‘I got called to prophecy on a night like this. Lonely feeling. I know you’re lonely here. But if you listen, then you’ll know you’re not alone. You’ll hear the call of God. Even though it’s still me and Sunny finding our way, I got the prophecy now.’ 

‘Must be a comfort,’ is all I knew to say, sitting cross-legged on my childhood bed with Sookie, beatific at the foot, wanting to fill me with some promise of newness. I did feel—I was—lonely like she said, but she had never left the town of Land’s End like I had. 

She had always been giddy, but the socially acceptable exuberance of being young and wild seemed to have given way to more calcified eccentricities. With a finger, she twirled her brassy blonde-from-a-box hair, black roots showing, eyes glazed over as she went on about God coming to her in the dark part of the night. She said she’d been filled with infinite stores of energy; she had no need for sleep. When I tried to interject, I could feel my mother in me, cautious and ready to warn her off. Sookie stood me down with punctuations of familiar girlish laughter. She said, ‘God just gives and gives,’ which was still old Sookie, flirtatious in the face of disaster.  

 My mother’s living room Bible study was as established as it ever was. It would take an apocalypse to undo her regime. Every Wednesday night at seven, the same old flock of women descended on our country house, Sookie arriving by carpool, as was her custom.  

When I first arrived and walked through my bedroom door, saw the polished floors and hospital corners on the bed sheets, my mother said, ‘Well, there.’ And the hundreds and hundreds of steps I took to get gone were erased in one drift, the sweep of some silent snow. 

* 

I drove her to doctor appointments, but she made me wait in the parking lot while she went in. They wheeled her back out three, four, sometimes five hours after, and I’d remove the magazine from my face and drive us back out of town. I stopped at the grocery store and got all the things she liked. Sensible bags of potatoes and apples. Reduced sodium cans of soup. Orange pekoe tea. White onions, frozen peas. High-fibre cereal. Bananas and margarine and ginger ale.  

In the morning, she called to me, ‘Hester, can you come run me a tub?’ but she wouldn’t look me in the eye when I came into the bathroom. She’d stand tall there until I got the tub ready, and then she’d hold onto my shoulder and climb in, still not looking, and say, ‘Close the door behind you; I’ll call you when I’m done.’ I backed out but left the door open a crack, and she allowed it to be that way. 

She never once asked about my personal life. If she was curious, she didn’t give in. But she’d never been curious about me. She’d been trying to raise me to be a strong Christian, not a strong person. I don’t even think she saw me as a person at all. I was the child; she was the mother.  

Land’s End Wesleyan Church sucked people into its gravitational pull the way a black hole swallows its nearby stars. There were tiers in the church like a caste system, with deacons and elders, including the mayor, at the top. Then there were the middle-class families who filled pews, gave money, volunteered. My mother counted herself in this group. On the bottom rung were the charity cases: Single mothers, ex-drunks, scallop fishermen who came to church when they weren’t on the water. Sookie Woodrow was in this lower tier, and, if I hadn’t known her over the years, I would have suspected she was trying to use her new gift of prophecy to social climb. But Sookie wasn’t calculating—if she had been, maybe she would have made more for herself and Sunny.  

There was nothing wrong with being a woman alone, but the church decided under which circumstances such independence was acceptable. My mother Ruth was widowed. Acceptable. Sookie had been married to a drunk who didn’t attend church and finally left her. Unacceptable.  

‘There you are, Sookie.’ My mother came around my bedroom door, glancing between us with a smile so well-rehearsed I could have counted the wrinkles in line with her lips. ‘Bible study’s not over.’ 

‘Oh, let me steal a few more minutes with Hester,’ Sookie pleaded, girlish and intimate as if we were in here gossiping. To elucidate, she stage-whispered, ‘Have you got someone special in the city?’ 

