##Part 3 - Unholy Children...
_______
#####Chapters:
_______
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2023
The gods have abandoned me. I’m convinced of it now. Even Zygomar doesn’t help me although he should because we Thompsons are the ones that founded this holy land in his name. My forefather Ezekiel brought his worship here to Holybrook. He first showed the united tribes the promise of this land and sowed the first seeds in the surrounding earth. I don’t understand at all. How could the Great One abandon me? Where are you Zygomar? I bear your mark upon my skin! I have worn it on my very ass from the moment of my birth! Are you truly weakened to the point that you don’t have the power to hear me and help me? Do you defend yourself? How can you forsake me now when I need your intervention most? The others don’t answer my prayers either and I fear the cause is two-fold: because they are sleeping and they have also grown afraid of choosing a side. It’s clear to me now who will win this war for power. I believed in you. I was always faithful and you’ve just given up.
My phone will die soon and I fear that I am slowly dying too. My hunger is endless now, clouding my thoughts and in the small world of this attic where I’ve confined myself, the shapes of things in the darkness are growing undefined. The sharp edges of everything have become relentlessly dull no matter how hard I try to focus my eyes in the dimness here.
And they’re all still out there–just beyond the door whispering their whispers…
And their fingers still continue to scratch.
_______
I open my eyes in a dark place and find myself suspended–floating in a void that’s filled with stars and swirling galaxies that appear clearly and far off but are actually close enough to reach out and swirl around with my touch; I do so now, watching the world around me ring with ripples like a pool of water that reflects the night sky. This place exists light-years away from my physical body. My spirit has projected itself here astrally and I exist in this impossible place as a nonmaterial being. This is what it’s like to enter The Humming Trance–it’s a secondary dimension that exists deep inside the subconscious minds of the believers. This is a place I’ve visited a handful of times before, although the journey is usually not quite this effortless. It usually takes hours of concentration but something is different tonight and it only takes a moment.
We use this place to connect with our gods. We know they are there because we can speak to them directly but they don’t exactly exist here. It’s more like appearing within a telephone signal or a radio wave. We can hear them if we listen closely but they speak from someplace else unseen–this time is different because the god I seek an audience with reveals himself in his corporeal form right before me. I know this is anomalous. Something few have experienced before and I’m shocked and horrified by how he appears. His physical form is an abominable writhing mass of tentacles that seem to undulate slowly in the darkness, gliding as though swimming, treading the pool of black–treading the nothingness. At the center of his multiple swaying limbs is a head with an oblong shape. I’m struck with silence seeing him because he is nothing short of terrible. Yet, I am unafraid of what he is or the unspoken danger facing him might mean for me in this dark place.
When he speaks to me, his mouth (or what I presume to be his mouth) doesn’t move and his voice resonates to me from inside my mind, the way that the old gods have always chosen to speak to us. I hear him from the quiet space between my ears where my soul resides.
You seek anssswersss, child Vorgrath’s voice echoes like the hissing of a snake through the darkness where I float half dreaming, half awake, and answersss I can give…
Answersss to questionsss you don’t even asssk. You seek to know about the thingsss your ssspirit sssaw after you received the blessing of my kissss.
He falls silent and I feel a surge of knowledge pass through me. It happens in seconds: thoughts, images, concepts and complete histories…things so old they predate writing become known to me and somehow the entirety of this knowledge is relayed to me without a single word from Vorgrath.
What I learn in these moments is this–the entire history of the gods and world I knew and how it came to be:
The old gods that we worship in Holybrook have existed since the cosmos burst forth from nothingness. They have existed since the stars were young. They are ancient and everlasting. At first they held no extraordinary power. They were simply advanced consciousnesses without physical forms set adrift through space. There were hundreds of these beings flying slowly through many galaxies and exploring the many corners of the universe. Some watched certain sectors more closely, fueled by their own curiosities and drawn to specific places throughout the vastness by the emergence of sentience like themselves. Some wanted it to develop and flourish. A larger number of these omnipotent celestial beings were uninterested by such things and found contentment to aimlessly wander. Of this type, there remain countless multitudes throughout the cosmos that float through the dark with no destinations in mind nor drive to search out anything specific. They are content with their existence as things are and find no need to change the course of what they’ve always done and they will continue on in this way for eternity.
