My latest book was published by TouchPoint Press in September 2022. It’s a small press, and these days, very few writers can count on any sort of fanfare to announce the arrival of their work. We’re expected to toot our own horns, something at which I have no native skill! MINISTRY is the most ambitious piece of fiction I’ve so far attempted, and I’m not sure what people will call it. Speculative fantasy? Post-Apocalyptic saga? Spiritual adventure? Hell, I don’t know. I think of it as a Romance with a capital ‘R.’ It’s written in a feminine voice —my Isobel begins as a precocious child of 13 and grows to be a magnificent young woman and the spiritual leader of a bootstrap rebellion against the tyranny of a self-declared A.I. demigod. I’m doing a partial serialization here on Medium. Chapter One was previously published. Here is Chapter Two.
There were three of them: one as wide as a bull at the shoulders, with a head as big and round as a hubcap; a tall, skinny one, black as tar, with his shaved head drooping like the light at the top of a lamppost; and one no bigger than me but, from his eyes, older by quite a few years. The way they stood and stared, you’d have thought they never saw a girl before.
It was the big one whose voice had waked me up, and now he spoke again. “This is our place,” he said. “And you better blow out unless you got something to trade.”
He was some character, as Daddy would’ve said. How anyone could be so big with as little as there was to eat down here, I couldn’t guess. From the looks of the other two, he was getting their portions. He was wearing a lady’s coat with a ratty fur collar. I could tell it was a lady’s coat by the cut of it, but it must have been for a very big lady. As I said, his head was like a pumpkin, and his hair was as ratty and oily as the fur collar. Not having grown up in a place where people made judgments about these things, I couldn’t say right then and there that he was ugly, but I suppose he was.
None of the three of them were much to look at, in truth, but only the smallest one looked mean. He had blood red hair and a bent little nose covered with freckles, and his eyes were so dark they reflected light like a crow’s, but it was his mouth that made me uneasy. Daddy had always said that meanness was in the mouth, because the mouth had to shape itself for words, and if the words that came out of it were full of spite, the mouth would come to resemble what it spoke.
The tall, skinny black one, he just looked sad and wilted, like the sunflowers that grew by the factory wall but never got enough water and spent their whole lives slumped over. I worried about him.
“My daddy died last night,” I said. “I had no place to go.”
“Just died like that?” said the big one. “Left you solo?”
“Wasn’t his fault,” I said. “His time’d just come.”
“So what you gonna do?” he asked. “Girl like you won’t last a week.”
“Find a sanctuary,” I said. “Try to spread the knowledge. Daddy said if we kept the knowledge, the world might come back one day.”
“Doubt that,” he said. “A ‘sanctuary,’ huh? Well, you ain’t found it, so you can move on.”
“Wait,” said the small one. “She could be good bait. Or trade.”
“Maybe,” said the big one, cocking his head as if that was the only way he could get a good look at me. “In a year or so. ’Til then, we’d hafta feed her.”
I knew something about trade. Down here on the ass-end sometimes it was the only way to get things you need. But if there was any trading to be done, it was my daddy who did it. And he sure never talked of trading me.
The little one walked a step closer and spoke with a quake in his voice. “You can stay the night if you touch me,” he finally got out.
I could tell from the quiet and the way the black one drooped that the red one had said something uneasy. The windows rattled again like broken bells. There I was, kneeling on that dirty bed made of tires, still frozen to my bones, and nothing made much sense to me. That is, until the red one walked over across the tires and said to me, in a kind of a knifey whisper, “Inside my pants. You know.”
I just stared at him like he was as crazy as the people who used to some-times comes howling around the old factory at night. My daddy said those people were “gone, gone, gone.” But this little guy didn’t look like a howler. And I wasn’t about to touch him there. Daddy told me that when I was ready to touch a boy that way it would feel as natural as petting the factory cats who came around looking for mice, and until then, I should keep my hands to myself and useful things.
“Not gonna touch you,” I said. “But I will make myself useful. I’ll scrounge for you.”
I shot a look over at the droopy, dark one. “If you let him come out with me.” I had decided that he was the only safe one of the three. And since he looked pitiful, he might make a good scrounger.
