Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

by Laura Ruby

Of course, it wasn’t her mother’s voice she heard. It was mine. Because the dead never sleep, you see. We have so many other things to do.

The order of nuns that ran the orphanage was called the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, but some sisters served Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, and others simply caused perpetual sorrow for everyone else.

Once I’d confessed to my own mother that I thought God was a woman, because who but a woman would care so much about the oceans and the plants and the animals, who but a woman could build a whole world in seven days? My mother slapped me so hard my ears rang like church bells for hours after.

When I was a little girl, I’d heard about ghosts, or rather, the places they haunted—old houses, cemeteries, dark roads at night.

And yet, unlike so many others, I didn’t skulk around graveyards. All right, I didn’t only skulk around graveyards. I’d boated down the Chicago River, I’d ridden the train all around the Loop downtown, I’d motored through every inch of the city and beyond, I’d gone wherever and whenever I wanted to go.