Our gods were of the first more type and more ambitious, driven to explore the young planets like our own. Volcanic and evolving places experiencing tectonic shifts, changing and morphing as they formed atmospheres and evolved. Eventually these worlds began realizing the hidden potential that drew these gods to them in the first place and the spark of life spread quickly across their surfaces.
When our gods first arrived on this planet and chose to enter this plane to observe, they were content to watch formlessly and unseen but the longer they observed and life began to flourish across the Earth, they found that their exposure to our world began to cause transformations in themselves. Their immaterial, incorporeal presences began to manifest physical forms of their own. A number of these beings found such changes in themselves undesirable and returned to the stars when their energies began to shift as mankind evolved from the mud. More of them vacated in greater numbers still when we began to walk upright and develop further.
Eventually only five remained.
These five vied for power to wield over the life on this planet. They made themselves known to man and over time, presented themselves as powerful gods, and the people formed five tribes–one for each of them. Each tribe was separate and divided by the deity that ruled over them. Death and destruction followed each of these gods as their tribes began to fight for the same resources and the right to settle the same lands.
Then after centuries of this, there came an age where the leaders of each of their peoples grew tired of the endless war and violence and death. The chieftains from each clan sent their soothsayers and shamans to a neutral place to negotiate and find a path to peace. It was in this age of reason and knowledge that the tribes began to work together, building a tentative peace between them despite the warring nature of their ancient gods.
During this establishment of communication between the tribes grew cooperation and eventually from that, prosperity. With the channels of dialogue finally open, the highest priests from each religion began to whisper of the prophecies they kept secret in the ages prior. Foretellings of the comings of their futures revealed to them in many ways: in visions, trances and dreams; in divination, astrology and tea leaves; whispered from the lips of beasts and read in the fortune telling bones used by certain oracles. These prophecies came to the holy men of every tribe throughout their histories and when they began to share among themselves they realized that each prophecy was the same:
A prophet would be born. A messiah that would rework the threads of their existences and weave them into something new. He would devote the first third of his life to learning the prayers and traditions of each of the five tribes. He would learn to speak to each god in their native tongue and he would learn to invoke them each in time, by calling out to them by their secret names. The second third of his life would be spent uniting the tribes as one. One nation, one people. All of them sharing one religion created from the fabric of them all. The final third of his life would be spent taking the new united tribe from the darkness of the caves and deserts where their civilizations was born and he would lead them to The Fields of Nectar and Plenty and that place, when they found it, would be called Holybrook. And this prophet would be called Ezekiel.
And the people, at the end of their migration, would still keep each of the five elder gods in their new, unified way, but they would choose one from among them to be the leader of the others. Once that leader was chosen, the other four would drift to sleep in the endless way that lasted eons to dream for eternity in the immaterial land of slumber. This great sleep would signify the end of their history of strife and war forever.
Occasionally one god might grow restless when a devotee called out to them by name in a way that was persistent and insistent enough to warrant their arousal. They would judge this adherent, determine whether to reward their insistent prayers or consider them unworthy and smite them for disturbing their slumber. Once these calls were satisfied, they would return to their default incorporeal quiet state of sleep.
But while Zygomar ruled and the others dreamed for endless scores of time, Vorgrath slept with one eye open, biding his moment and waiting for Zygomar to grow ambivalent or weary of Holybrook’s devotion.
Vorgrath told me that one day he was delighted as he watched as Zygomar too drifted off to sleep. As he slept in the unseen ethereal place where the gods are kept, Vorgrath watched and waited for Zygomar’s arousal–we, his devoted people, had no way to know he could no longer watch over or hear us, so the traditions we kept continued on the way they always had–his name was still spoken daily, devotions and feast days were kept and offerings were sacrificed to him frequently but despite this, he continued to sleep. Still has he slept now for over a decade. Seeing that time was ripe to seize power, Vorgrath opened his eyes fully and chose tonight for the specific moment to bless me with his kiss and set the things I witnessed loose from the earth.
Vorgrath named these abominations his “Dark Children” and their soul purpose is to convert Zygomar’s followers to himself, ensuring that he would become chosen the new supreme god of Holybrook making Zygomar one of the lesser gods in endless dreaming with the others on the incorporeal plane.
He believed if he could convert the Thompson clan first, the descendants of Ezekiel, the rest of Holybrook would follow the doctrine set forth for them as they always had. He said he blessed me with his kiss during the lantern lighting, and endowed me with the gift of visions in the hopes that the first of the Thompsons he converted might be me.
