The Bone Wall Read Free

strident as the curses, prayers soar in God’s holy name. Some bow on their knees, praying for themselves, none praying for us. The loudest voices screech from faces contorted by hate, calling us devils in disguise, cursing us to the pits of Hell and laughing with bitter malice at the certainty that Heaven too will fall. Just as my father said they would.
     
     
     
     
     

     
     
     
     

 
     
    2
     
    ~Angel~
     
    From thirty-five feet high on a branch as thick as my arm, I watch my sister kneel and pray. Her head bows, her bonnet swathing her face in sharply angled shadow, palms steepled in supplication. We are twins, mirrors to each other, boyishly thin, our mother’s buttermilk hair iron-straight, our father’s eyes, gray pools reflecting the hues of the hour. Are my sister’s eyes jade-tinged by the grass she kneels upon or slate for the shadows circling her soul?
    She doesn’t know that I spy on her and the descendants of Heaven and Paradise in our mutual hopeless destruction. No one knows I cower up here as my sister begins to break.
    The cracks in Heaven’s shield splinter, no mere rumor. At night they crackle, blue light sparking and rippling in streams, opening voids like blots of spilled ink, empty black eyes to the night sky that snap closed again. I’ve felt rain, true outside-rain spattering on my face and arms when holes wink open.
    How can she deny what our eyes see, our tongues taste, our skin feels. Our filaments flicker and dim. Lampposts cast scarcely a glow; at night, we light our chambers with candles to save our stubbed toes. Our water might gush or dribble depending on the day. The very air swelters or freezes as the broken world spins through its seasons. Crops wither and thrive; we wither and thrive. I fear we tiptoe on the rim of annihilation.
    On the earthen wall, I behold the mirror of my family and neighbors, a cast-out community, myself. Are they me and mine, our own future crying out for deliverance? The youngest children whine and sniffle at their tiredness and hunger, writhing against their parents’ distress, incapable of envisioning the threat lurking in the days ahead. Older children appear immobilized, bewildered to the point of senselessness, their exclusion from our Garden incomprehensible to their experience, to all they’ve learned in their short lives. A dusty little girl in a once yellow frock comforts her mother as she watches my sister pray in the green grass. Does she, like my sister, believe God will answer all her prayers?
    A flicker of movement distracts me, and I raise my eyes over the refugees’ heads. The afternoon sun sinks behind me, casting a golden light across a wilderness of thirsty grass and golden weeds, blood-red stones of a dry riverbed. Beyond crumbling banks, an expanse of barren dirt stretches toward a spindly forest, saplings sprouting like stiff gray hair on an old man’s head. Bronze mountains cut the distant horizon, ridges and valleys sharpened by the sun’s shadows; beyond them I dream of mirror lakes and copper-crested seas.
    Movement stirs again at the trees’ edge. I’m not the only one who notices it. Deacons and elders on the metal tower still their bumping for position, voices silent as several point to the skeletal limbs. Those outside the shield turn, first a few, then more, until the whole line rotates to face the first sign of Biters.
    **
    The House of God’s Law swarms with deacons, elders, and most of the men, not a crevice spared for women or children, our presence deemed unnecessary. Rimma sneaks through the twilight around the hub, gathers her skirt in her teeth, and climbs the ivied ladder. I follow close enough on her heels to taste the soles of her shoes.
    On the roof, she creeps toward the belfry and child-size door that opens to the bell loft. She needn’t lift the latch so gingerly or fret over squeaky hinges; the cacophony of male voices below creates a rumbling thunder that drowns our meager sounds. Inside the