My mother pitied Sookie. I hoped I didn’t. The world had flung its aggregation of shit at this woman, and still she believed. No matter how hard things became, God was a floor she couldn’t fall beneath. And now God was apparently calling her ahead.  

‘We’re all glad to have Hester home for a visit,’ my mother said, her voice hard and bright. ‘But Willa Fay wants to give her testimony, and Trudy brought Nanaimo bars, so let’s head on back, shall we?’ It was not a negotiation. 

My mother had been collecting these women around her for years. Maybe she thought this was friendship, but she’d never have them closer than she had them now. 

Sookie contorted her face like Melpomene, headed reluctantly toward the hall. Then put her hands to the small of her back and said, ‘I am just wired for sound these days.’ 

My mother ushered Sookie out. ‘Door closed?’ she asked. 

 I knew what she wanted me to say. ‘No, it’s fine.’ 

* 

Our topics of conversation were whittled down until we had nothing left to mull over but the people I’d gone to school with: a dangerous topic as it skirted those last days. 

‘Let’s see. Those brothers? Emos and Amos? They’re both married, somehow.’ She wrapped her fingers around her mug as they appeared in detail again, those boys that had always looked to me like the missing link. ‘Their sister Dorcas works on an oil rig out west, if you can believe it.’ 

‘I can believe it.’ 

‘And,’ she shook her head, ‘Mr. Tobin and his wife were killed in a car accident about six, seven years ago. The children, well they’re not children anymore. They went back to England.’  

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s sad news.’ And I felt the sadness, conjured my old teacher’s face and then moved along again in my mind because what else was I supposed to do. 

She rose early, still. When I heard her in the kitchen, clinking dishes and starting the coffee, I was meant to come out of my bedroom. I knew it in my body, in the restlessness it brought. So, I padded down the chilly hallway to the kitchen, told my mother to sit; I’d make eggs. She put up a thin protest, No, no, while I got the eggs out of the fridge and cracked them into the pan. 

When I heard her clear her throat and pause, my shoulders tensed automatically. She was going to ask me something I wouldn’t want to answer. She cleared her throat and paused whenever she brought up her younger sister, my aunt Nancy. She had cleared her throat and paused when she had to first explain my menstrual cycle to me. And now she cleared her throat and made a dainty Ahem. The pregnant pause. ‘Hester, do you still read your Bible?’ 

I was sixteen again. ‘You assume I have one.’ I tried to flip the egg, mangled it. They would be scrambled. I began stabbing at the yellow-white.  

The Bible is the literal word of God, she’d said and said again. And I’d gone through with a marker, highlighting the verses that said menstruating women are filthy, fathers and daughters could have sex or be sold as slaves, women should be quiet in church. I’d shown those verses to my mother, but she only smiled sadly, said I had gotten it wrong. 

‘Come prayerfully to the Bible, and let God lead you through His word,’ she’d answered tidily. And how could anyone argue with that?  

I put the eggs on a plate, tried to get her to eat. 

In the night I crept through the house. Even though my mother was changing, the house had not. The painting of praying hands above the wood stove. The depiction of Jesus bleeding, with I am the way, the Truth and the Light written in Comic Sans underneath his fleshless feet. The living room rippling with its view of the night, wild grass falling away to the ocean. The little house out here alone on the shore road. The old smells of linen, cedar and smoke. 

* 

Sookie’s boy Sunny had been touched by the angels—his big wet eyes often slid apart vacant, fixing on something beyond. It had always been Sookie and Sunny alone, long as I could remember.  

Everyone in my town went visiting after church on Sundays; that was just the way. When my mother used to take me out to Sookie’s, Sunny and I would be exiled to the yard in all seasons, instructed to stay away from the woodpile in case we toppled it on ourselves. Sunny and I never had much to say to each other. In my memories, he was six, and I was twelve. He’d crush bugs in his hand and cry over their deaths. 