The little one’s mean mouth twitched, and his crow eyes flashed at me like sparks coming off steel. “I can’t trust you lest we have a bond,” he said. “You touchin’ me, that’s a bond.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
I have to explain why I wasn’t scared out of my wits. People down here, in the forgotten part of the world, they were hungry and desperate and sometimes mean, but they were also beaten down. None of them thought they were anything to speak of, anything to be noticed, or anything to have rights to. And so he answered me, “Elias.”
Then, after a few seconds, while he thought about whether he might’ve given away too much, he asked, “What’s yours?”
“Christmas,” I answered.
“Christmas? Kinda name is that?”
“A better one than Isobel,” I said.
“Maybe . . .”
“So now we have a bond,” I said. “I know your name, you know mine.”
My Daddy told me that names have power. That once upon a time knowing somebody’s name gave you a kind of power over them.”
“Your Daddy was a bullshitter,” said Elias. “And prob’ly batshit crazy.”
“Nope. He just knew about places outside the ass-end, about the world before the Awakening. And history. Pythagoras and Newton and all.”
Right then, the big one stepped up and sort of nudged aside Elias, like he was saying, “I’ll take it from here.” Elias didn’t like that much, and I felt something crunch down inside him. I could feel what other people were feeling. Their tone. It was physical. Even musical. Like most things I knew how to do, Daddy had taught me, though he’d said he couldn’t have if I hadn’t had the knack. We’d sit face to face, not saying anything, and practice exchanging hearts. Mine for his, his for mine. I could always feel the weight when his big heart entered my chest. And I would know his colors and his tones: whether they were bright or dull or major key or minor key. That was how I’d got the sense that he was ready to leave the valley.
No, Elias didn’t like being nudged aside, but he moved. The big one, whose head, like I said, was round and fat as a ball, crossed his arms and said to me, “So you scrounged before?”
“Sure, I have,” I lied.
“We need food, mostly,” he said. “Had nothin’ since yesterday afternoon. There’s a smokehouse down beneath the overpass that runs into the city. You ever seen it?”
I shook my head no.
“Well, then you ain’t been out much,” he said with a smirk. “Anyhow, it’s not much more ’n a tin shack, but the old African keeps the fire burning. How he does it I don’ know, but he does, and he smokes and slices and dries anything he can catch in the riverbed. Rabbits, wild pigs, dogs ’n cats for all I know. Makes jerky out of ’em. Ever had jerky?”
I had indeed, which told me that my daddy must have been to see the African more than once.
“Now you and him . . .” He pointed to the droopy one. “You pick out two matching tires from our piles outside. Small truck tires, they bring the best in trade.” He cocked his thumb again. “He’ll know which ones. Nobody drives cars in the city anymore, but they still do in Cantrelle, where the people who work the algae farms live. They do like their trucks. Anyhow, the African does a pretty good trade, ’cause the algae farmers can’t stand to eat what they grow. ’Course the Tops in the city, they lap that algae up. It’s about all they eat. So we’ll barter two tires for two pounds of jerky. And tell him we don’t want any fuckin’ dog jerky. He’ll haggle over the trade. You won’t get two pounds. But get what you can.”
“Okay,” I said and shot a look over at my partner, who didn’t look too excited about the mission. “We’ll try.”
“You do better than that,” he said. “And maybe I’ll keep Elias here from messing with you in your sleep tonight.”
With that, I felt Elias crunch even tighter. I recognized his tone now. It was shame turning into balled-up anger.
Outside, it had only gotten colder. The wind had come up, and when the wind blew through the ass-end, there was nothing to stop it. When I was little and the ice-wind came up and blew through the broken windows of the factory, Daddy would tuck me into my cupboard and tell me it couldn’t get me in there. But I knew even then that the wind finds everything. It found its way into the jaws of every useless old machine and whistled through their metal teeth with a sound like thhhhiiiieeeeee.
There were all sorts of tires out there on the lot, all of them hard as stone from the cold, and I wouldn’t have had any notion of how to find one that fit a small truck, but the stringy guy knew where to look. Against the hard blue sky, bent by the wind, he now looked to me like a match that’s burned right down to your fingers and about to break off. Black as charcoal and withered up, with a little head sticking out on top. He found one tire that was the right size and rolled it over to me.
“What do I do with it?” I asked.