When I absorb this story from him, I take the briefest of moments to contemplate the offer before firmly telling him my refusal. I refused to name him the leader of them all because he was attempting to take this title by deception and force. I told him the people of Holybrook would never accept the supreme leadership of a god so dishonest and cruel. Zygomar was chosen by the pioneers, the original settlers of Holybrook not only for his great power but for his endless patience for sinners who had lost their way and his benevolence and love.
At this declaration he welcomed me to try to stop him and hurtled me from of my Humming Trance and back to face the ceiling fan as it spun in the darkness of my bedroom.
Prior to my face-to-face interaction with Vorgrath, I hadn’t told my family what I’d seen in my vision. I was hesitant, considering the possibility of that the sights of my out-of-body experience were a simple hallucination–the result of my proximity to death. Now, however, I sat up in bed with the resolve to do so. The necessity of doing so flowing through me, imbuing me with a sense of urgency. Although moving made the agony of my raw skin flare anew, warning my family that something unholy was afoot overrode the importance of my discomfort and I climbed from bed with swift, but cautious speed.
As I make it to the stairs at the end of the hallway, something strange and inexplicable comes over me. It starts with a slight tremor; my extremities loosening and contracting against my will and beyond my control. Next the incoordination begins to set in, an extreme numbness that spreads involuntarily through my limbs. Losing coordination entirely, eventually this paralyzation grows further and before I am aware, my limbs become like gelatin. I’m completely unable to support my weight and fall in the hallway where I stand. Thankfully I am already using the wall to support myself and when I finally lose the strength to hold myself up, I’m slumping into a convenient sitting position with my back against the wall.
The lights in the hallway flicker, or perhaps they don’t flicker at all. Perhaps it’s my vision itself that begins to flicker. I blink as the hallway alternates from fully lit to darkness. The power surge along with my swoon is disorienting so I blink against the constant change of light a few times…
I close my eyes on the hallway one last time…
_______
…and I find myself outside. I’m kneeling at the altar outside the chicken coop. The furnace set before it is raging with bright flames and a living fowl, a fully conscious chicken is being sacrificed. It beats its wings against the doors, trying to escape from the flames. My heart is breaking as I watch this, but somehow I know it is being done for a greater good. Still, my eyes begin to water and raising my hands, I wipe the tears away.
It takes me several moments to process what I’m seeing and I realize that the eyes I am using to look out at the night sky over the ranch…the eyes that are fixated on the helpless chicken as it struggles…the eyes that have begun to cry…are eyes that do not belong to me.
I’m looking at the world through the eyes of my mother.
In the darkness, something moves through the field. It stretches itself in geometrically straight lines–movement that defies the natural order of things–it creeps through the tall grasses that surround the chicken coop. I am not afraid. I know that I am protected from harm by not just our supreme god Zygomar but by the other four gods as well. I wasn’t born a Thompson, but I am the mother of five of them so I am protected from all evil things that lurk in the dark just the same as my husband and children are protected. I watch as this thing stretches a sharp appendage through the grass and moves closer…
Its skin is unsettlingly black. The type of black that absorbs all light into itself so that it can remain unseen–a shadow come to life…but I can see it just the same as it moves slowly toward me in the shadows of the overgrowth. As it emerges from the weeds, I see that the skin isn’t black and devoid of color at all. Its skin is covered in dark crystalline geodes that appear to shine through the darkness like a formation of small, craggy obsidian rocks. The moonlight reflects across it from every angle, as though it shines like the lights of a thousand stars.
I hear myself gasp at the unnatural sight of it. It moves like an amoeba, only not…the movement is all wrong as it pulls its rocky form across the ground towards me.
It stops suddenly after emerging from its hiding place. Whether I’ve startled it or its attempting to remain unseen, I can’t tell and I stare at it for a long moment, contemplating it curiously. I decide that it makes me uneasy, but that’s probably due to its anomalous nature. I’ve never seen anything like this. I don’t think a thing like this should exist.
Watching it move slowly in my direction, I realize how unsettling it is–the way it extends its sharp appendages lengthily outward from its body in order to drag itself across the dirt through the dark, the strange pattern it leaves on the ground, and the way its overall form keeps shifting into perfectly undeviatingly angular and congruent lines–the seemingly impenetrable texture of its skin, a sort of armor reminiscent of a living crystal…
Though it appears to be eyeless, I realize that it seems to be watching me back.