Sookie’s child support seemed to peter out quickly. The food she could afford, after mortgage payments, car payments and the cost of raising a child alone, came in cans or needed to have water stirred into it to become a meal. My mother made Sookie the subject of her prayers. Sookie got a second job. 

Sunny was half-raised by babysitters. My mother took him sometimes. I liked to bring Sunny into our kitchen to play on the warm linoleum. I put a plastic mixing bowl on his head like a hat. When it slid down over his eyes and he started screeching, my mother called from the living room, ‘Stop tormenting that baby.’ Because Sunny was always a baby, even when he no longer was. To my mind, something about Sunny begged to be pestered, maybe because he was fat and cross-eyed or because he was little and had fallen behind. Because my mother was strong and his was weak. I guess I thought that then.  

When my mother couldn’t babysit, Sookie had to rely on anyone she could get, folks who didn’t mind going all the way out to her bungalow on the highway. And that’s how it happened. Sookie got some man in she knew from around town. My mother still said to this day, ‘She left him with a man.’  

When Sookie came home from her eleven-hour workday, she found them in the bathroom. He had Sunny in the bathtub, was performing some kind of irreversible act, as total as a brand. All this I overheard at the women’s Bible study, with its scented candles and grocery store butter tarts. 

Sunny stayed childlike. He was maybe sixteen or so when Sookie Woodrow got called by God, and I came back to town. But Sunny never got any older. 

Early morning sun revealed the dripping tap, the crooked shelves, a light bulb dangling from a wire. 

‘So? What was Sookie talking to you about the other night?’ My mother strained to keep her voice light, tinkling her fingernails on the side of her mug. Smile tight as a rubber band. 

‘Oh.’ I said, touching the crumbs on my plate until my mother covered my hand with hers to get me to stop. ‘Some prophecy. Didn’t tell me what the prophecy was about.’ 

My mother let her eyes half-close, almost as if she were praying. I made to get up and start clearing the breakfast dishes, but she flapped her hand at me to quit it and pulled her housecoat tight. ‘Don’t. I only found out about this…prophecy of hers day before you got to town.’ She tinkled the mug again, with less enthusiasm. ‘She’s calling it her Good News.’ 

‘No kidding. What’s so good about it?’ 

‘Oh…’ my mother picked at the tablecloth with her fingernail. ‘Listen. Just because you’re living a godless life doesn’t mean the Lord’s gone anywhere for the rest of us.’ 

‘What did he say to Sookie then?’ 

‘According to her, she’s being called to write…a supplement to the Book of Revelations.’ My mother blew her bangs up from her forehead. 

I stood there, plate in hand. ‘Isn’t that blasphemy in your religion?’ 

My mother got that beady eye on her. When I was a kid, that was my cue to run. I backed up to the kitchen counter, put the plate down, waiting. I know she was counting to ten. In my head I counted with her. She got to about three before she brought her fist down on the table. ‘Don’t do that!’ There it was. ‘Your religion. Just because you’ve broken off to do…whatever it is you’re doing. You’re not the enlightened one.’ 

Here was the opportunity for me to tell her about my life. It wasn’t enlightenment. But it was some kind of escape.  

I did not speak. The moment was gone. The plunk of the faucet’s water came loud as gunshot. The wash of an occasional car.  

When my mother began to breathe again, I tried for a tone of mild curiosity. ‘What did you say? When she told you she was rewriting the Bible. What did you say?’ 

‘I mostly just listened, Miss Skeptic.’ She was no longer making fists with her hands at least. ‘Anyway, she convinced me. She can quote vast passages of Revelations. There’s a woman who knows her Bible. I gotta hand it to her.’ 

Her face was so satisfied I had to turn around and face the window for a minute. ‘Mom,’ I finally said, the word like salt water. ‘You don’t have to hand it to her. Sookie is probably having some kinda mental break here, and you’re congratulating her for memorising bible verses. She could do with a healthy dose of medication, sounds like.’  

