Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

by Ashley Winstead

Because around here, the only belief system that had ever competed with religion was superstition;

devouring every book that wasn’t a spiritual, each one proof another world existed outside the one I knew.

Ruth Cornier, the preacher’s daughter, coveted a boy’s love more than God’s.

“Panic attack.” I’d never told anyone—I didn’t even know for sure. I’d read a book with a character who had them, and it had been like a lightbulb going off. I’d diagnosed myself.

It was amazing how embodied obedience was. Amazing how, even though sometimes I thought I hated my parents, their commandments still wormed their way so deep into my subconscious that obeying them was more muscle memory than choice. That had to be the worst kind of prison—the one whose bars were buried under your skin, invisible cages around your heart and mind.

“You may be grown, girl, but you’ll always belong to your daddy.”

Of all the people in this town, perhaps none are more invisible than the Fortenot Fishing wives, women known not even by their names but by their husbands.

“A reader, then.” He eyed me. “Dangerous quality in a girl.”

I wanted to drink their threat, hold that volatile substance in my chest. Swallow their danger and become the danger myself. Vampire, viper; all that power, mine.

“The cruelest people we know are from church. Let that sink in.”

I belong here on this good green earth. I’m part of it. Not a sinner or a saint—just another creature.

“You think I need you to swoop in and shield me, take me to the hospital and chain me up for my own good? Listen to me, Barry, and listen well: I am the one you aren’t safe from. You better hurry up and run from me.”

What is it about us teenage girls that claws so deeply under people’s skin? We’re reviled and desired in equal measure; cringed at, laughed at, then lunged at. The sheer effort people like my father and my teachers have spent trying to control us. So many dress codes and rigid rules and unspoken ones we have taken on the mantel of policing ourselves, looking in the mirror and wincing at our reflections, drawing our own blood first, before others can.

I thought I knew these people, that they were salt-of-the-earth folk with good heads on their shoulders, but it’s like some switch’s flipped.