He said, “Just don’t let it roll away.” I thought maybe he smiled, but that might’ve been me wishing he did. After a few minutes, he found one that matched and brought it over, whistled and said, “Let’s go.”
I tried picking it up, but it was too heavy for my own matchstick body, and I looked at him like a factory dog with his ears up. “How do I move it?” I asked him.
This time, he did smile a little but closed his mouth real quick to hide all the broken and missing teeth. “You roll it,” he said. “Like this.” He gave his tire a push, and it was so stiff and heavy with cold that it rolled what must have been twenty feet across the parking lot. He ran to catch up with it before it stopped, then turned to watch me try.
I couldn’t get the hang of it at first, and my tire kept falling over after a few feet. I was either pushing too hard or not hard enough, and it would turn and fall over almost as soon as I let go of it. He didn’t do a thing. Just watched. On the fourth or fifth try, I must’ve got the knack, because it rolled and kept on rolling past where he stood, and I ran to catch it, the wind stinging my eyes and making my nose run.
“I think I got it,” I said, and I must admit I felt proud.
“Well, let’s go then,” he said. “I’m so hungry I don’ care if it’s dog.”
Over the flat, desolated lay of the ass-end, down streets I never knew existed and past factories like ours, we rolled those tires. Looked like the world was being rolled out in front of us by the tires. Not a pretty world, but at least a new one. You might wonder how I’d even know what pretty was. Part of it was the pictures in the Big Book, but also the objects that Daddy and I fashioned from things just lying around. Junk, mostly. The things we made didn’t have any use. But they had a beauty. Daddy said that, when the world lost its beauty, you had to make your own.
Once, when I was really little and missing my mom, he made me a doll by drawing a face on a half-used roll of toilet paper. He’d had to act fast, I guess because I was in such grief. But it worked — at least he told me so. It must have, because I kept that doll for years until one day I left it by the window when it was raining, and it turned to mush.
Sometimes, the tires went for yards and yards, other times turning right back on us and falling over with a thunk on the concrete. It was hard work, and soon my hands were as black as his from the rubber dust, but there was a scant minute down one long street, where the alley cats scattered left and right yowling, when it stopped being work and felt good. I knew what it was to play. Daddy’d taught me hide ’n seek and catch me if you can, and I suppose some kids would’ve thought it fun to have a whole factory to roam. But I’d never played with anyone anywhere near my own age or size. I figured the string bean for fifteen at most, so maybe he was my first friend.
We got tired of running after a while and slowed into a sort of rhythm of pushing and walking, pushing and walking, and there was a spot where the rhythm reminded me of singing the symphonies with my daddy and particularly of what he’d said was the “slow movement” of the Sixth Symphony of Beethoven, and I actually began to hum it, which brought kind of a strange look from the matchhead boy.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“None that I’d wanna say,” he answered.
“C’mon. Can’t be any stranger than mine.”
“Could be I don’t have one,” he said. “Could be I never got one.”
“Well then,” I said. “I’ll give you one.” I thought for a minute. “I’ll call you Droopy ’cause, to be honest, that’s the first thing that came to me when I saw you.”
“You can call me whatever you want,” he said. “Just don’t call me that in front of Elias or the Jawbone.”
“The Jawbone?” I said. “He’s got no cause to make fun of anyone’s name if he’s called the Jawbone.”
“You talk different,” he said.
“I do?” I asked. The idea had never occurred to me. “Well, I never really talked to anybody but my daddy except for people who’d come around scrounging, so I guess I speak as he spoke.”
“See what I mean?” he said. “Speak as he spoke.” He repeated it, quietly, to himself. “Speak as he spoke. It’s got music to it.”
Every once in a long while, we’d catch a glimpse of other people. Most of them in pairs like ours, or little ragged clusters that moved like paper blowing down the street. I’d always been told that nobody walked alone on the ass-end, but I’d also never heard of anybody getting hurt because they were alone. Like I said, people were mostly too broken down to do harm, and what wasn’t broken was sworn silently to what my daddy called “honor among apostates.” He told me that, long ago, that’s how tribes and sometimes great empires would be formed — from outcasts who learned to look out for each other. Not that the ass-end was any kind of empire. People got sick, and there was no one to heal them. Babies got left in trash cans and froze to death or stewed in the heat. And there were always bodies on the streets. Daddy didn’t take me out that much, probably because of that, but I saw them through the factory windows, covered by leaves or mud or snow. A couple times, I saw someone come by and drop a blanket over a body. Not often, because blankets were scarce, so it had to be someone close. The thought of my daddy’s blanketless body gave me a pain in my chest, and I stumbled.