It advances suddenly and with a speed that is nearly imperceptible, so quickly I’m helpless to react to it when it lunges in my direction. It lands heavily on me, crushing itself against my face. I try to pull it away but it’s covering my eyes and I can’t see anything except for the sharp darkness of its underside. Its acuminous legs are wrapping themselves around the back of my head and I can feel its sharp protuberances multiply, numbering in the dozens now. Each time I pull one away, another grows out from the center of the thing to take its place.
Until this moment, I haven’t screamed, but now the instinct to cry out in terror takes over and I realize too late that this was a mistake. I begin to feel the thing reach out half a dozen of its protuberances and press themselves into my mouth and sharply down my throat. The strange armor covering its skin feels like swallowing a thousand shards of glass and I can feel each of them digging against my insides as it moves itself down.
_______
The vision ends and my eyes spring open. I find myself back in the hall where the vision began. My hand is covering my mouth and I don’t remember putting it there but I did it to stifle myself from screaming.
At first, I don’t react to what I’ve seen, but I can’t just sit here in the hallway. I have to do something. I have to protect the others and my mind races through the inventory of weapons available. Without knowing the weaknesses of Vorgrath’s minions, how do I take them face-to-face? I do know that Father has multiple guns but he also keeps them locked in a safe. If I only had one of them, I think. “I am a pretty good shot.* But would a gun even work? The more I consider the way those things looked and moved climbing up from the depths of the ground, I don’t even know how effective bullets would be against them. Their skin seems to be made of crystal or stone–what if it’s an adaptation? Some armor to protect them from harm? What if it’s as hard and impenetrable as stone?
I decide I have to find Father, wherever he is, and tell him everything I know. He would know what to do. If I can find Father and tell him what is happening, he will arm us both…but what if he doesn’t believe me? Worse–what if he does and we arm ourselves, but using firearms on them ends up more dangerous than finding another way? How hard are the geodes they are composed of? What if it turns out their skin makes them impenetrable and the bullets ricochet right back in my direction? This isn’t something I can figure out on my own. Father might be nearby–inside of the house–if not he might be putting out the lanterns. I want to look for him immediately but I know the smartest thing for me to do is to find something I can use to defend myself first.
With renewed resolve, I return quickly to my room–the burns that tormented my skin now nearly forgotten thanks to adrenaline and urgency. I collect my hunting knife from its place on the dresser. I decide that this is good, but I need something else. I can’t explain my logic, but I want my slingshot also. I’m good with it and use it to kill crows all the time. It’s not a toy. I look for it for several moments before remembering where to look…
I loaned it to my nephew Micah earlier in the day. I did it with his mother’s blessing of course when he saw me using it and expressed interest in trying it out. I knew it wouldn’t do much against Vorgrath’s children, but having it would make me feel better, regardless. I have no delusions about what it is…it’s a placebo at best…a glorified security blanket. It’s better than nothing.
Leaving my bedroom, I head down the hallway to the guest room where Micah and Hannah, Josiah’s twins, sleep while they stay here for the seven nights celebrating the Feast of Eternal Abundance with everyone.
This room is upstairs as well–at the other end of the hallway. I enter quietly, inching the door open slowly, avoiding the creak of the rusted hinges. The door only protests if you’re careless. If opened slowly and methodically, it doesn’t make a sound. I stop when the gap is large enough for me to fit inside. I don’t want to draw any attention to myself and if the twins are asleep, I don’t want it screaming out into the darkness and waking them. It’s nearly 11:00pm, making it well past their bedtime. The room is dark and I can barely see them when I enter. They’re definitely already in their beds.
The slingshot is easy to locate. The curtains of the guest room window are tied open and it rests on the windowsill, illuminated by the moonlight almost as if it stands on stage below a spotlight. When I first enter the room it was draped entirely in shadow but now as my eyes adjust, as the shapes grow clearer the muted light from the night outside enhances things further.
Vorgrath and his creatures intend to convert every Thompson. He told me that himself. He won’t discriminate or deviate from this plan. I stand framed by the window staring at the faint shadow that I cast onto the carpet and consider this more deeply. The twins are definitely targets as well–just as my mother was targeted and how my Father will be too–my brothers and sisters, Josiah’s entire family–they’ll all be targeted. Not a single one of us will be overlooked. Bringing the twins with me isn’t really a decision, but more of an instinct…I am the only one who knows everything about what’s happening. The responsibility to keep everyone safe falls to me alone–I’m especially responsible for the children who are completely innocent and defenseless in this. They are the weakest of us alI.
