Exodus, p.1
Exodus, page 1
The
Little Seer:
Exodus
Laura K. Cowan
Copyright © 2013 Laura K. Cowan
All rights reserved.
THIS STORY IS A WORK OF FICTION, THOUGH ITS BASIC TRUTHS ARE VERY REAL. ANY SIMILARITY TO ACTUAL PEOPLE OR EVENTS IS COINCIDENTAL.
For the walking wounded and the dreamers of dreams.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY HUSBAND, FOR MAKING THIS WRITING LIFE POSSIBLE. YOU ARE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE, AND GOD’S PROVISION FOR ME. AND THANK YOU TO MY BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER, FOR REMINDING ME EVERY DAY THAT LIFE IS AN I LOVE GOD AND AN I LOVE YOU STORY. FINALLY, A BIG THANK YOU TO MARTA AND TANIA, FOR READING MY DRAFTS, LOVING ME THROUGH MY OWN JOURNEY TO HEALING, AND FOR ALWAYS BEING THERE. I LOVE YOU ALL.
CONTENTS
1 The Birds
2 On Sunday
3 An Announcement
4 A Gift To See Things
5 Escaping The Darkness
6 The Sheep Bird
7 Red Static
8 The Zoo
9 Another Crow
10 What Happened That Night
11 A Prophet in Her Own House
12 The Dark Wood
13 Elders Meeting
14 Still Waters
15 Showdown
16 The Secret Place
17 Anonymously
18 On the Cliffs
1
THE BIRDS
With a crash, the stained glass windows set high in the walls of the new church shattered, pulverizing the image of a man surrounded by birds. A fierce wind tore through the round openings. It whipped shards of glass through the cedar rafters toward the congregants, who ran screaming out of the pews.
Aria shut her eyes against the grit in the air. Debris tore at her cheeks and arms, but still she groped for her parents, who had been sitting next to her in their pew. They were no longer there.
Aria felt her way along the white bench to the sounds of men shouting and things crashing against the far wall. And then, all she could hear was the wind. She felt unmoored, as if she were floating in a fog, even though she could still feel her feet planted on the ground, one after the other.
Finally, she found her dad’s hand, which yanked her to the floor. He pulled her under the pew just as a piece of wood flew by inches from Aria’s face. She huddled with her parents, her dad crushing her to his chest.
Aria managed to peek out from under her dad’s suit jacket to see who else was still in the building. Phil Donagee and the other elders cowered under the front pew across the aisle. Mr. Bob reached toward the stage where Pastor Ted somehow still stood, his hand held up as if he were making a point in his sermon. He ignored the men’s shouts and instead locked eyes with Aria.
Pieces of sheet music blew past him from the tumbling music stands on stage, but still he stared. Aria couldn’t tear her gaze away from his eyes.
They weren’t the eyes she knew.
Aria suddenly realized that Pastor Ted was only wearing a dress shirt and boxer shorts. He saw her looking, and his nostrils flared. His eyes bulged as he coughed up a sound that was part moan, part roar.
Before the sound died in his throat, the winds calmed as quickly as they had risen. Dirt began to rain down on the pews in the still air.
Winged shadows were flapping over Aria’s head. She looked up to the hole in the wall where the tornado had blown through and saw crows balancing on the jagged glass above the windowsills.
Pastor Ted saw them too. He roared again and cast his arm in Aria’s direction.
The crows let out an unearthly scream. They dove through the rafters, straight toward Aria. The birds reached out with huge black claws as they descended on her, tearing at her exposed arms, ripping her skin with scissor-sharp beaks. Aria buried herself in her father’s chest and screamed.
2
ON SUNDAY
Aria gripped the sides of her Sunday school desk with aching hands. The black wings flapping in her mind had drowned out the lesson.
“God spoke through a dream,” Ms. Nancy said, and held up a book.
Aria’s head was swimming. It wasn’t the first scary dream she had ever had, but it was the first where—.