“You ’right?” asked Droopy.
“Yeah. I’m all right,” I said. “Just cold.”
This is what I knew about the Awakening. It’s important that I tell you because we were coming up on the overpass that led into the city, and you can’t understand the city unless you know about the Awakening. Even though I was older than my years (Daddy called me an “old sea goddess,” though I’d never been to the sea), I still saw things as a child, so some things didn’t and still don’t make sense to me. There was a great movement of people in the year of my birth. The Expulsion, they called it. My father and mother (whose name was Rhea) and I, as a baby, were among the people expelled. There had been years of war, which were fought mostly over food because there was never enough. The earth had moved into a “new system”: the temperature got higher, the seas poured in, and things stopped growing. That, I suppose, is when the algae farming started. Anyhow, as Daddy described it, this new system caused a new and harsh way of thinking. There’d always been haves and have-nots, but during the years of what was called the Tribulation, the haves got to be fewer and fewer, until there were less than in a small country, and the have-nots were everyone else, including us. We, Daddy said, were those who, while doing the business of nature, had forgotten the nature of business. We were ‘obsolete.’
A scientist, who became like a god with a little ‘g,’ said this was how it was supposed to be according to the projections. He also said there was mathematical proof that there wasn’t and never had been any God with a big ‘G,’ and he made a bet with the world that if he showed that proof, everyone would see it. There were cycles, he said, and every forty- thousand years or so, an Elect had to emerge and replenish the race, and everybody else had to be expelled and turned back to earth. He asked the people, did they want to see the proof? Because if not, they could go back to their little lives, and eventually, the world would end. If they chose to know, they’d be saved. Between the world ending and getting saved, there didn’t seem much contest, so the people chose to know. And the scientist made God go away with a computer, and from then on, he called himself the Architect but was known to people outside as the Godslayer.
And everything changed.
The big cities sealed themselves up, letting only the Tops live there. Bridges, walls, negative gravity fields. They called us Atrophines, which got shortened to Atros, and I was told it was harder for an Atro to get into the city than to put his arms around the sun. There were seven cities of the Elect, and all the rest had perished. The biggest cities had to be on a saltwater port, as that’s how they kept the algae supply going. But the ocean came farther now, so the new ports were cities that had been inland before the earth went into the new system. There were just those seven; everything else was some kind of ass-end. There were desert and country ass-ends, but they all had the same problems: food, water, sickness, and knowing you were never meant to be. The city whose ass-end we lived in was one of the small cities of the Elect and wasn’t on an ocean but a salt river. It was important, I’d learned, because it was a “hub” for information going to the other cities. The scientist had shown that information was the most important thing in the world. It was the duty of the Tops to harvest it and, eventually, to become it, so they said.
We — Daddy and I, that is — were different from most because we kept our minds turned on and tried to remember the things people had once known. I suppose you could say we kept up hope, but hope is maybe a stronger word than is right. We lost Mommy in the Expulsion, and from that day, we never really wanted to be in anyone’s company but our own. We read, but mostly we talked, and there wasn’t a single lesson Daddy taught that I didn’t have to repeat and memorize. He said these were the new Dark Ages, and we had to keep the flame burning. He didn’t buy that we were nothing. He took trips outside the ass-end into the fields and came back saying that things had started, little by little, to grow again. The grasses, especially. He brought back bags of coarse, raw grain and found a way to make bread that was only half-horrible.
The most important thing he learned was that the Architect had been wrong when he said that the earth would not regenerate until it had been purged of us and our polluted genes. And if he’d been wrong about that, he might have been wrong about other things. Science was a model of the world, Daddy said, but “models could change.” It gave him hope to see that the grasses were growing, but it was a hope more for me than for him. I don’t believe he ever thought he’d be around to see things get better.