Now, of course, she reached for her Bible. Her answer to a lost argument. The book always sat in the middle of the kitchen table. As much a part of her as her own hands, it evoked my mother so much that seeing it was the same as looking at her face. Oxblood leather, floppy gold-edged pages, a ribbon for a bookmark. Oscillating cursive in the margins. These attributes were my mother, through and through. The inscription on the inside cover I knew by heart: ‘This Bible belongs to…’ and in the blank space she had written ‘Ruth Nickerson’. The book also provided spaces for her to write when the Bible was given to her and by whom. ‘Summer of Seventy-Six, Gomer MacKenzie’. 

See, I told myself, even in this mortal twilight, my mother wouldn’t be shaken down. She wore her bible-verse-quoting face, her lecturer’s face. Her everyday face. 

Running her big-knuckled finger down the tissue page, she alighted on the Book of Ezekiel. Then holding the finger up as if testing the direction of the wind, she read: ‘Again the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, speak to the children of thy people, and say unto them, when I bring the sword upon a land, if the people of the land take a man of their coasts and set him for their watchman: if when he seeth the sword come upon the land, he blow the trumpet and warn the people; then whosoever heareth the sound of the trumpet and taketh not warning, if the sword come and take him away, his blood shall be upon his own head.’ 

I said, ‘Oh yeah. Totally.’ Sixteen, all over again.  

And expected my mother would snap back, and we would be this way forever, a domestic ouroboros. 

But no. Instead, her mouth crumpled in this horrible and sudden way, her eyes polished with tears. I couldn’t watch. Was she going to cry? I had to leave the room. 

The phone calls began that night. As soon as they began, it seemed as if they’d always been happening. Sookie called at dinnertime, at three in the morning. She called to read the Bible to my mother; she called to read the Bible to me. There was no back and forth; it was just Sookie and a tower of babble. Her voice came high-pitched through the receiver as she spoke of her plans. She never said anything about the plans—what they consisted of—she could only say that she had some. She couldn’t answer direct questions. It sounded like, ‘And I said Jesus what do you want but he didn’t say suffer unto them children of Israel because woe to them and I don’t think there’s any room for that brand of whatever, you know I can’t remember, and I can’t catch no Zs anyways.’ She’d break for a scree of laughter and then: ‘But He is the great mystery, the master, and I keep him like an ace up my sleeve, a cross in my pocket, communion in my shoe, like a….’ 

I could practically hear her pacing the floor, clapping her hands, breathing, gulping tap water, fanning the pages of her Bible like cards in a gambler’s deck. 

I thought back to the Sookie I had known, flirty and fun, a hard worker, burdened by what’s-his-name leaving her; always there was an absence of him, as there was an absence of ours. Sookie throwing back her head to laugh and showing her silver fillings. Where was Sunny these nights when Sookie prophesied into our phone? Was he staring at the television set, dull and happy? Was he frightened? Did he believe?  

When I came through the front door heavy with groceries, I found my mother pale and haggard on the couch, her eyes purpled, holding the phone away from her face. 

‘Is that Sookie again, calling on behalf of Jesus?’  

‘You’re not as smart as you think you are, miss,’ my mother whispered. Sookie’s voice pierced the quiet house. I could hear the words Hallelujah and Kingdom Come—it set my teeth on edge. 

* 

The church, knowing nothing more than Sookie had fallen on hard times, enlisted the Youth Group and Youth Pastor Tom to fix up her house. My mother enlisted me to go along. 

I met the kids in the church parking lot under a bleak and watery sky. They were clambering into a minivan like cherub-faced missionaries off to save heathens by feeding them Bibles. They reminded me of a Communist painting. 

‘Why don’t you get on in the front seat there, Hester?’ grinned Pastor Tom. ‘We can chitchat.’ He couldn’t have been more than ten years older than me, though the strings of his hair were already scraped over the shine of his head. 