Aria looked down at her arms. She had covered them carefully with a long-sleeve shirt, despite the fresh spring sun outside. Bloody scrapes peeked out of her cuffs.
She went pale and sat back in her seat.
What if I did that to myself? Her mind worked through all the possibilities—none of them nice. What is going on? Could a dream like that be from God? But how could it be? Ms. Nancy always said God was nice.
Her arms and hands throbbed.
Aria tried to slow her breathing. She inhaled the fading scent of paint that mixed with the mustiness of old hymnals the church stored in the metal cabinet on the back wall.
If only the excitement of building a new church weren’t fading along with the construction smells, but there was undeniable tension in the air now that the thrill was beginning to wear off. Aria thought back to the sermon she had just heard.
“A sign of good stewardship is a consistent tithe,” Pastor Ted had said as he admonished the church members yet again to give more money to the building fund. “You need to ask God what you should be giving, and then be faithful with blessing his work.”
“What if he tells us to take our tithe where it does some good?” Aria heard Phil Donagee grumble in the pew next to her. She looked up at him, startled. He grimaced, smoothed his thinning blond hair, and went back to reading the Bible in his hand.
“Psst, Aria!” Aria’s friend Tara was holding out a note. Ms. Nancy had briefly turned her back to write a scripture verse on the board up front.
Aria smiled and reached out to take the note.
One of her bandages came unstuck from her stiff hand, revealing a fiery red scratch that reached around most of her wrist.
Tara’s eyes opened wide.
Aria shoved her fists into her lap along with the folded note. How could she explain that when she woke up from a dream of birds attacking her she had actual cuts on her arms from protecting her face? How could she explain the other dreams she had been having, or how this had all started?
You seemed so good when I saw you, she prayed. Why would you let something like this happen? What is going on? It hurts!
When Aria wouldn’t meet her gaze, Tara flipped her blonde hair around her shoulders with a sniff and turned back to the front of the room.
“Aria, what does it mean?”
“Hmm?”
“In the Bible when Joseph dreams that his brothers’ sheaves of wheat are bowing down to him?” Ms. Nancy shifted the bag of candy in her hand to remind Aria that she gave rewards for correct answers. She picked an invisible piece of lint off her white blouse while she waited for a reply.
“Joseph’s dream told the future. His brothers really would bow down to him when they had to beg him for food during the famine,” Aria replied.
She put her head back down on her desk. Then she raised it again.
“Ms. Nancy?”
“Yes?” Ms. Nancy turned around and squinted through her narrow glasses. The lines around her eyes were getting deeper as she began to age. Aria wondered if she ever was going to get married. She seemed much older than most women she knew who had started families. Her once-blonde hair was now streaked with gray.
“Does God ever give us bad dreams that come true in the future?”
“What do you mean?” Ms. Nancy asked.
“What if God gave me a dream where Pastor Ted ordered crows to, um,” Aria stole a glance at her classmates, “peck out my eyes?”
They were staring.
“Aria! You know Pastor Ted would never do such a thing!” Ms. Nancy said.
“But—.”
“God never gives us bad dreams,” Ms. Nancy admonished her. “If you had a bad dream then it came from your imagination… or from the devil!”
She straightened her skirt as if neatening her appearance would banish the unruly thought.
Jimmy grinned at Aria around a half-eaten lollipop. He pantomimed one of his hands pecking him to death and cast his red head back across the empty desk behind him, tongue lolling over his pale chin.
Aria turned back to Ms. Nancy.
“But he did, and a tornado destroyed the church, and—.”
“And what?” Ms. Nancy put her hands on her hips.
“… and—he wasn’t wearing pants,” Aria finished in a small voice. She slouched down in her seat and crumpled Tara’s note in her hand.
Someone behind her let out a snort.
“I think we need to ask the elders to pray for you,” Ms. Nancy said, frowning. She paused again and repositioned her glasses on her nose before continuing. “Now, let’s get back to biblical dreams.”
