Francesca Haig - The Fire Sermon

I didn’t cry out when he pressed it to my forehead, though I heard Zach give a grunt of pain. My hand was at my chest, clutching the key that hung there. I squeezed it so tightly that later, upstairs, I saw that it had left its imprint on my flesh.

They let me stay for four days, until the burn had begun to heal. It was Zach who rubbed balm on my forehead. He winced as he did it, whether from pain or disgust I didn’t know.

‘Hold still.’ His tongue emerged from the corner of his mouth as he peered close to clean the wound. He’d always done that when he concentrated. I was extra aware of these small things, now, knowing that I wouldn’t see them anymore.

He dabbed again. He was very gentle, but I couldn’t help but flinch as he touched the raw skin.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Not sorry for exposing me – sorry only for the blistered flesh.

‘It’ll get better in a few weeks. But I’ll be gone by then. You’re not sorry about that.’

He put down the cloth and looked out the window. ‘It couldn’t stay the same. It couldn’t be the two of us, any longer. It’s not right.’

‘You realise you’re going to be by yourself, now.’

He shook his head. ‘You kept me by myself. I can go to school now. I’ll have the others.’

‘The ones who throw rocks at us when we pass by the school? It was me who cleaned up the wound when Nick landed that rock right above your eye. Who’s going to mop up your blood once they’ve sent me away?’

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ He smiled at me. For the first time I could remember, he was perfectly serene. ‘They only threw rocks because of you. Because you made us both into a freak show. Nobody’s going to be throwing rocks at me now. Not ever again.’

It was refreshing, in a way, to be able to speak openly after all the subterfuge. For those few days before I left, we were more comfortable together than we had been for years.

‘You didn’t see it coming?’ he asked, on my last night, when he’d blown out the candle on the table between our beds.

‘I saw the brand. I felt it burning.’

‘But you didn’t know how I’d do it? That I’d declare myself the Omega?’

‘I guess I only got a glimpse of what would happen in the end. That it would be me.’

‘But it might have been me. If you hadn’t said.’

‘Maybe.’ I shifted again. The only bearable way to lie was on my back, so that the burn didn’t touch the pillow. ‘In my dreams, it was always me branded.’ Did that mean that staying silent had never been an option? Had he known so surely that I would speak up? And what if I hadn’t?

I left at dawn the next day. Zach’s happiness was barely disguised, and didn’t surprise me, though I was saddened to see how my mother rushed the farewell. She avoided looking at my face, as she had ever since the branding. I’d seen it only once myself, sneaking into Mum’s room to meet my new face in the small mirror there. The burn was still raised and blistered, but despite the inflammation surrounding it, the mark was clear. I remembered the Councilman’s words, and repeated them to myself: ‘This is what I am.’ Holding my finger just above the scorched flesh I traced the shape: the incomplete circle, like an inverted horseshoe, with a short horizontal line spreading out at each end. ‘This is what I am,’ I said again.

What surprised me, when I left, was my own relief. Although the pain of my brand was still sharp, and although Mum pushed a parcel of food into my arms when I tried to embrace her, there was something liberating about leaving behind those years of hiding. When Zach said, ‘Take care of yourself,’ I nearly laughed out loud.

‘You mean: take care of you .’

He looked straight at me, not averting his eyes from my brand the way our mother did. ‘Yes.’

I thought that maybe, for the first time in years, we were being honest with each other.

Of course, I cried. I was thirteen years old and I had never been parted from my family before. The furthest I’d ever been from Zach was the day he journeyed to collect Alice. I wondered if it would have been easier if I’d been branded as a child. I would have been raised in an Omega settlement, never known what it was to be with my family, with my twin. I might even have had friends, though never having experienced any closeness apart from with Zach, I didn’t really know what that might mean. At least, I thought, I don’t have to hide who I am anymore.

I was wrong. I was hardly even out of the village when I passed a group of children my own age. Although Zach and I had not been able to attend the school, we knew all the local children, had even played with them in the early years, before our strange togetherness became a public problem. Zach had always carried himself with confidence, and insisted he would fight anyone who said he wasn’t an Alpha. But as the years passed, parents began to warn their children away from the unsplit twins, so we’d relied more and more on each other for company, even as Zach’s resentment at our isolation grew. During the last few years the other children had not just avoided us, but had openly taunted us, hurling rocks and insults if our parents were out of sight.

The four children, three boys and a girl, had been riding on a pair of old donkeys, taking turns to race each other on their comically awkward mounts. I heard them from a distance, and saw them shortly afterwards. I kept my head down and kept to the side of the narrow road, but word of our split had spread quickly, and when they grew close enough to see my brand they were filled with the excitement of seeing the news confirmed.

They surrounded me. Nick, the tallest of the boys, spoke first, while the others looked with undisguised disgust at my brand.

‘Looks like Zach can finally come to school.’

Nick hadn’t spoken to either of us for years, other than to shout slurs, but it seemed my branding had immediately returned Zach to favour.

Another of the boys spoke: ‘Your kind don’t belong here.’

‘I’m leaving,’ I said, and tried to break away, but Nick blocked my way and shoved me back towards the others, who shoved me again. I dropped my parcel and instinctively shielded the wound on my head as the boys’ blows sent me stumbling from side to side within the tiny ring they had formed. A taunt accompanied each shove: ‘freak’; ‘dead-end’; ‘poison’.

My hands still over my face, I turned to Ruth, a dark-haired girl who lived only a few houses from us. I whispered, ‘Stop them. Please.’

Ruth reached forward, and for a second I thought she was going to take my arm. Instead she bent down, grabbed my flask, and emptied my water slowly on to the ground, where one of the donkeys made a futile attempt to slurp at it as it sank into the sandy soil. ‘That’s our water,’ Ruth said. ‘From the Alpha well. You’ve been contaminating it long enough, freak.’

They left me without looking back. I waited until they were out of sight before gathering my things and making my way down to the river. Emptying the flask had been a harmless act: the river water, though brackish and warm, was perfectly safe to drink. But even as I crouched at the river’s edge to fill the flask again, I knew the significance of Ruth’s gesture. To the Alphas, perhaps even my own mother, my life up to now had been a lie, my place in the village kept through deceit.

For the rest of the day I avoided the road, instead scrambling along the banks of the river. I fastened my shawl over my head, flinching when it touched my burn. The one time I passed a farmer, an Alpha woman bringing her goats down to the river’s edge to drink, I scuttled past in silence, head down. I didn’t stop when I reached the gorge leading west to the silos, but pushed onwards, further south than I’d ever been.