Elaine Vance memorized the King James Bible before she turned nineteen, the third of her family line to complete the sacred duty. Heaven itself doesn’t know how many times she read her mother’s handwritten copy of the holy texts to do so. Elaine lost count somewhere after thirty. Whenever she recited passages to her mother, Reverend Grace, the graying woman nodded in approval, or swatted her fingers with a thin switch at the slightest mistaken jot or tittle. Young Elaine committed herself further to her studies to avoid the stinging pain of the detestable switch as well as her mother’s disappointment. She spent hours each day in her small study with its smaller window behind her mother’s chapel. Genesis. Exodus. 1 Kings. Malachi. John. Romans. Revelation. All through the Old Testament and the New, until at last she knew every word, every comma and semicolon, the entirety of the Abrahamic story painted into the linings of her mind. 1,181 chapters. 779,866 words.
Three days after Elaine’s twenty-eighth birthday, she raised her voice against Reverend Grace for the first time. She had been writing out the words of the Bible by hand, a painstaking effort on her part. Recitation from her own memory, coupled with comparisons to her forerunners’ efforts to ensure immaculate accuracy in the copy. The work demanded extreme care, as her mother’s Bible lived on the podium in the chapel, available for all the literate in the town to read at any hour, only to be moved from its place for Elaine’s copy work. Nothing else. Meanwhile, her grandmother’s scriptures slept in the dark of a fireproof safe under the desk where Elaine labored. It never left. As the owner of the sole pair of known Bibles in existence, Reverend Grace felt a profound obligation to keep one secure and hidden away, in case of disaster.
The righteous fury that led Elaine to battle with her mother first sparked after she finished her copy of the sacred texts and compared it to her forerunner’s. Satisfied with the identical nature of the copies, it occurred to her to check her own writing against her grandmother’s. As a final accuracy check. A new exercise. She crouched under the desk and spun the safe’s combination. Her mother had given it to her for safekeeping before she was old enough to read.
Decades’ worth of dust danced and refracted in the air as the safe door rasped open. Elaine suppressed a cringe as her fingers left prints in the thickening coat on her grandmother’s Bible. She reached for the hem of her dress to wipe it down, but decided instead to fetch an old rag and wipe off the tiny particles, hourglass grains of time gone, with gentle movements.
Reading her grandmother’s copy proved easy and fast, faster even than the thin clouds tumbling over the pinnacled roofs of the town outside the window. As Elaine scanned the three texts before her, she paused over a few words in Exodus 22:18. Her grandmother’s wide, confident handwriting read:
“Thou shalt not suffer a murderer to live.”
But when Elaine returned her attention to her mother’s swirling cursive, decipherable only by the most patient readers, it contained a minute but significant difference.
“Thou shalt not suffer a murderer to live free.”
At first Elaine puzzled over the error, confused as to how her mother could make such a sizable mistake as adding a word to the Bible itself. It could be an accident. Elaine used to stumble over less familiar passages in her recitations, and she’d fixed typos in her manuscript more than once as she reviewed her work. But after a moment’s consideration, she understood what her heart already knew. A whole additional word to the text meant something else. Something sinful. Elaine shook where she sat, her fingers trembling as she set her rare ballpoint pen, a traded good from the traveling caravans, on the old desk.
Jesus Christ was the same yesterday, today, and forever. So, too, must His word remain.
She stoked her anger all day, saving it for dinner, when she planned to release it like a controlled flood.
It was a weekday, far from any holiday, so the reverend’s home behind the chapel hosted no guests to ruin Elaine’s plans for confrontation. They sat close to one another in creaking chairs at a table for four, breaking bread, carving pieces of chicken, and sipping milk.
“I finished my writing today.” Elaine pretended casualness as she spread butter on a roll after they said a prayer. “Compared it to yours. No errors. It’s ready.”
“Excellent.” Reverend Grace didn’t look up from her food. “God’s word will be even more secure now. I’m proud of you.”
