Seven Sins

by Piper Lennox

  There were fields where we grew our own food and raised our own livestock; our electricity came from sunlight and wind, and our water was pumped straight from a nearby river and purified before arriving on our doorsteps, every night, in big glass bottles.

  Beyond our small, idyllic town sat the reverend’s sprawling home. In the early years, he welcomed members there at all hours of the night, and held beautiful services from his deck on cool summer evenings.

  It was perfect, Mother told me. Heaven on earth. Exactly what Reverend Barton had promised his congregation.

  I remember no such time.

  Maybe it was because I was born into it, but Unity Light seemed far from perfect. Life was a system of rules that changed at the council’s whim. Myself and the other children were disciplined by everyone, not just our own parents, and told it takes a village. Our transgressions could be as small as complaining about our clothes being too hot, or asking for seconds at dinner.

  As I grew, things only got stricter. Reverend Barton barely acknowledged the changes, claiming that as our community grew, our rules would have to grow with it.

  To me, it seemed like the rules weren’t growing, but shrinking—tightening around us an inch at a time. Too few of us seemed concerned that, sooner or later, we’d run out of room.

  During the last three years, in particular, Crown Plains became unrecognizable. Reverend Barton suddenly told us to call him Prophet Barton. A few months later, he changed it again—Salvator. Savior.

  Instead of services four nights a week, we now met twice daily, and Barton no longer read from the Bible. He simply gave us rambling, fiery accounts of his visions, which were getting scarier. More threatening. He told us the world was collapsing. We weren’t safe outside Crown Plains.

  He was no longer a messenger for God, he said. He had become the message itself. He would write the new Word, and our community would survive when the rest of this world perished—but only if we did exactly as he said.

  One by one, families left. None came back.

  The day the fences went up, Mother cried.

  Not in front of me. Never in front of me. She sat at our kitchen table and told Rebecca’s mom, “This isn’t what he promised. They always said we were free to leave. Is this free?”

  “The fences are to keep the outside out, Allison. Not to keep us in. Are you having doubts?”

  I held my breath. Admitting yes would mean a retreat: a weekend in the Main House for constant prayer, fasting, and no contact with family.

  The council called it optional, but would coincidentally stop sending water to your house if you didn’t go. You’d get ignored, everywhere you went. Council members would show up every night to pray over your hell-bound soul, until finally you were so sick of it all you’d bite the bullet and go.

  I’d attended four in the last two years. The prayer and fasting, I could handle; even the isolation wasn’t awful.

  It was the men.

  Every evening, one would bring fresh clothes or water. Some would sneak you food.

  When they returned in the middle of the night, you were to lie perfectly still. Even if they climbed into bed with you.

  Even if they kissed you.

  It never went beyond that, at least for me. I noticed if I broke the rule and moved a little, kissing them back, they’d leave quicker.

  It was inevitable. I figured I might as well get it over with.

  Whatever the purpose was escaped me. The council said retreats were a test of the spirit, so I guess I kept passing.

  Every time I returned, Mother looked worse than when I’d left her, like she hadn’t eaten either.

  “No,” she told Rebecca’s mother, too quickly, “of course not. I just.... What if we want to visit family?”

  “Salvator says we’re still free to come and go as we please,” Mrs. Hostetter reassured her. “You just have to check out now. It’s for safety reasons.” She paused. “But maybe it’s better if you don’t visit your family. Remember what happened last time?”

  “That was years ago, though. Before Jun— Jescha,” she corrected, “was even born. My parents might understand, now.”

  “I don’t think they would. But if you want to try...all you have to do is sign out.”

  In reality, it wasn’t that simple. Not after two hundred members dwindled to a hundred, and then a hundred shrank to seventy. Now the mere mention of signing out earned you an “optional” retreat.

  By the time there were fifty members left, we barely saw Barton anymore. He recorded his frenzied rants on a cassette tape that one of the council members played over a loudspeaker, the audio squealing and popping all around us like logs getting burned. Rumor had it he didn’t even live on Crown Plains now.

  Some said he was hiding, and that law enforcement was trying to find a way to shut our community down. Others claimed he was setting up our new community, and that it was going to be even more perfect than Crown Plains originally was.

  In his absence, the council ran the community with all the arbitrary strictness he did.

  Not that they had to enforce much. The serious doubters had already left. Most of the members who remained still clung to every word that dripped from Barton’s now-recorded mouth.

  My mother was one of them—in public.

  But in the privacy of our home, I saw someone else.

  With enough prodding, I could get her to tell me stories of her life before the church: the music she listened to, the clothes she wore, or what her parents—my grandparents—had been like.

  The only thing she still had from her old life was the scuffed red Walkman and Janis Joplin discs we listened to, whisper-low, on nights I couldn’t sleep.

  When I was twelve or so, I asked her if we could leave Crown Plains.

  “No, Juni.” She only called me this in private. Reverend Barton had chosen my name, claiming he’d heard it in his vision. Jescha meant “behold.” I didn’t get a middle. Behold…what?

  Mother originally wanted to name me Juniper Summer. She’d had it picked since she was a little girl. It was our secret, as special to me as the Walkman and all her stories of Before.

