Jason Mott - The Returned

Lucille licked her lips and shook her head. The air grew stiffer. There was no room for a body to move but, still, people were coming into the church. She could feel it. Probably, they were coming from Buckhead or Waccamaw or Riegelwood. The Bureau was trying to hold these town hall meetings in every town they could and there were some folks who’d become something akin to groupies—the kind you hear about that go around following famous musicians from one show to another. These people would follow the agents from the Bureau from one town hall meeting to another, looking for inconsistencies and a chance to start a fight.

Lucille even noticed a man and a woman that looked like they might have been a reporter and a photographer. The man looked like the kind she saw in magazines or read about in books: with his disheveled hair and five-o-clock shadow. Lucille imagined him smelling of split wood and the ocean.

The woman was sharply dressed, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her makeup flawlessly applied. “I wonder if there’s a news van out there,” Lucille said, but her words were lost in the clamor of the crowd.

As if cued by a stage director, Pastor Peters appeared from the cloistered door at the corner of the pulpit. His wife came after, looking as small and frail as she always did. She wore a plain black dress that made her look all the smaller. Already she was sweating, dabbing her brow in a delicate way. Lucille had trouble remembering the woman’s first name. It was a small, frail thing, her name, something that people tended to overlook, just like the woman to whom it belonged.

In a type of biblical contradiction to his wife, Pastor Robert Peters was a tall, wide-bodied man with dark hair and a perpetually tanned-looking complexion. He was solid as stone. The kind of man who looked born, bred, propagated and cultivated for a way of life that hinged upon violence. Though, for as long as Lucille had known the young preacher, she’d never known him to so much as raise his voice—not counting the voice raising that came at the climax of certain sermons, but that was no more a sign of a violent soul than thunder was the sign of an angry god. Thunder in the voice of pastors was just the way God got your attention, Lucille knew.

“It’s a taste of hell, Reverend,” Lucille said with a grin when the pastor and his wife had come near enough.

“Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Lucille,” Pastor Peters replied. His large, square head swung on his large, square neck. “We might have to see about getting a few people to exit quietly out the back. Don’t think I’ve ever seen it this full. Maybe we ought to pass the plate around before we get rid of them, though. I need new tires.”

“Oh, hush!”

“How are you tonight, Mrs. Hargrave?” The pastor’s wife put her small hand to her small mouth, covering a small cough. “You look good,” she said in a small voice.

“Poor thing,” Lucille said, stroking Jacob’s hair, “are you all right? You look like you’re falling apart.”

“I’m fine,” the woman said. “Just a little under the weather. It’s awfully hot in here.”

“We may need to see about asking some of these people to stand outside,” the pastor said again. He raised a thick, square hand, as if the sun were in his eyes. “Never have been enough exits in here.”

“Won’t be no exits in hell!” Helen added.

Pastor Peters only smiled and reached over the pew to shake her hand. “And how’s this young fellow?” he said, aiming a bright smile at Jacob.

“I’m fine.”

Lucille tapped him on the leg.

“I’m fine, sir,” he corrected.

“What do you make of all this?” the pastor asked, chuckling. Beads of sweat glistened on his brow. “What are we going to do with all these people, Jacob?”

The boy shrugged and received another tap on the thigh.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Maybe we could send them all home? Or maybe we could just get a water hose and hose them all down.”

Jacob smiled. “A preacher can’t do stuff like that.”

“Says who?”

“The Bible.”

“The Bible? Are you sure?”

Jacob nodded. “Want to hear a joke? Daddy teaches me the best jokes.”

“Does he?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Pastor Peters kneeled, much to Lucille’s embarrassment. She hated the notion of the pastor dirtying his suit on account of some two-bit joke that Harold had taught Jacob. Lord knows Harold knew some jokes that weren’t meant for the light of holiness.

She held her breath.

“What did the math book tell the pencil?”

“Hmm.” Pastor Peters rubbed his hairless chin, looking very deep in thought. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “What did the math book tell the pencil?”

“I’ve got a lot of problems,” Jacob said. Then he laughed. To some, it was only the sound of a child laughing. Others, knowing that this boy had been dead only a few weeks prior, did not know how to feel.

The pastor laughed with the boy. Lucille, too—thanking God that the joke hadn’t been the one about the pencil and the beaver.

Pastor Peters reached into the breast pocket of his coat and, with considerable flourish, conjured a small piece of foil-wrapped candy. “You like cinnamon?”

“Yes, sir! Thank you!”

“He’s so well mannered,” Helen Hayes added. She shifted in her seat, her eyes following the pastor’s frail wife, whose name Helen could not remember for the life of her.

“Anyone as well mannered as him deserves some candy,” the pastor’s wife said. She stood behind her husband, gently patting the center of his back—even that seemed a great feat for her, with him being so large and her being so small. “It’s hard to find well-behaved children these days, what with things being the way they are.” She paused to dab her brow. She folded her handkerchief and covered her mouth and coughed into it mouselike. “Oh, my.”

“You’re just about the sickest thing I’ve ever seen,” Helen said.

The pastor’s wife smiled and politely said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Pastor Peters patted Jacob’s head. Then he whispered to Lucille, “Whatever they say, don’t let it bother him...or you. Okay?”

“Yes, Pastor,” Lucille said.

“Yes, sir,” Jacob said.

“Remember,” the pastor said to the boy, “you’re a miracle. All life is a miracle.”

Angela Johnson

The floors of the guest bedroom in which she had been locked for the past three days were hardwood and beautiful. When they brought her meals, she tried not to spill anything, not wanting to ruin the floor and compound her punishment for whatever she had done wrong. Sometimes, just to be safe, she would eat her meals in the bathtub of the adjoining bathroom, listening to her parents speaking in the bedroom on the other side of the wall.

“Why haven’t they come to take it back yet?” her father said.

“We never should have let them bring her...it to begin with,” her mother replied. “That was your idea. What if the neighbors find out?”

“I think Tim already knows.”

“How could he? It was so late when they brought it. He couldn’t have been awake at that time of night, could he?”

A moment of silence came between them.

“Imagine what will happen if the firm finds out. This is your fault.”

“I just had to know,” he said, his voice softening. “It looks so much like h—”

“No. Don’t start that again, Mitchell. Not again! I’m calling them again. They need to come and take it away tonight!”

She sat in the corner with her knees pulled to her chest, crying just a little, sorry for whatever she had done, not understanding any of this.

She wondered where they had taken her dresser, her clothes, the posters she had plastered around the room over the years. The walls were painted a soft pastel—something all at once red and pink. The holes left by pushpins, the marks left by tape, the pencil marks on the door frame indicating each year of growth...all of them were gone. Simply painted over.