A warm, surprised satisfaction engulfed Elaine’s body. For a heartbeat, she almost forgot her anger. Not once had her mother praised her in so straightforward a manner. But she wouldn’t let that distract her from the matter at hand.
“Thank you.” She took a breath, steeled herself to press forward. “I decided to make especially sure everything was accurate, though. So I started comparing it to Grandmother’s, too.”
“You took it out of the safe?” That caught her mother’s attention. She stopped eating. Her words came anxious and quick. “Why would you do that? I didn’t tell you to do that. Did you put it back?”
“Don’t worry, I put it away. It seemed like a good idea to use both for my work. Turns out there was a good reason.”
The silence passed fifteen-odd seconds. Reverend Grace put down her fork, almost as aged and silver as she was, and regarded her daughter with unrepentant eyes.
“Did you really think you could vandalize the words of the prophets?” Elaine could no longer endure the tension between them. “‘Thou shalt not suffer a murderer to live free’? What did you hope to accomplish? Why would you smear the truth of God?”
The older woman had the audacity to roll her eyes, though she refused to meet Elaine’s gaze. “Oh, that? That’s nothing, really.”
“Nothing? How can you say that?”
“Your grandmother changed some things, too.”
“What sort of things did she take out?” Nausea squirmed in Elaine’s stomach. Her ears rang with a high pitch screeching a dreaded new truth: she had memorized an altered text.
Her mother shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. She wouldn’t tell me.” She began eating again, hoping to end the conversation. “Except for one. The passage you found? That used to be about not suffering witches to live. Your grandmother changed it to murderers.”
“Why?”
“Because ‘witch’ was a term used to persecute and torment women before our time. Now the verse is better. It’s about murderers, and we can all agree that murderers are bad, right?”
“But you changed it, too.”
Reverend Grace spun her fork in front of her, a piece of chicken dangling on its tines. “So I got rid of the death penalty. Forgive me for thinking a God that says ‘thou shalt not kill’ doesn’t favor execution.”
“For all we know, ‘thou shalt not kill’ is another revision that Grandma made!” Elaine raked her hands down her face and groaned. “We don’t own the truth. And even if it weren’t true, we’ve no right to go making changes willy-nilly.”
“No. We make changes to protect people.”
Elaine rose to leave. “That’s not good enough. We don’t get to choose for people.”
Her mother stopped spinning her fork to eat her food. After she swallowed, she gave a sad shake of her head. “Are you going off to tell everyone what I’ve done?”
She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. But Elaine thought through the consequences. Assuming anyone even believed her, she and her mother would lose their livelihood and their community. Or worse, no one would care.
“No,” Elaine replied, her face and tone stiff with frustration. “I can’t tell anyone. You know I can’t.” She saw her mother nodding and knew she understood the direction of her thoughts.
“What will you do now?” Reverend Grace began eating again and motioned for Elaine to do the same.
She didn’t want to, but Elaine obeyed, sitting down and eyeing her fork. “I’ll wait. Maybe I’ll find a real Bible one day. And if I do, I’ll start using that one. Immediately.”
The young woman’s anger grew more controlled but unfaded. It was just as well that Elaine had finished writing out her copy of the Bible that day, because she vowed to never, under any circumstances, allow any further changes to the word of God. Not from her, not from her children.
***
Years passed. Seven of them, and three hundred and thirty-three days, too. Elaine never spoke to anyone of the forbidden conversation with her mother. The secret nature of the town’s Bibles periodically rankled her mind with cold, righteous anger, but she lived out her days much the same as she did before. She soon finished a second copy of her Bible. It ached to do so, but both her transcriptions followed that of her mother’s; although her grandmother’s contained a more accurate text, it lay locked up, while her mother’s version lay atop the chapel podium, its words the most familiar to the congregation. Few bothered to read the book themselves, even though it was available to them, but Elaine feared someone might catch the tiny inconsistencies between the generations’ manuscripts.