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t have any money, no car...nowhere else to live.”

  Her answer chilled my skin, but in an exciting way. I’d meant “leave” like a day trip, even just to help the canvassers pass out pamphlets. She thought I meant permanently.

  So the fact she answered with such practical reasons thrilled me. Was that all we needed? Were those the only reasons we hadn’t moved sooner?

  Leaving for good is even possible?

  Every time I brought it up after that, though, she’d shake her head and simply say, “No. We belong here.” Her answer sounded so final, I wondered if I’d dreamed that earlier conversation.

  But the sadness in her eyes…I remembered that too vividly to ignore it. It stuck with me for years.

  And the day the fences went up, when I heard her crying to Rebecca’s mother, I knew it for sure: she was doubting.

  At least part of her, small and buried as it was, wanted to leave. Maybe that would be enough.

  After Rebecca went home, whispering to me that we would meet the others by the South Building at midnight, I started dinner for my mother and set only one plate on the table.

  I was supposed to set two: one for my mother, the last meal I would prepare for her before a lifetime of preparing them for my husband, and one for the offering. Ten percent of every meal, to thank God for our blessings.

  It used to sit under our crucifixion painting, until Reverend Barton replaced it with a portrait of himself. Every last home had one now.

  He’d seen it in a vision, he told us.

  When I asked the council if that meant our offering now went to Reverend Barton instead of the Lord, they made me scrub every floorboard in the Main House myself.

  Now, I placed the offering plate back in the cabinet and stared at the food, still steaming on the stovetop. The s
cent of chicken and potatoes stabbed straight into my stomach.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I could eat. I wasn’t going to be a bride, so I didn’t have to fast.

  I didn’t have to follow any of their rules.

  Before the front door opened, I managed to eat two baked potatoes with salt. They were the best meal I’d ever had.

  Mother wilted into her chair. Daily Acts exhausted her. She had twice the work of most women, because she’d given birth to me out of wedlock and claimed she couldn’t name my father. Her atonement, sent directly from Reverend Barton, was to serve the community as though she were two people—to remind herself, and others, of the burden in not taking a partner.

  If spouses were so crucial, I didn’t understand why the council forbade her from getting married like the widows or divorcees who joined our congregation. And if raising a child alone was the crushing weight they said it was, why did they make her spend so many hours serving others, instead of here at home?

  Tonight, seeing her almost fall into her seat, my heart broke for her. My mind raced with all the questions I’d bitten into my tongue for years.

  “Our last meal together,” she sniffed, her smile like a tightrope about to snap.

  “Not together. I have to fast.” I flicked my water glass. The ding filled the silence.

  “Though I suppose,” she went on, like I hadn’t even spoken, “I’ll be able to join you and Zachary on occasion, once you settle in.”

  “Do you really want me to marry Zachary?” I blurted. I’d meant to lead into things gracefully: that’s why I didn’t prepare the offering plate. I wanted her to ask me why it wasn’t there.

  I wanted a way to finally tell her. Mother, I’m doubting.

  No. I was beyond doubt.

  I was done.

  “Don’t you want to marry Zachary?” she asked.

  “Mother.” I took both her hands in mine across the table, then squeezed them with all the urgency Rebecca did to me when we left the dress fitting. “You always told me the council would grant us a choice—that if we didn’t agree with our match, we could appeal. And if we didn’t feel ready to marry, we could wait.” I blinked at her. “They aren’t letting us appeal, anymore. We aren’t allowed to wait.”

  “Salvator changed the rules for a reason, Jescha.”

  “Juni,” I snapped, when she pulled her hands away to eat like this was any other meal. Like this was any other conversation. “And what reason? This is the same as when the fences went up. He’s going back on his promises.”

  She cut her potato into nothing and didn’t answer.

  “I don’t want to leave,” I whispered, and the sob I’d barely held back since she came home fell onto the table.

  Carefully, she set her utensils down in a crisscross and got up to hug me. “I won’t be far.”

  Yes, you will be, I thought, clutching her dress in my hands and pushing my face into her stomach like a toddler.

  After she was done eating, she asked if I’d like her to braid my hair. I said yes. She hadn’t done it in years.

  Her cool hands on my neck and forehead, brushing the hair back and winding it together, calmed me. It reminded me of when I was little and had a fever, and she’d come to check on me in the middle of the night.

  “Can I see your tattoo?” I asked, when she finished the braid and told me to go to bed.

  She laughed and said I’d seen it a million times, already.

  “A million and one, then.”

  It was a small black heart on her ankle, always hidden by her pantyhose and the ankle-length dresses we all wore. She got it when she was fifteen, at a party. Before Unity Light.

  “Your body is a temple. Never damage it with the baubles and stains of this world.” Barton’s teachings dinged in my ears, meaningless but memorized, as I touched the faded ink embedded in her skin.

  “You were my age, when you got this.” I sat on the plain brown rug by her bed and poked the heart again.

  “Yes. I shouldn’t have, though.”

  “Because it was unsafe?” I asked, which is what she’d told me once before.

  Mother shook her head and looked so tired, it almost made me yawn. “It’s a stain.”

