The Atomic Priesthood

I was the first one to talk to the flies.

I know every little kid says that. I know every little girl wants to be the first for something, the most important little girl around. But it wasn’t me that was important. It was Elsie. And she didn’t even get the chance to know it. Least I don’t think she did. Around here you never can be too sure.

The summer the priests sent Elsie to Hell, Mr. Abrams swore this time really was the apocalypse. He was always swearing crazy things, like that the thorns would all fall down or the black hole in the middle of the field would sink in and make way for Hell to come and swallow us all up. He was a priest’s son. He thought he knew better. Thought he knew better than his daddy who got sent to Hell, at least.

Of course, it wasn’t really the apocalypse that time. James did see one of the cats start to glow. That day, the priests took it out by the pond. We all gathered round and turned our eyes down as they stuffed it in a sack with rocks and threw it, the screeching, meowing, scratching poor thing, down to the hellmouth in the water. It probably drowned before it got there. For something innocent like a cat, it’s the only humane thing to do. The priests were gone the next week, out to tell the Honorable People the cats changed color again, that Hell was coming closer to the surface, and we were doing everything in our power to keep it underground.

After Elsie, I couldn’t watch anymore of the sacrifices. The green stagnant water terrified me. The field of thorns, the half-mile wide perimeter of metal spikes protecting the tar black hole, reflected clearer than the trees, and I couldn’t stand to look at them. Me and Elsie used to make tinfoil men and race them across the pond, just to see if they’d make it to the other side or get sucked into the hellmouth. The boys at school used to toss rocks in there, trying to see how long it would take for it to hit the bottom. We never heard a sound. The rocks just slowly disappeared past the sand and into the black.

The flies talked to me by that pond. At first, I thought the voices were the priests, talking to me like they did when I got in trouble. It was usually Elsie that got me in trouble, her always trying to hide the cats in case they started glowing, or hold onto some bird, or wander past the tar pit to where the Honorable People lived.

“You are welcome in no place of honor,” the priest, his face covered by a gas mask and shadowed by a mesh cloak, would say from across the pond.

“I am welcome in no place of honor,” me and Elsie would reply in unison.
“What you are is dangerous and repulsive to the Honorable People,” the priest would say. Elsie would usually grab my hand and squeeze my palm at that part, as if to say I’m sorry, or

it’ll be okay. Then say with me, “What I am is dangerous and repulsive to the Honorable People.” “You were born with a danger present inside of you.”
“I was born with a danger present inside of me.”
“The danger will be released if you disturb anything around you.”

“The danger will be released if I disturb anything around me.”
“You are not valued here.”
“I am not valued here.”
Then, the priest would kick the backs of our knees and we’d kneel on the sand in front of the

lake.

“Look at yourselves and tell me if you’ll let the danger out again,” the priest would say. And we would stare at our reflections in the pond, the ripples distorting our faces. Since I was a kid, the pond has had a little glow to it. My eyes would always drift toward Elsie’s face instead of my own, her long nose and round eyes, curls falling over her forehead. I couldn’t help sometimes but to imagine her tumbling in and sinking straight to the bottom. I felt awful about it, of course. But I think deep down I always knew.

The flies knew too. That’s the first thing they said to me. Big suckers. Every summer they’d land in the landscape of thorns or the tar pit and start hissing like spoiled milk and every year they were bigger than the last, so big everybody would get all anxious, saying flies weren’t supposed to get that big until Hell was right about to crack through the dirt. At least, that’s what the priests would say.

“We saw everything,” said the first fly. The way it spoke made it sound like a rattling can. Or the sound the thorns made when they shook during a storm. Otherwise, I would have thought the fly’s voice was a priest or a voice in my head that had grown too tangible.

The fly thudded onto my shoulder. Since it was the size of my fist, I could feel each of its six legs poking into the fabric of my shirt. The slow lift of every hair on its feet. Each time it twitched its wing, I could’ve sworn it was fingers crawling up my back.

“What?” I asked it, my heart throbbing the way it did when one of me and Elsie’s classmates pretended to have seen a cat change color. Flies weren’t supposed to talk until a crack in the ground let a part of Hell out. Not until all the cats were glowing and the deer sprouted eyes up their spines.

“You know,” the fly replied. “You know why you were born where the Honorable People won’t set food and why you’re here instead of out where the priests are letting the glowing kittens get to Heaven.”

