.”

Following Hannah down onto the field, Cass realized how little she had moved during the two days she’d spent confined to the dorm. Her legs felt tight, her heartbeat sluggish. It had been days since she’d ended her solo journey at the school, months since she ran flat-out through the Sierra foothills.