Her plaid skirt flipped around her knees as she whirled around and returned the bag of candy to her desk.
Aria’s cheeks burned hot. The classroom felt stuffy, airless. She looked past Jimmy to the garden outside, where poppies the color of his hair were blooming.
A black butterfly flitted from the poppies to the oak tree in the yard. The bright sunshine started to fade in and out. Tall, whipped cream-topped storm clouds passed overhead, flipping the leaves of the oak tree upside down with a stiff breeze.
In her mind’s eye, Aria pictured herself outside, standing under the large oak while the wind thrust against it. She could almost feel the rough bark under her fingers.
The tree was swaying dangerously. Then, Aria imagine d the wind suddenly cracking the tree’s roots up from the ground. She jumped backward just in time, close enough to feel the rush of wind as the trunk passed her on its way down. The bark fell off the oak tree as it struck the ground, and underneath Aria could see that the wood had rotted through long before the tree fell.
It started to rain. The wood pulp washed away, leaving just the bark on the wet grass. Aria felt her heart hammering in her chest.
“Sometimes God gives us warnings about things that are about to happen.” Ms. Nancy’s voice brought her back to the present.
The images she had just seen reminded her of last night somehow, but why?
“But they’re never negative,” Ms. Nancy said with a hard stare in her direction.
Aren’t they?
Aria twisted her hands in her lap.
Why is this happening to me? First the dreams, and now I’m seeing things while I’m awake! God, if this isn’t you then I must be crazy.
But God did give people crazy dreams in the Bible. Aria already knew that. And warnings of coming wars and famines and even their own deaths. Ms. Nancy seemed somehow unaware of what she was teaching, even while she admonished Aria. And if it was somehow God trying to speak to her…. The thought gave Aria goosebumps.
What if you’re not who people say you are? she thought. Then I don’t know you at all. Neither does Ms. Nancy!
But how can I ever know for sure? And why would you let me get hurt?
The wounds on her arms began to throb again. She opened her hand, finally, and unfolded the wrinkled paper.
“I like Jesse. Who do you like?” the note said, with hearts over the Is.
Aria sighed. She held her pen above the paper.
I see things that aren’t happening. What boy is going to like a girl who cuts herself in her sleep? she imagined writing back.
She paused and then wrote, “Nobody.”
3
AN ANNOUNCEMENT
Aria passed over three crock pots of baked beans on the card table the elders had set up beside her house. She gazed up at the two-story brick colonial with peeling white trim.
Home.
This house had always been home to her. She had grown up in this flaking old friend, played with Jenny down the street for as long as she had memories of playing with anyone. The neighborhood was filled with homes belonging to the people from these picnics, who had been a part of her church since before she was born.
The old church had been home, too, though. She missed the white wood building with the single bell in the steeple and the honeysuckle that grew under the windows—windows that opened to let fresh air in.
Aria scooped a large dollop of macaroni salad onto her paper plate, leaving room for a handful of potato chips and one sugar snap pea.
“I see you’ve got all your food groups,” Mr. Bob said. He shuffled down the length of the table next to Aria and dug into one of the crock pots with a big ladle. His bulbous nose hung low over his plate, which he was piling high with brown, soupy beans. His red neck was spilling over the edge of his collar again, too. Mr. Bob always seemed to have a red face and nose, like he was holding in a sneeze.
Aria stepped back to look up at him around his heavy stomach and shot him a mischievous smile.
“I have to eat my vegetables,” she replied.
She picked up a second plate with a frosted brownie on it.
Balancing both plates in one hand and her punch in the other, Aria made her way across the lawn to where Jenny and Tara were perched on lawn chairs by the back flowerbeds.
It was a warm spring, and the tall hibiscus stalks were already starting to droop behind Jenny and Tara’s bare legs, which sprouted like pale stems from their shorts. Aria tried to pretend she was comfortable in her long-sleeved shirt, which she had worn to cover her arms again, but she was sweating.
Aria smiled, but Tara turned away, even though Aria was sure she had seen her.