Goosebumps rose from my wrists to my shoulder blades.
“Why would you pretend?” the fly asked.
“Pretend what?” I replied, wondering if a question could be a lie. “Pretend it didn’t cut you too.”

It was Elsie’s idea to treat the thorns like a maze. Not mine. She’d always wanted to see the black hole, even if everyone swore it was dangerous. I should’ve fought her harder. But she crawled down the rocks and jumped, landing between two of the towering thorns. They’d rusted just a bit in the blazing sun and angry rain. To me, each flake of rust looked like dried blood.

I should’ve fought harder, but I ran after her, narrowly avoiding tripping down the rocks. And I followed her, halfway to the tar pit where we heard the creaking. It sounded like the early rumbles in a thunderstorm at first. Then, a lot like the buzzing flies. I saw it first, as it tipped over, the iron half melted in the sun. The crack at the thorn’s base was huge and black and what I imagined the hellmouth at the bottom of the lake to look like.

I tried to push Elsie out of the way, but it was too late. The thorn came slicing down above us. The tip of it slid down Elsie’s forearm. The thud of the thorn hitting the ground covered her shriek and I hardly noticed the rust catching my side, cutting a three inch gash above my hip I wouldn’t see until that night.

I held Elsie as she cried, sunk to her knees on the ground. The blood on her arm crusted over faster than it should’ve. Turned green around the edges and leaked pus that looked like what would happen if the craters melted off the moon.

It wasn’t long before three priests were marching to the fallen thorn. They snatched Elsie the minute they saw her, then dragged me back. They didn’t see my scrape and they didn’t even try to heal Elsie’s. Didn’t even knock her to her knees and make her repeat the phrases about the Honorable People. Just tied her hands behind her back and filled her pockets with rocks.

“You’ve let the danger out,” the priests were shouting as they tossed her into the water. “You let the disease escape. There is no cure. There is no cure. There is only Hell.”

I didn’t try to stop them. I guess I never tried to stop anybody.
“We saw it,” the fly said. “We were flying overhead. We wanted to see the priests.”
I started to cry then. I didn’t cry when the priests threw Elsie in the lake. I didn’t cry when

the thorn trembled its ugly metal way to the ground. I didn’t cry when it hit me, or Elsie. I didn’t cry when Elsie cried and cradled her bleeding arm to her chest. When I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the last time I cried about anything. It hit me then that I was selfish. And that made me cry harder, knowing that I really did belong far from the Honorable People and that there really was something sick inside of me, some disease that was probably leaking out of me every time I exhaled.

“We could tell the priests.”

I could hear them. The flies. Coming, coming, coming. Behind me, near my shoulders, buzzing in my ear. One of them peeled the bottom of my dress up to the scab above my hip. I cried harder. I didn’t even try to pull them off, or beg them not to tell the priests. I waited, as they flew off of me, much slower than they came, and I felt my body tip forward into the lake.

My eyes were open the whole time. I sunk and sunk and as I drifted to the bottom, I swear it got brighter. Bubbles flew out of my mouth up and up and up to the surface. I didn’t move the whole way to the floor. And down there, way at the bottom of the lake where the hellmouth sucked in the sand, I saw Elsie.

Her head was sticking out of the hellmouth, her hazel eyes wide. She was smiling, with her crooked teeth, which she never did before. But she was alive, and it was Elsie, and her hands were on the edges of the hellmouth. She tightened her fingers and pulled. The hellmouth shut like an iron door right in front of me. Elsie was gone. She’d shut herself inside and this time, I couldn’t follow her.

When the priests pulled me from the water, they told me I was lucky to be alive, and I was even luckier that the cats didn’t glow around me even though I’d just been baptised in unhonorable water.

Right after I caught my breath, one of the priests lifted me by my armpits to sit me on my knees. My long hair fell in front of my face and dripped into the lake, sending ripples to the edge and to the fist sized fly laying belly up in the middle. I wondered if Elsie could see the ripples, if the lid to Hell was transparent.

“You are welcome in no place of honor,” the priest said, his gloved hand buried into my shoulder.

“I am welcome in no place of honor,” I repeated.

Ruby Davis is an undergraduate student in creative writing and anthropology. She’s usually hanging out with her cat, Babushka. You can find her other writing in The Meat Puppet, Diamond Gazette, and Grain of Salt, or upcoming in the Vincent Brothers Review, FiilthyGlo, and Quarter Press.