Little Widow

I was fourteen and at a sleepover when the cult drank poison. The sleepover mom turned on the TV and said “Oh my lord, Mary, would you look at this? It’s the feds is what, and a bomb, right out there where you come from.”

But it wasn’t the feds, and it wasn’t a bomb. It was us. We were destined to die. I watched it burn, and listened to the news call us a cult, which was not what we called ourselves. We called ourselves Heaven’s Avengers. I watched it for a while, and then I threw up hamburger casserole.

Miracle didn’t have a stoplight. Miracle didn’t have a grocery store. Miracle didn’t typically attract anything but traffic going the dirty way to some other place. We were on the road to California, and people sorrowing in other states found their way to Disneyland through us. Miracle had no marvels. It was named after a thing that’d happened back in 1913. People got lost—a whole troupe of the religiously devout on a pilgrimage—and then they got found. They came up out of a lake bottom and walked on the water, briefly, before they disappeared again. A cult got started around that notion, and a hundred years later, on the anniversary of the water walk, my cult killed itself.

Now it was trailers and scraggly dogs and everyone who hadn’t been part of the dead cult was an ex-con turned to factory work. An hour away, we had a sugar factory and you could get a company bus. Most of our town worked there, bleaching brown to white.This story also appears in WHAT THE #@&% IS THAT? edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen. Available Nov. 1, 2016 from Saga Press. Buy the Book Amazon Barnes & Noble Powell's

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