As Aria approached, she could hear Tara saying, “You know you could!”
Jenny giggled and tossed her long, dark hair.
“You could what?” Aria asked.
They both looked up at her.
“Um, you know!” Tara said cryptically. She raised one eyebrow and wiggled a speared piece of asparagus at Jenny.
Jenny giggled again.
Aria gingerly placed her plates on the arm of a lawn chair that faced the house. “Yeah,” she said without smiling. She settled in to eat her brownie first.
She cleared her throat.
“What?” Tara asked.
I’m scared my dreams are going to hurt me and I want to know if God is real or if I’m crazy, and all you can do is giggle about asparagus! Aria thought, her forehead flushing hot.
“Nothing,” she said. She finished her brownie and dug into the macaroni.
“Yah!”
A sudden yell from behind sent Aria sprawling on the grass. Something had bitten her ankles like a snake. Macaroni landed on her back, and her brownie went face down into the lawn.
She whirled around to find Jimmy wearing her chair like a sombrero.
“Jimmy!” she yelled.
Phil Donagee, Mr. Bob and his wife Gail turned from their conversation across the lawn to look. Ms. Gail lifted her head out of her gray turtleneck, raising a pale eyebrow. She reminded Aria of a turtle that lived in Mrs. Coghill’s backyard pond down the street—always pulling his head up and down to check for danger.
“Don’t hit me. I’m just a messenger,” Jimmy said with a grin.
“From whom?” Aria demanded.
“God! He wants you to know, Technicolor Dreamcoat, that you’re crazy!”
Jimmy danced in a circle with the chair on his head.
Aria rolled her eyes, but she looked around to see who was watching. Ms. Nancy was keeping an eye on them over her paper cup, but when she saw Aria looking at her she turned back to her conversation with Jenny’s parents, the Stauffins. They were wearing their usual khaki, Mr. Stauffin’s slacks considerably more sizeable than his wife’s.
Phil Donagee was still watching too, but he met Aria’s gaze and smiled. He snapped his phone shut and raised his cup of punch in a toast to their mutual love of sugary picnic foods. His square belly, which strained against his polo shirt, betrayed the fact that he had seen a lot more picnic food in his day than Aria, though his stomach was as solid as a tree from his days in the Air Force.
“Excuse me, everyone, can I have your attention over here?”
Pastor Ted broke the awkward lull in conversation by stepping up onto the deck and holding his arms up like Moses over the Red Sea.
“Everyone? Thank you. Jimmy, put that chair down! Okay.”
Jimmy crouched down under Aria’s lawn chair and backed out to kneel on the grass. He grinned once more at Aria, who crossed her arms and turned to glare at Pastor Ted. She winced with the pain of her cuts pressing into her sides, but tried not to show it.
Pastor Ted’s dark eyes held everyone’s gaze.
“I have some exciting news,” he said with a toothy smile. “As you know, we have been fundraising to save up a down payment on our new building, which just passed its final inspections. Well, we had enough to roll our construction loan into a mortgage, so the new building is ours!”
He twirled his hands and took a shallow bow.
The church members tucked their plates into their elbows and clapped.
“God is so good,” Aria heard Ms. Nancy say to Jenny’s mom.
“Yes, isn’t his favor a wonderful thing?” she replied with a bright smile.
But as Aria turned around she caught Phil Donagee grumbling, “And how are we expected to pay for the rest of the building?”
He saw her watching him again and shut his mouth. He dug into a slice of cherry pie so aggressively that his fork stuck through the bottom of the plate.
Aria heard her plate crack under the force of Jimmy’s swift kick. He ran off to raid the desert table with Tara’s little sister Lydia. But Aria’s eyes were still locked on Pastor Ted.
Why did my dream take place in our new church? she wondered. She had not thought of that detail until this moment. But the tornado had ripped through the new church building, and there was something going on with the place. She could just smell it on Pastor Ted. What is wrong with the new building? she thought.