Part of me wants to run from all of this. Get as far away from the ranch as I can get and hope for the best for everyone I leave behind–but that would be wrong. It would be weak. I have to wake the two of them and take them with me while I search for Father and everyone else. Their parents will likely be somewhere in the main house. It’s less likely they would be outside somewhere on the grounds so late, but not impossible. I can’t leave these kids behind with the hope that someone else will come to their rescue. It has to be me. I can keep them safe as I look for everyone else. Not taking them with me puts them at risk that The Dark Children may find them here first, where they lay hopelessly asleep.
With the window at my back, I am facing the door. I turn right toward the guest beds. I’m about to wake them but just before I do, I have to stifle myself from gasping in shock.
Two twin beds occupy the room and each child lays in one. Immediately something about their posture strikes me as wrong. Unnatural. Their forms are barely outlined in the moonlight. The square of light cast by the window is too far from them to be much help, my eyes are fully adjusted to the darkness, but I can’t be sure if what I am seeing is true. It may be a trick of the shadows but it appears that they each lay on their backs with their arms laced across their chests. It’s the posture a mortician might use for an open-casket viewing. It isn’t their posture that seems most strange to me…I can tell something is wrong but I’m having trouble identifying what it is…and then it hits me: neither of them are in pajamas. They are still fully clothed wearing the same outfits they wore earlier in the day. Instead of being tucked beneath their covers, they’re on top of them. These things are strange but there’s something else I don’t like–they lay motionlessly, breathlessly, as if they are already dead. I can’t even hear them breathing–not even faintly. I hold my own breath just to be sure.
As if I weren’t unsettled enough, as I am taking all of this in, deciding what I should do, they both turn their heads to face me where I stare at them from the window at the same moment. Their eyes are wide and unblinking and I think that something more about the two of them might be wrong, but I have to move closer to be sure.
Moving cautiously, my heart starts to jump from my chest and into my throat over and over again as I take each slow step across the room and toward the beds. When I am halfway across the room, I’m finally sure of what I see. The eyes they stare at me with are not their own.
They’ve turned fully black–the whites are gone–the usual shade of blue is gone as well. The eyes are too round and too large and everything between their eyelids has been replaced by a void of nothingness. Pitch black like the darkness of space that seems to sparkle like the sky at midnight. I’m still several feet away from them but I can see the reflection of my silhouette clearly in their stares, outlined by the moon as it watches the three of us through the window behind me.
Instantly, my desire to safeguard them dissipates. I’m too late. It’s too late for them. They’re already gone.
I run from the room and down the hallway toward the stairs. I don’t know how to save anyone but myself right now.
I take the stairs two at a time and when I reach the landing of the first floor, I feel the onset of the same tremors that I felt earlier. The ones that happened before the vision I had of my mother. My muscles begin to loosen and contract against my will. Another vision is coming and I don’t know how to stop it from happening, but I can’t have it here–out in the open–at the bottom of the stairs. Once it begins, I won’t be able to defend myself…I’ll be helpless. Incapacitated.
I look around quickly, desperately, for a place to hide. The numbness begins to spread through me again–and then I see it–the coat closet beneath the staircase. Using the wall to steady myself I make my way to it and reach it just as my coordination begins to fail. I reach for the handle and watch my arm swing at it impotently, my fingers won’t move at all. I’m panicking now–how will I get inside? I try for the handle again, swinging both arms this time and manage to squeeze it between my wrists but the attempt seems futile. Just as I’m about to give up, accept my fate, and allow myself to collapse where I stand, I manage to turn it enough to unlatch and swing the door open. With no hope of closing the door behind me, I stumble into the closet and press myself between the thick layers of coats hanging there, pushing myself behind them and against the wall. Unable to support my weight, I lean forward and as my vision begins to flicker in and out, the last thought I have is the hope that I’ve made it deep enough into the coat closet that if anyone passes by the open door, I’m far enough between the winter clothes to be unseen.