In that passage of time, Reverend Grace sickened. Her mind departed to distant and forgotten years. She’d sit up in bed, stretching forth a hand of leaf fragile skin to touch faces that weren’t there. She spoke of things from her childhood long past, taking them for granted as present. Televisions. Presidents and governments. At first, Elaine tried to bring her mother back to reality. Correct her. Comfort her. As those sorrowful days wore their way onward, though, she abandoned the former and embraced the latter, finding none of the same for herself.
Elaine buried her mother that winter. Pure, uncomplicated grief replaced her anger as they lowered the hand-carved casket into the icy, sunken earth. Later, the mayor bestowed the reverend’s collar around Elaine’s neck. Her fingers explored the thin whiteness. It felt wrong on her. She’d wanted more time with mother, wanted Grace to live to see her daughter find a wife, perhaps adopt children.
In the months that followed, any unoccupied time in Elaine’s schedule filled with scattered memories, some forgotten until that exact moment. The both of them bent over scripture to see who was right about a misplaced word. Her mother saying she was proud of her. Even the thought of that horrid switch, long thrown out, brought a sad smile to her face. Its whistling strikes echoed across her knuckles whenever she stumbled over a pulpit reading.
All the town gave condolences to Elaine, and she received whatever warmth they offered as best she knew how. Growing up isolated in the church, she was quiet in social situations, happier to listen as her lifelong neighbors complained about crop cycles or told stories about their children as they gifted her dinners and earnest tokens for her grief.
The congregants enjoyed Elaine’s sermons. Although every impulse told her to recite the doctrines she knew so well, she instead shared biblical stories and asked the audience to help her extract a collective meaning from them, something both the old and young of her community enjoyed more than tired lessons and lectures.
All the while, Elaine kept her family’s secret. She had to, or she risked losing all credibility as a reverend herself, the sole life she knew. And she did it to protect her mother’s well-regarded reputation. Some nights she awoke in a panic, convinced that what she read and preached to her people wasn’t the Bible at all, but a different book entirely. Then she’d sink back into bed, reassured that the oldest members of the congregation recalled the early days when Bibles were everywhere, and not once did any among them protest what was said. Perhaps they dared not question the words of a book they left behind in the collapse of civilization.
She hated the secrets she kept.
***
The trade caravan arrived a few days ahead of schedule, but no one complained. The town celebrated any change from their repetitive existence. This particular band of traders time and again brought an enticing combination of exotic curios alongside real necessities, making for a productive day at market. And, even if no new treasures were purchased, they provided a chance to see rare and strange things from as far south as Savannah and as far north as the ruins of Old New York.
Elaine took her time before going to see the traders herself. As reverend of the town, she possessed little and wanted for less. Others saw to her meager needs and would do so again. Meanwhile, she penned her next sermon. Her first handwritten copy of the Bible, bound and now over ten years old, sat nearby, a warm if unneeded friend for this task. The mayor borrowed the second as soon as it was ready. It served as little more than a coffee table book for his home — and one more security measure for the protection of the scriptures. Some suggested that Elaine begin work on a third Bible, or else have others work to make more copies, so that every home in town could have one. But Elaine demurred whenever the conversation came up. Copying a Bible required endless hours of difficult labor. It would take years for farmers to work their fields in the day and find time to write out new manuscripts in the evenings. Besides, the church Bible was available in the chapel for all to access.
And she didn’t want to spread her mother’s lies any further than necessary.
As Elaine’s thoughts wandered over her sermon, someone knocked on the study door before pushing it open and entering. Nine-year-old Brie met Elaine’s gaze as she looked up from her writing.
“The traders are here, Reverend,” the little girl said, softer than satin.
Elaine smiled. “Thank you, Brie. I’ll be along soon. And you can call me Elaine, you know.”
“But…Octavia’s there.”
Heat swam across Elaine’s face in a red tide. “I know,” she lied. She tried to return to her work.
But Brie still stood in the doorway.
“There’s something else,” the little girl said. “She has a Bible to trade.”
