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It’s enough for her to know, sitting in there in the dark, that if she really wanted to she could get out. The knowledge is as good as freedom.
The collarbone. It has only been a few seconds, but the moments have elongated. Only pain can bring such attention to the body; this is how Margot notices the answering echo in her chest. Among the forests and mountains of pain, a chiming note along her collarbone. Like answering to like. It reminds her of something. A game she played when she was a girl. How funny: she hasn’t thought of that game in years. She never told anyone about it; she knew she mustn’t, although she couldn’t say how she knew. In the game, she was a witch, and she could make a ball of light in the palm of her hand.
In the game Margot played when she was a child, she was enough all by herself.
Allie wanted to run along the line and pop the chickens out of their shackles and set them free, wild and angry. She imagined them coming for Mr. Montgomery-Taylor in particular, taking their revenge in beaks and claws. But the voice said to her: This is not the time, daughter. Your moment has not come. The voice has never led her wrong yet, not all the days of her life. So Allie nodded and said: “It’s very interesting. Thank you for bringing me.”
The voice said: There will be a day to use this, and on that day you will know what to do.
Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day something is different, so that in the heaping up of days suddenly a thing that was impossible has become possible. This is how a girl becomes a grown woman. Step by step until it is done. As he plunges, she knows that she could do it. That she has the strength, and perhaps she has had it enough for weeks or months, but only now is she certain. She can do it now and leave no possibility of misfires or reprisals. It seems the simplest thing in the world,
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“See,” Sister Maria Ignacia says to the girls who gather to listen to her before evensong, “our Lord learned from a woman how to love. And Mary is close to all children. She is close to you now and has brought you to our door.”
dozen women turned into a hundred. A hundred into a thousand. The police retreated. The women shouted; some made placards. They understood their strength, all at once.
It’s been a year. There’s been footage on the TV of riots in faraway and unstable parts of the world, of women taking whole cities. Daniel’s right. The critical thing isn’t that fifteen-year-old girls can do it: you could contain that. The thing is that they can wake up this power in some of the older women. It raises questions. How long has this been possible? How did no one know until now? On the morning shows,
She guns the gas and drives off before the sirens start. She wondered what she’d have done if they’d caught her, and in the asking she knows she has enough left in her skein to stun a man, at least, maybe more—can feel the power sloshing across her collarbone and up and down her arms. The thought makes her laugh again. She finds she’s doing that more often now, just laughing. There’s a sort of constant ease, as if it’s high summer all the time inside her.
It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.
Abigail says, “What shall we do then?” Eve says, “Then God will show us what She wants of us.” And this “She” is a new teaching, and very shocking. But they understand it, each of them. They have been waiting to hear this good news.
the land, and a thirst for truth and a hunger to understand what the Almighty meant by making this change in the fortunes of mankind. In those days, in the South, there were many preachers who explained it: this is a punishment for sin, this is Satan walking among us, this is the sign of the end of days. But all these were not the true religion. For the true religion is love, not fear. The strong mother cradling her child: that is love and that is truth. The girls pass this news from one, to the next, to the next. God has returned, and Her message is for us, only us. In the early morning
They wait in the dark. They practice. They have to be certain they can do it all in one go, that no one will have time to reach for his gun. They pass the thing from hand to hand in the dark and marvel at it. Some of them had been held captive for so long they never heard a word of this thing; for the others, it wasn’t more than a strange rumor, a curiosity. They believe God has sent a miracle to save them, as He rescued the Children of Israel from slavery. From the narrow places, they cried out. In the dark, they were sent light. They weep.
“I think there’s going to be a great battle between light and darkness. And your destiny is to fight on our side. I think you will be mightiest in the mightiest.”
“I look after myself,” says Allie. “I learned how to take care of myself.” “Yeah. I can see that.” The voice in Allie’s head has been quiet these past few days. Quieter than she remembers it being in years. Something about being here, these summer days, knowing that Roxy’s here and she could kill anyone stone dead; something about that has made it all go quiet.
She pauses. She knows this is not what they’re expecting to hear. “God loves all of us,” she says, “and She wants us to know that She has changed Her garment merely. She is beyond female and male, She is beyond human understanding. But She calls your attention to that which you have forgotten. Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses, for what you can learn from her. Muslims: look to Fatima, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation. “You have been taught that you are unclean, that you are not holy, that your body is impure and could
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crowd. She had been here for the protests three years earlier; yes, she had held up her banner and shouted and signed her petitions. “It was like being part of a wave of water,” she says. “A wave of spray from the ocean feels powerful, but it is only there for a moment, the sun dries the puddles and the water is gone. Then you feel maybe it never happened. That is how it was with us. The only wave that changes anything is a tsunami. You have to tear down the houses and destroy the land if you want to be sure no one will forget you.”
“Now they will know,” shouts one woman into Tunde’s camera, “that they are the ones who should not walk out of their houses alone at night. They are the ones who should be afraid.”
They want to make a demonstration here. A show of force to let the world see how a properly trained army deals with a rabble like this.
It is probably involuntary. Pregnancy hormones increase the magnitude of the power—perhaps a side effect of a number of biological changes during this time, although people say now, very simply, it’s to protect the baby. There are women who’ve knocked their nurses clean out while giving birth. Pain and fear. These things whittle away control.
They all take a little bit before they head out the door, and there’s music playing in Roxy’s head. Sometimes it’s good to go to war, just to know you can.
Allie is quite familiar with trouble that is too deep to be spoken. She knows it happens in any house, however high. There is no place that cannot be penetrated by the kind of trouble Allie has seen in her life.
day Enuma touched him. He has written in the scribbled notes for his book: “At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.”
At the table next to them, Tunde is listening. He also has a large whisky, though he’s not drinking it. The men are getting drunk and shouting. The women are quiet, watching the men. There is something vulnerable and desperate in the men’s display—he thinks the women are looking with compassion. One says, loud enough for Tunde to be able to hear, “We’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Listen, we don’t believe in this nonsense. You can tell us where you want to go. It’ll be just the same as it’s always been.”
When he walked past a group of women on the road—laughing and joking and making arcs against the sky—Tunde said to himself, I’m not here, I’m nothing, don’t notice me, you can’t see me, there’s nothing here to see.
One of them says, “Why did they do it, Nina and Darrell?” And the other answers, “Because they could.” That is the only answer there ever is.
She presses just enough to make him see stars. He laughs, and she laughs, breathless and foolish in the middle of the storm. Their bodies have been rewritten by suffering. They have no fight left. They cannot, in that moment, tell which of them is supposed to be which. They are ready to begin.