Unable to move into the closet any further, my eyes begin to close against my will…
_______
…when I open them again, I am running through one of the cornfields. There is someone in the next row over, to my right. I can’t see clearly who it is, but every now and then I see the shape of them through slight gaps in the line of crops. Even when I can’t see them, I hear their rapid footfalls as they run as well. They’re running fast and I can’t be certain, but I don’t think they’re chasing me. If they were chasing me, they’d pass through the stalks and run along the same row as I do. We might be running away from something together. Someone might be chasing us through the dark–or maybe we’re not running from someone, but something.
”HELP! SOMEBODY HELP ME!”
The screaming voice belongs to a woman. She’s ahead of me and she’s nearby and her screaming doesn’t matter out here. The nearest neighbor is more than four miles away. Nobody is close enough to the ranch to hear her, and even if they were, there’d be nothing they could do that would help her.
The running footsteps in the row adjacent are falling behind now. They’re moving fast, but I’m moving faster and they’re unable to keep up with me. It isn’t possible for them to keep up with me. It never has been.
The woman screams for help again and it sounds even closer than it did before. I’m gaining. Then a second voice, one coming from the same general area, is screaming for help as well.
This voice I recognize. This second person is easily frightened. I grew up listening to this voice do its share of screaming and and equal share of crying as well. Right now she’s doing both.
Nobody is chasing me.
I’m the one who’s chasing.
It’s Caleb. I’m looking through the eyes of Caleb and he’s fast. Much faster than the person in the next row. If I had to hazard a guess, the partner he’s outrunning must be Josiah. He’s never been as fast as Caleb. Nobody I’ve ever met is faster than Caleb. They’re both chasing Leah somewhere deep in one of the fields. I’ve never heard Leah scream in my life. Never. But somehow, something makes me sure the first voice I hear calling for help is hers.
The second voice, the one I recognize, belongs to Rebekah. Rebekah, who I’ve made scream a lot. I always did it because she’s fun to scare. It’s so easy to do and she screams so loudly. She also cries a lot and I recognize the sound of that too. Rebekah who cries if she mistakenly causes a loaf of bread she’s baking to burn. Who loudly cried herself to sleep every night for a month when Samuel, who gave her armfuls and armfuls of bruises was trampled to death in the mud by his own mule because I prayed and prayed for him to be punished…yes I’ve heard those screams. I’d know the sound of those tears.
This is more frightened than she’s ever sounded in her entire life.
Still running; never slowing–not when I’m so very close. Their screaming is giving them away. I’m getting closer and closer to them. Moving to the left, to the next row, I slip between two towering stalks of corn. They’re not in this row but I’m getting closer. I slip left again to the next row, and again to the next and I see them. They’re not 20 feet in front of me now.
I hear rustling through the stalks behind me and still running, I glance back over my shoulder to see Josiah pushing his way into this row as well. We make eye contact and I gesture at him to pick up the pace because he’s fallen so far behind. His wide midnight eyes grow even wider when he sees how close we are to them and his speed increases with renewed vigor.
I face forward and Leah is just ahead. The gap between us is less than 12 feet now. Rebekah is further up and faster, but not by much, ahead of Leah by just 4 or 5 feet more.
Leah is 10 feet now.
8 feet
6
5
3
I reach Leah easily, but instead of leaping onto her back, I pass her. Rebekah is more of a challenge which excites me more. Josiah can catch his wife himself.
When she’s less than a foot ahead of me, I leap mid-run and land square on Rebekah’s back; wrapping my legs around her torso and pulling her to the ground and both women begin to scream.
*I turn her forcefully onto her back and straddle her stomach. Using one hand to hold her neck against the ground, with my free hand, I shove my fingers between her lips and then between her teeth and force her jaw as widely as I can get it to open. Then I open my own mouth now and something dark and sharp begins reaching out from it, ripping its way up from deep inside my stomach. It drags itself out from within my insides with one of its sharp pseudopodia, a long black arm covered with jagged obsidian stones that shift and move as if they’ve come to life. Both of our mouths open, holding her jaw, I press my face to hers and feed her some of the thing that’s been hiding inside of me for hours now.
I feed it to her like Tabitha fed it to me. Like I fed it to Josiah after. Like Josiah fed it to Micah and Hannah. Like he’ll soon feed it to his wife who runs past me while I feed Rebekah. As she passes, Leah stumbles over a rock in the path and land on her hands and knees in the dirt. Josiah’s just a few feet away from her now and almost on top of her…