So that’s more or less how we got to where we are, and now, Droopy and I were standing beneath an overpass that led to a gate that controlled one of the four entrances to the city, where the Elect lived on algae and infor-mation. Even money was a kind of information, or so I’d been told by the only person I’d ever really known until now.
The African was standing out front of his smokehouse, looking up at the yellow sky above the overpass, a steady, gray plume rising up from the shack behind him. He seemed to nod a little when he saw us coming, but I don’t know. It could have just been that he was old.
“What’chu bring me?” he said, and his voice carried through the air even though he spoke soft. I noticed that his long, knotty hair, which looked gray from a distance, had yellow running through it, but that didn’t make him seem any younger. He was the most ancient thing I’d ever laid eyes on.
“Two for two,” Droopy answered and gestured to me. “Got a new belly to fill.”
The African looked at my stomach, which was wrapped in enough layers to make me look like I didn’t need feeding all that badly, and said, “That girl with child?”
I had never heard that phrase before, and I thought he was asking if I was a child.
Droopy hesitated for a moment before saying, “Uh-huh.”
“I am not,” I protested. “I’m as old as Queen Isobella of Spain.” Droopy looked at me kind of angry and said, “She’s crazy ’cause she’s had no food.”
“Two for two?” the African repeated. “I’ll give you a one-pound sack.” He pointed to the tires and spat. “Those tires are near bald.”
“One and a half,” Droopy said. “For the baby.”
I started to speak and then shut up, because I suddenly got it, and so I kind of grabbed hold of my belly and tried looking hard-up.
“I’ll fill it fat,” said the African. “But truth, this no world for babies.” He looked at me hard. “We are in Gehenna, girl. Belial take us all soon.” He ran his words together, and half of them I’d never heard or never heard said that way, but I took the meaning. The African disappeared into his shack and came back with a sack that did look fat, as he said, and the smell of the smoked meat made my mouth water so bad that I had to wipe it. Droopy reached for it, but the African turned and handed it to me. As I took it, he looked into me with eyes that were as old and brown as burnt paper, and in the middle of each of them was just the tiniest point of yellow light. He asked, “Where you born, girl?”
I pointed toward the spires of the city and said, “Mount Sinai.”
He looked at me deeper, maybe even with a flash of anger in those yellow pinpricks. “That city a damn long way from Sinai, young girl.”
“It’s a hospital,” I said, staring that anger down. “Only time I ever was in one, according to my daddy.”
“And where your daddy now?”
I don’t know how long I stood there, looking down at the black gravel on that embankment beneath the overpass. I know that my throat got tight and wouldn’t let any words escape and that I had to press my lips together hard. I knew that, if I spoke that he was dead, it would be so.
The African nodded his head and said, “Uh-huh,” and the anger went out of his eyes. “What’chah name?”
“Christmas,” I answered.
He laughed, and Droopy laughed along, or tried to remember how to, and I thought they were laughing at my name in an unkind way.
“I was born on December twenty-fifth,” I said, still staring at the ground but talking like I meant business.
The African stopped laughing, and Droopy did too.
“Well, now,” the black man said. “One day, you will walk among the Elect and not be seen. And their blindness will be their damnation.” He nodded, turned into his tin shack, and shut the door as much as it would be shut. I didn’t imagine it gave much protection from the wind. His words passed over my understanding at that time.
It was so cold on the way back to Discount Tire Center that the jerky got stiff and brittle, and once when I fell, two pieces broke off and fell out of the sack. Droopy looked down at them and said, “Can’t put ’em back broken. Better eat ’em.” He picked the broken pieces up and handed me one. “Put it on your tongue,” he said. “Let it get soft ’fore you try to chew.”
Even with the cold coming down hard, it was easier walking back than it had been coming because we didn’t have to roll the tires. Because we had meat softening on our tongues, and just the little bit of juice from it made things better. And because Droopy had been kind and the African had looked in my eyes and seen somebody.
All night, the wind screamed and beat against the windows so hard I thought for sure they would break. Only that little bit of food nestling in our bellies made it bearable. The three of them slept in what I guessed must have been their usual places on the tire bed, close together like animals huddling for warmth, and left me on my own at the edge. I pulled my knees up to my chest and curled myself into the tightest ball I could, like my daddy had once curled me into a ball against him to keep me warm in the days before we found the factory. There wasn’t any sleep to be had, although once I must have slipped into something like sleep, because I woke with a darkness over me and the smell of something close.