Elaine’s pen lost its trail on the page. “She what?”
Brie explained that the traders had, not a Bible, but a pair of Bibles. Printed letters and leather covers from the old days and everything. Elaine followed her out the door, rushed but trying to maintain a certain degree of ecclesiastical dignity.
They passed the aged homes and business of the community, some as old as the cataclysms that wracked the world generations ago and bearing the architectural style of those forgotten days, others newer, built by living hands to stand for years and years to come. When the pair arrived at the edge of town, the caravan awaited them, a worn array of ancient vehicles that once drove themselves, now pulled by teams of horses. They all formed in a semicircle that allowed the townsfolk to explore the wares at their leisure. Fredrick offered gardening tools and plants from all over the continent. Nasir and Zara hawked bags of flour and sugar. Everyone knew they also sold guns, but things had settled across the land when Elaine was a child. Raiders and bandits, if they even still existed, hadn’t come near the town in almost twenty years. Other familiar faces sold clocks and watches, popular olden day novels and practical clothing, hardy fabrics and handmade quilts.
Elaine ignored all of it in favor of Octavia Bell, who’d planted her horsedrawn truck near the center of the semicircle. Her shrewd eyes met Elaine’s before she returned her focus to haggling with the mayor over a set of china. Elaine nodded and waited her turn. She tried not to stare, at least not obviously, at the thick locks of Octavia’s hair, the gleam of sunlight on her dark shoulders under the thin straps of a green blouse.
The reverend remembered meeting her decades ago, when the dangers in between towns took a sharp decrease and a modicum of interconnected civilization returned to the remnants of human society. With the risk of the road reduced, more traveling groups like Octavia’s began to form. Both felt drawn to the other, fascinated by differences in their lives — Elaine’s isolation and elevated education, Octavia’s nomadic travels and adventures. Reverend Grace had approved of the friendship. When Octavia had first realized she was a girl, not a boy, Elaine’s mother had hugged her and bought her a new dress as a gift.
Elaine enjoyed watching the trader at work. Her knowing smile as the mayor offered a pittance for valuable china, her firm counteroffer delivered in her smoker’s voice. In time, they settled on a fair price, and the older man shook hands with the trader.
“Why travel so much? You could stay, you know,” he said, not even pretending to have no agenda as he glanced back at Elaine. “Plenty of people would be happy to have you.”
“I’ll think about it.” Octavia winked at Elaine, and something funny happened in the reverend’s chest cavity. “But, for the time being,” the trader took on a theatrical, lofty voice. “I’m afraid the road calls to me.”
The mayor laughed, then moved on to examine someone else’s inventory, allowing Elaine to approach.
“So, Tavi,” she said, “you have a Bible.”
Octavia grinned. “Straight to business, I see. That’s not how this usually goes. Or where this usually goes.”
“You don’t have the usual wares.”
“You know that, and I know that, your worship.” Octavia laughed at her own joke.
“Come on, really. Won’t you at least let me see it?”
Octavia rolled her eyes through a smile and turned to shift a few piles in the back of her truck. After a moment, she lifted a box and opened it, presenting Elaine with two leather bound books, each with a cross on their front.
“King James and everything,” Octavia said. “Real fancy.”
“You’ve read it?” Elaine suppressed a mixture of jealousy, fear, and eagerness.
“Only a page or two.” Octavia sat down in the truck bed. “That’s a lot of words, and I don’t have time to read them.”
Elaine snorted, imagining her friend wiling away the hours of travel by doing anything except read an extremely rare and valuable holy book. Her eyes scanned over every crevasse in the leather, the slight fold at the aged corners, the chipped and faded gold of the crosses. She wondered what would be different, what it would say, this restored word of God.
“It’s beautiful.” Elaine half-breathed out the reverent words. She imagined the world around her brighter. Truer. The Holy Spirit, or the universe, or maybe her own soul, she didn’t know, whispered that good news had at last come to her.
