Amity & Sorrow Read Online Free Page B

and all grew hushed when they crossed the threshold, stepping from the red and blue to the soft, pale light inside. Wives formed a ring about the room, encircling their husband and the altar and Sorrow.
    He roared his Revelation. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock! If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come!’
    There, from outside the temple door, there came a knock. Wives screamed out. Children whimpered.
    ‘This is a holy place!’ he called. ‘No law or government will defile our church!’
    Another knock came.
    ‘Will I answer it?’ Amaranth asked him, stepping into the circle. She saw how Sorrow gripped the edge of the altar with clenched fingers. ‘Husband, I will answer.’ She walked toward the door.
    ‘Don’t do it!’ called a wife from the circle. ‘Lock it!’ called another. The wife from Waco began to scream, uncontrollably, ‘It’s a trap; this is how it happens!’
    A baby began to wail and a mother bounced it, shushed it.
    Amaranth reached to open the door and her husband called out.
    ‘Stop! Hide the children. Hide them below. They will not take my children!’
    Amaranth’s hand froze on the door. Children were their glory, their purpose. How should they be hidden from police, as if they were shameful, as if they were not made, all of them, in their holy love?
    He dragged the altar table back from the hole in the floor and lifted the hatch. ‘We must keep them safe,’ he said.
    Women clung to their children, then bent to soothe them and explain. They dropped them, child by child, down into the hole, down into the dark of the room below. As for the children, they were happy enough, for down below there were piles of blankets, quilts to lie in and to jump on. There was food to last them for months of Armageddon, should it come to that.
    Amaranth watched toddlers handed down by older children who swung in to follow them, but when Amity started down to the hole, she stopped her. ‘Stay with me,’ she said, and Amity nodded. She pulled her daughter toward the door to hide her in women.
    The knocking at the door was a pounding now and Amaranth ran back to open it even as her husband shouted, shutting the hatch and moving the altar, candles swaying, ‘We will pray! You will pray!’
    The women joined hands to make their circle. They began to spin their circle about the room. Amaranth opened the door on a chubby female officer in a navy polyester uniform. She had spoken with the officer before, but she did not smile or greet her.
    The officer looked into the temple, to see inside the thing they had been watching from the outside: the plain wooden interior and the candles, the circle of women rushing by. She saw the officer startle at Sorrow’s open-throated, guttural cries and her husband’s upraised hands.
    ‘That the girl there?’ the officer asked her, pointing at Sorrow.
    And then she heard a shot ring out behind her. One single gunshot and women began to spin in a frenzy. Only the wife from Waco was still, gun in her outstretched hands. The officer crouched and grabbed for her own gun, shouting into her radio over Sorrow’s prayers and the pounding of clogs, ‘I need backup!’
    Amaranth scanned the room for daughters, for Sorrow, clinging to her father, for Amity, pressing herself against the wall. Amaranth forced her way through the spinning women, weaving among them, crashing into them, while her husband shouted, ‘I will break the seals!’
    And then there was only grabbing and clutching and dashing and rushing and hands in her hands, hands pulling away, and the screaming of women, the silence of children, and the smoke and the flames and the driving away.

5
Stitches
    G o home, he said. As if it were that simple.
    Amaranth scoops the last pathetic handful of oats from the dirt beneath the car. She searches the scrub for something she can feed her daughters, any edible weed she might boil into a gruel. She looks for wild sorrel or chicory, picks dandelion and