The smell was Elias. The three of them, they each had their smell. The big one, Jawbone, smelled sour and sulfurous. Droopy had a sort of leathery smell that I didn’t mind even though it was strong. But Elias had the smell of dried blood, and that I didn’t like at all.
After a while, he went away, and once my heart stopped pounding, I slipped back into that raggedy sleep that was only your body begging to rest. Pictures came before my eyes, not dreams but visions outside my head, right out in front of my eyes. There was the factory, on fire in the winter night, with no one to put it out. I saw someone in the window up where we had lived and then saw that it was me. I threw Daddy’s Big Book, the Encyclopedia, out of the window and onto the snow below, to save it from the fire, I guess, only then the dogs came after it and tore it apart, thinking it was food. I ran and ran, chasing the dogs down the alleys, picking up torn pages as fast as I could, and then I tripped. What I tripped over was my daddy, blue in the snow and dead as wood, but I swore he looked at me.
Right then, I sat up from the tire bed, a fire like the factory fire in my head, and I said out loud, “I got to get him a blanket. I forgot to put a blanket on him.”
“Who’s that?” asked a numb-lipped Droopy from across the tires. “Your daddy? He need no blanket now. He warmer than us, prob’ly.”
I got up and walked across the tires toward the door. “I did wrong,” I said. “I should’ve given him a blanket.”
“You go out there now,” said Jawbone with his mouth half-covered, “you won’t be comin’ back. You’ll be dead as him, and nobody gonna find you a blanket.”
“Got no choice,” I said. “Right is right.”
I heard Droopy get up. “And where you get a blanket in this cold hell? You’d have to take it off another dead one.”
They both made sense, I knew that even then. But something had a hold of my jaw and my chest and wouldn’t let go. I had forgotten to do the right thing because I’d never done it before, only heard about it. And, I suppose, because I was surprised by death, even though Daddy had done his best to prepare me. I pushed my way through the tire shop door and into the parking lot, and the cold took my breath and brought me to a stop.
There were stars in that cold night. Some I could recognize, others I’d never known the names of. I knew they were blazing with heat, all of them little suns, and I wished some of that heat would reach me, but they gave me no comfort. One of them, closer and brighter than the others, started blinking at me. I was cold and ragged tired and still in that in-between state, but I swore it was changing colors as it blinked. I stared at it and sent my eyes out to it, thinking that I might be able to capture some of its heat. And then there was warmth all through my body, making me shiver in a good way, and a voice right up next to my ear that said, “Stay alive.” Those were the two words that Daddy had said I should never forget, no matter what, and it was his voice I heard saying them.
“Stay alive,” he said again.
And I knew, in the way of knowing that comes without any thinking, that it was him, calling to me down in the shadow valley from the hillside where the grasses grew long and thick. There was a sound behind me, and I turned with a tremble, thinking it might be his ghost, but it was Droopy. He said, “Think you better come back in, Chrissmas. We’ll find him tomorrow, if you want.”
“Yeah,” I said, taking a last look at the star, which had gone back to its normal color. “I guess you’re right.”
Before we went inside, I turned to Droopy and said, “Could you do something for me?”
“If I can,” he answered. “If I won’t get in trouble.”
“Could you maybe sleep between me ’n Elias, so he can’t vulture over me in the dark the way he’s been doing?”
Droopy lowered his match head again and chuckled. “Vulture over you, huh?” he said. “There you go again with your words. Elias is second man to Jawbone. He’s got rights I don’t. But I’ll keep an eye on him. He’ll behave all right when somebody’s watching him.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll do you a good turn one day.”
The only thing as bad as being too cold to sleep is being too hungry to sleep, and I was both. The African’s jerky didn’t even put a dent in my stomach, especially as the Jawbone took most of it for himself, saying that food should be divided up based on body weight. When I couldn’t sleep, I went to one of those safe places in my head Daddy had taught me to keep. This one was a little white church in the woods I’d seen a picture of in one of his books. It had a candle in the window, and that’s why I chose it. Candles don’t light themselves. I went inside and I prayed that Daddy had made it up the green hill, and though I was alone, I wasn’t lonely.
And that is where I passed the night.