“I hate to break the reverie, Reverend,” Octavia said, “but I’ve got bad news. This one isn’t just mine to trade. Otherwise, it’d be yours in a blink. But the whole caravan agrees we need to sell this at an upcharge. I doubt anyone here can afford it.”
The reverend couldn’t tear her gaze from the priceless books, but she nodded all the same. “I understand.”
The trader regarded her friend, sympathetic but powerless, then cast a surreptitious look in either direction. She motioned for Elaine to lean in closer.
“Listen, I can’t give them to you. But how about I lend them to you while we stay here? You can have your look, maybe even copy some of it down if you’re fast enough.”
Elaine grinned. “I’m fast enough.”
Octavia smirked in return. “Damn right you are. Now, get lost. I’ve got junk to sell. But let’s catch up later?”
And they did. When the traders locked up their goods some hours afterward, the pair retreated to the sole bar in town, along with the majority of their friends, neighbors, and associates. Standard procedure for visits like this. Cheap liquor flowed. Revolting to the taste, yet effective. Caravan-crafted moonshine mixed with the locals’ unrefined swill elevated the heightened chatter brought by the welcome change from the mundane ins and outs of life. Just about everyone wanted to speak with Octavia, and they all exchanged brief words with her. Greetings and teasings and inside jokes. After a time, though, they all made a point to leave her and the reverend to themselves. They knew of Elaine’s special relationship with the popular trader and wanted to allow the two women as much time as they needed. Octavia and Elaine used this precious allotment as best they knew how.
A pattern had emerged over the years of meetings and partings, one they perpetuated that night, too. First, they reminisced, recalling fond times chasing rabbits and exploring the wetlands beyond the edge of town. They howled with laughter as, back and forth, they retold stories that made them cringe, misadventures from when they both pretended to be interested in boys to make the other jealous. They saved the proper catching up for later in the long conversation. Octavia had found and sold a collection of katanas for twice their worth to a private collector. Elaine dreamed of installing a trio of stained-glass windows in the church. One for Jesus ascending to heaven, one for Moses and the bronze serpent, and one for Mary Magdalene and Lydia, her wife.
Octavia brushed her fingers across Elaine’s delicate, scholar soft hands as they talked. The reverend envied the trader’s confident overtures and wanted to flirt in the same way. But she never quite knew where to start.
As the sunlight expired outside and the tumult lowered to a healthy buzz of chatter, Octavia made sure no one was watching before removing a box from a backpack she’d brought with her. Within gleamed the truth and light of a single precious book. She placed it on the table before Elaine, who opened the pages in a hungry movement. She couldn’t stop herself from frowning as she saw little bits of handwritten marginal notes and passages highlighted in yellow.
“You know,” Octavia said, “normally I’d be inviting you to join me in the field by now.”
Elaine blushed and looked up from the first chapter of Genesis.
“Please don’t worry.” Octavia bowed her head toward the holy scriptures. She smiled. “I know what this means to you. I want you to have all the time you need with it.”
But Elaine brushed the offer away, rising from her seat. “I’ll look at it later tonight,” she said. “The rest of this evening… well, the rest of this evening is for you.”
Elaine and Octavia once tried to share each other in the reverend’s bed. But the closed walls and low ceiling left the trader, used to the constant open air, feeling trapped and enclosed. The field offered the two women space apart from everyone else. Privacy. Intimacy. Their conversation followed familiar routes through the constellations above them. But new avenues of thought joined in like the random patterns of clouds that blotted and reshaped the stars. They lay beside one another as they spoke and, as always, laughed. Soon enough their lips met, and they became a tangle of mismatched limbs and quiet gasps.
***
Weather permitting, Elaine normally stayed the night with Octavia in the beloved field — their beloved field — but her friend knew how much she longed to flip through her temporary gift. So, a while later, the trader left her with a kiss and returned to the caravan, while the reverend made the short walk back to her chapel.