  I swallowed back my next question—the one I’d wanted to ask for weeks.

  If I leave, will you leave with me?

  For all the signs of her unhappiness, her doubts...my mother still trusted Barton. She loved Unity Light and the Plains. Not for what it was, but what it used to be, and could have become.

  When I crept past her cracked door just before midnight, I silently promised, I’ll come back for you.

  I wasn’t sure when, or how. But the second I was able, I would return to Crown Plains and take her away from all this. The ever-changing moods and visions of a leader going mad. A community that called itself her family, but didn’t treat either of us with the love we had for each other.

  But before I could save her, I had to save myself.

  There were five of us, crouched in the shadows of the South Building that night. Hanna and Ada, sisters, were only twelve and thirteen. I was worried about them, but at least they had each other. Joshua was a surprise; I didn’t know he wanted to leave Crown Plains. He seemed to like it here.

  Of course, he liked Rebecca more. Maybe learning she could no longer appeal the council’s match and request to marry him, instead, motivated him to join us.

  “They have dogs now,” he whispered. “I heard them barking the other night.”

  “Spotlights,” Ada added, as she tucked her sister’s long braid into her dress, then turned so she could do the same for her. Smart. Rebecca and I did it for each other, while Joshua pulled his shoulder-length hair into a rubber band at the base of his neck.

  “Tie your dresses up,” he told all of us.

  “We can just wear our underclothing,” Rebecca offered, but he explained the woods outside Crown Plains stretched on for miles.

  “Your dresses will keep you warm, make good bandages...you may need them later.”

  We nodded. None of us knew exactly where the Plains were—or how far we were from anything else. Traveling on foot and avoiding all roads, we could be in these woods for days.

  “Jess?” Rebecca’s hand found mine, when the five of us lined up in the shadows to wait. “I promise, I’m not leaving you.”

  “You can’t make that promise.” We’d sworn it days ago, in the attic. No matter what happened, we would keep going. With or without each other.

  Joshua snapped his fingers: the irrigation system for the fields had just started. They weren’t loud, but would help disguise the rattle of the fence.

  Together, we ran.

  Rebecca shoved past me when I tripped in the grass. In retrospect, I think she was shoving me forward—knowing there wasn’t time to help me up. All she could do was get me a tiny bit closer.

  I cut my thigh at the top of the fence. Nightmares would carve this memory up and tell me it was barbed wire, but it wasn’t: just the jagged peaks of the chain link, because it wasn’t built well. It was built fast.

  I was the last to drop. One by one, I heard everyone else hit the ground and go, but I couldn’t. My muscles felt frozen. I clung to the fence and looked at the lights on top of the hill.

  There weren’t spotlights, or dogs: my nightmares would throw those in too, once I left. All I was seeing were the headlights from one of the council cars. Maybe the fence had a silent alarm, and they were sending people out to check. Maybe there were cameras, hidden in the buildings or trees.

  Maybe no one had any idea we were leaving, and this was all easier than we’d thought.

  Then why do you even have to climb a fence in the first place?

  With this thought came the urge to look at the gate, several yards away. It was locked, always. Only council members knew the combination.

  I held my breath and went deadweight, dangling by my arms from the top bar.

  I dropped.

  Another c
hange my nightmares would create: that my ankle twisted and my other leg shattered. That I turned and limped behind the others at a pitifully slow pace, while Rebecca looked back like she wanted to help.

  In reality, I just felt a buzzing pain in both ankles that faded quickly. Running was easy.

  And no one looked back for me, because they were already gone.

  I ran until I threw up. The potatoes I’d eaten, my broken fast, looked like they’d barely been digested when they landed in the decomposing leaves under my feet.

  It was morning. Dappled sunlight revealed the blood staining my dress that I didn’t notice until now: my arms had cuts, either from the fence or swatting branches out of my way for hours on end.

  I found a creek and drank, but vomited every drop back up a few minutes later. Cramps rolled through my stomach until I crouched behind a tree to relieve myself, too dizzy to be embarrassed.

  Who was out here to see, anyway? Clearly, the others had found paths better than mine. I hadn’t seen or heard anyone since they dropped from the fence.

  Hours went by like this: walk a few yards, vomit, use the bathroom, blink away the dizziness when I stood, and repeat. It wasn’t a conscious process. All I knew was that I couldn’t stop. Not until I found someplace safe.

  Around mid-afternoon, I fell to my hands and knees in exhaustion.

  I wept.

  The twigs and leaves barely crunched when I rolled across them, hugging my knees to my chest. I felt weightless: unreal and fading.

  I wondered if Rebecca was still running. Maybe she and Joshua stuck together.

  Maybe she was lying in the brush somewhere in this forest, too, wondering about me.

  Branches snapped nearby. I jerked my head and saw a deer through the trees.

  I’d never seen one so close before. It was a doe, with soft white spots on its body that reminded me of drops of milk on our dining table.

  It stopped to sniff something. When I sat up to look, it yanked itself upright, blinked at me, and bolted back the way it came.

  I crawled to the spot where it had stood. There was a white block shoved into a dead tree trunk. When I touched it, it felt grainy.