The Fire Sermon Read Online Free Page A

table. When other children played together by the river, we played only with each other, or followed the others at a distance, copying their games. Keeping far enough away to avoid the other children shouting or throwing stones at us, Zach and I could only hear fragments of the rhymes they sang. Later, at home, we would try to echo them, filling in the gaps with our own invented words and lines. We existed in our own small orbit of suspicion. To the rest of the village, we were objects of curiosity and, later, outright hostility. After a while, the whispers of the neighbors ceased being whispers and became shouts: “Poison. Freak. Imposter.” They didn’t know which one of us was dangerous, so they despised us equally. Each time another set of twins was born in the village, and then split, our unsplit state became more conspicuous. Our neighbors’ Omega son, Oscar, whose left leg ended at the knee, was sent away at nine months old to be cared for by Omega relatives. We often passed the remaining twin, little Meg, playing alone in the fenced yard of their house.
    “She must miss her twin,” I said to Zach as we walked by, watching Meg chewing listlessly on the head of a small wooden horse.
    “Sure,” he said. “I bet she’s devastated that she doesn’t have to share her life with a freak anymore.”
    “He must miss his family, too.”
    “Omegas don’t have family,” he said, repeating the familiar line from one of the Council posters. “Anyway, you know what happens to parents who try to hang on to their Omega kids.”
    I’d heard the stories. The Council showed no mercy to the occasional parent who resisted the split and tried to keep both twins. It was the same for those rare Alphas who were found to be in a relationship with an Omega. There were rumors of public floggings, and worse. But most parents relinquished their Omega babies readily, eager to be rid of their deformed offspring. The Council taught that prolonged proximity to Omegas was dangerous. The neighbors’ hisses of poison revealed both disdain and fear. Omegas needed to be cast out of Alpha society, just as the poison was cast out of the Alpha twin in the womb. Was that the one thing Omegas are spared? I wondered. Since we can’t have children, at least we’d never have to experience sending a child away.
    I knew my time to be sent away was coming and that my secrecy was only deferring the inevitable. I’d even begun to wonder whether my current existence—the perpetual scrutiny of my parents and the rest of the village—was any better than the exile that was bound to follow. Zach was the one person who understood my odd, liminal life, because he shared it. But I felt his dark, calm eyes on me all the time.
    In search of less watchful company, I’d caught three of the red beetles that always flocked by the well. I kept them in a jar on the windowsill, had enjoyed seeing them crawl about and hearing the muted clatter of their wings against the glass. A week later I found the largest one pinned to the wooden sill, one wing gone, making an endless circle on the pivot of its guts.
    “It was an experiment,” said Zach. “I wanted to test how long it could live like that.”
    I told our parents. “He’s just bored,” my mother said. “It’s driving him crazy, the two of you not being in school like you should be.” But the unspoken truth continued to circle, like the beetle stuck on the pin: only one of us would ever be allowed to go to school.
    I squashed the beetle myself, with the heel of my shoe, to put an end to its circular torment. That night, I took the jar and the two remaining beetles with me to the well. When I removed the lid and tipped the jar on its side, they were reluctant to venture out. I coaxed them out with a blade of grass, transferring them carefully to the stone rim on which I sat. One attempted a short flight, landing on my bare leg. I let it sit there for a while before blowing it gently back into flight.
    Zach