She wasted no time in doing her work. Knowing she’d be up all night, Elaine opened with a quick prayer before returning once again to Genesis. Gospel truth, unsullied by mortal interpolations of her family. The word of God Himself. Sure, it bore the notes and highlighted passages of a different reader, but those mattered little to the reverend.
For someone like Elaine, reading the Bible was akin to breathing. Something one can do without being aware of it. She knew the words so well that it all came to her in a rush. Chapters breezed by, verses in less time than it takes to say “amen.”
Then it all went wrong.
Elaine slowed her pace whenever she encountered differences from what she knew. And they came too fast. And too often. Why was Adam punished less severely than Eve? Why didn’t they eat the fruit at the same time, together, as Elaine and all her congregation knew they did? Who was this God that slew all the world, save for one family and a scattered group of animals aboard a ship? The reverend’s panic began to build as further revisions appeared. Jacob’s wives — he had two of them now, and two concubines — were subjugated to him. The twelve sons were murderers and thieves.
It grew worse as she read into Exodus and the Law. Why was this section so much longer than in her copies? Homosexuality forbidden upon penalty of death. Women required to marry their rapists. Men paid small fees for accidentally beating their slaves (God, their slaves) to death.
Prophets led the total slaughter of cities and civilizations. Men, women, and children, all in the name of a God who played favorites. So much death.
When morning peeked through the study window, Elaine reached the New Testament. She hoped it might offer something better, but no. Slaves encouraged to submit to their masters. Women forbidden to speak in church. People like Elaine, people like Octavia, like many of her congregation, condemned.
Elaine closed her eyes, a finger resting on her stopping place. She had read through the night and past noon. Mere dozens of chapters remained for her to pore through, but she would do no more. Instead, Elaine began to read the marginal notes of the previous owner. All this person deemed noteworthy seemed to be the bigotry of their God. Elaine’s God. In Genesis, when it described the Lord as creating male and female, the writer marked the verses and wrote a comment to the side demonizing “transgenders,” an olden days term Elaine recognized as referring to people like Octavia. Tides of yellow-covered verses denounced “queers” and those who had sex out of marriage to a fiery hell, an eternal and cruel lake of fire and brimstone Elaine never learned about.
The reverend spent years yearning for the truth of such a Bible. Now she had one, and its supposed truths stood to destroy and condemn everything she knew; the gentle, loving God that allowed all souls into heaven, even the wickedest, after a time. Elaine’s own work and glory, preaching the word of God, was forbidden to her as a woman. The tenderness, the wonder, even the fun of intimacy, decried as an affront to heaven unless sealed by marriage. Her panicked mind returned again and again to Octavia. How this horrid book convicted everything her best friend and greatest love stood for, someone it never occurred to her that God might hate. Where was the God of grace and goodness, the Lord who so loved the world, who promised paradise to His children and swore an oath to end all suffering? Why was this new and unknown God so murderous, so capricious and cruel, so willing to toss aside his creations if they stumbled in even the most inconsequential ways?
Her grandmother was right. The Bible as it once was held unspeakable potential for atrocity, the philosophies of men mingled with scripture.
In a burst of revelation, Elaine lit a fire in the small hearth. As the flames built up, she stood over them, the Bible in hand, ready to drop it into the little Gehenna at her feet. She trembled, willing herself to do what was necessary to preserve her God of love, her way of life, the righteous revisions of her foremothers.
Her hands trembled, fingers refusing to part and let the book fall. She stumbled backward from the hearth, clutching the Bible to her chest. Breath came in short, harsh bursts, followed by despair. Burning those pages served no purpose; the caravan possessed another hate-filled Bible, anyway. Destroying this one would serve only to offend the traders and ensure they never returned. While Elaine now understood why her grandmother made her changes to the scriptures, part of her yet retained her conviction that truth mattered. This Bible did not hold her truth, but it might for others, and merited existence on that alone. Her town had no use for it, but she could spare it. Allow it to pass to other hands.
***
Octavia knocked at the door and let herself in around three o’clock, a plate of food in her hand. Knowing how the loaned Bible might keep her friend occupied, she hadn’t been concerned at her friend’s absence from the town and the caravans that day, but she wanted to see her.
She found Elaine with her face in her hands, the King James Bible closed in front of her on the kitchen table, where the reverend once fought with her mother about the importance of pure, unfiltered truth.
“Hey, your worship, how did it go?” Octavia said, not yet noticing something was wrong. She waved the plate toward the reverend. “Have you eaten today? Did you sleep at all?”
Elaine couldn’t bring herself to look up. But she spoke.
“It’s horrible, Tavi. The book. It’s wrong.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” Octavia placed the food on the table, then knelt by her friend and put her arms around her. “What does that mean?”
Elaine released tears she hadn’t been able to cry as she explained it all in a scrambled, disorganized rant. The changes. The murder. The hate. Octavia couldn’t follow all of it — she knew too little of the Bible to understand every explanation, and Elaine’s words came too fast to catch it all even if she did — but she nodded and took in the most important bits.
“It says both of us aren’t allowed,” Elaine said more than once. “Women can’t preach. Or love each other. And people like you go to hell.”
Through it all, nothing changed in Octavia’s always open face. No shift or sign of emotion as Elaine talked through her findings and then proceeded to share her family’s history of editing the Bible. Octavia spoke not a word throughout, letting her friend and lover release every emotion and thought until she ran out.
“Damn,” the trader said when Elaine had fallen silent for over a minute. “That’s…a lot.”
Elaine pulled Octavia’s face toward hers. “I need you to take it far away. Sell it. Somewhere far away where its horrible doctrine can’t come back to us. I tried to destroy it, but I can’t. I couldn’t. Just take it far away.”
Octavia nodded. “I can do something like that, worship.”
Elaine released a teary laugh at the pet name. Octavia patted her shoulder, then lifted herself from the floor by the chair. She stretched, then departed out the door, leaving the Bible with the reverend. This puzzled Elaine, but she figured Octavia would return.
She did so without knocking minutes later. She held the other Bible under her arm.
“Can I take the other one back?” Octavia said. When Elaine nodded, she smiled. “Good. They’re both mine, after all.”
Again, the caravan trader did something the reverend did not expect. She opened the door to the study and stepped inside. Elaine followed, frowning and uncertain.
Octavia turned to the fire, dimming but still alive in the hearth. She considered it for a moment, then dropped both Bibles in the little blaze. Faster than a hallelujah, the pages began to curl, the leather to harden, all of it to blacken.
Elaine gasped. Then she screamed. “What have you done?” She reached for the dying treasure, the volumes of a darker God, but the growing heat and tossing sparks forced her hands to retreat. Octavia stared at the little inferno, unflinching, the corner of her lip tightened into a resolved grimace.
“I did what I had to. For you, me. All of us.”
“But what about the caravan? I thought they agreed you had to sell it?”
“I’ll explain. And I think they’ll understand. And if they don’t, I’ll leave.”
The women watched the old books shrink into themselves in the heat, the flames rising higher from the new source of fuel. The red-gold baptism purified the texts of their many sins, burning out the hate and leaving behind for the world the words found in the Bibles of Elaine’s family.
“You can stay with me. If they don’t understand,” Elaine said.
“I’d like that.”
Unable to turn away from the dying scriptures before her, Elaine pondered whether she and Octavia had the right to make this choice for everyone. The town. The traders. She wasn’t even sure what they’d done would make a difference. Doubtless other, comparable books existed out in the wide world. But for the first time in many years, for the first time since she stumbled across her mother’s revisions in that very room, the reverend felt peace despite her deceptions. She took Octavia’s hand in hers. The trader nodded, then gave her a sad, knowing wink. They breathed the burning scent together. A precious, sweet savor.
Jack Bylund (he/him) is a student, teacher, and writer living in New Mexico. He loves Chinese food, bad movies, and writing stories about the end of the world. His writing is published in Sink Hollow, The Queer Sun, and Turning Leaf, among other literary magazines.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 