A boy sat directly behind the pastor, interrupting our limping small talk to shout about their hockey team. ‘Eh Pastor Tom?’ he said until the pastor reached around to ruffle the kid’s hair. ‘You betcha, Sandy. Go Boston.’  

The back roads of the town were ugly with anonymous scrub, a faded brown pastiche. I hadn’t been out this way in a long, long time. 

Sookie’s bungalow was a shoebox left too long in the rain. The woodpile Sunny and I once avoided lay mouldering behind the carport, grass worn down to dirt. The rare trees like broken umbrellas. 

Sookie was clerking at the gas station in town; I guessed she’d found a new minder for Sunny. ‘Hopefully this one is trustworthy,’ my mother said before I left. This was new, her flat ironic tone. Better than the tears, though. 

The youth group went boldly into Sookie’s house, carrying canned goods and cleaning products. I trailed behind. The rotting gold-speckled linoleum gave softly beneath my feet. None of the kids would remove their shoes.  

The pastor and his boy Sandy stayed outside to clean out the gutters, tacking them back to the side of the house where they’d come loose. I’d heard the boy’s story from my mother. His father had been lost on Dumping Day last year, his lobster boat swallowed up in the winter water. Tom brought the boy to hockey games, took him to the Dairy Queen. I watched them from the front door, the pastor roughhousing with him. The boy’s face a wash of relief, surprise. He’d lost something essential, and it had been replaced. A miracle. 

Sookie hadn’t managed to keep anything up. Some of the girls went into her bedroom, and I could hear them gasping, whispering to each other. This mess was beyond their church-mouse ken. When I came along, they scattered meekly to the corners. I remembered Sookie putting on the coffee, its burnt smell. This was her home. Did she know we were coming? My mother hadn’t said. 

I did the bathroom, savage and red-knuckled and thankfully alone. The ceiling was splattered with furry black spots of mould. I got most of it off with a lung-burning bleach, but I knew it would return. 

The pastor brought in a plumber because we could only do so much with elbow grease and goodwill. The plumber tramped across the carpet in mucky boots, declared the place a swamp. ‘You’re gonna wanna gut the bathroom; you can smell the mildew soon as you come through the door,’ he said, wadding wet tobacco in his bottom lip. 

Before the others got to it, I headed to Sunny’s bedroom. The small window let in no light. Sagging bed in the corner, plastic junk toys on the floor—same as it had always been. But in the corner of the ceiling, a stagnant hole leaked water down the wall in stripes, staining the carpet brown. And that’s when I saw him. Sunny was sitting in the corner as still as a stuffed animal, with his knees pulled up to his chest. Grinning in the dark. 

‘Hello, hello,’ he whispered at me. ‘I remember you.’ 

‘Sunny.’ I kneeled beside him. I wanted to touch his baby face, brush back his feather-soft hair. ‘I didn’t know you would be here. Have you been here all alone today?’ I fought hysteria suddenly, the urge to scream at the closing walls. 

Sunny laughed, so loud and unexpected that I jumped. My teeth clashed. He laughed again. ‘I’m always here,’ he said. 

* 

It was dark when Pastor Tom dropped me off. We’d spent the day cleaning, me keeping an eye on Sunny, at one point fixing him a sandwich. I didn’t like how he kept to that rotting corner of his room, but because he was a teenager, could he be left alone? He rocked back and forth. The rest of the youth group stayed away from his room. 

When I got into the house, I found my mother on the phone. I sat down smelling of bleach, massaging my neck. I wanted to tell her about Sunny, but my mother pressed the phone into her shoulder and mouthed, ‘Sookie.’ 

‘Who else,’ I said in a normal decibel.  

‘Shush.’ She put the phone back up to her ear. ‘…Yep, it was. The Youth Group and…yep, she was. Well, I told…right. I told you before Sookie; we’ve got to help each other out with the….Oh. Yep, okay then. One sec.’ My mother put her hand over the receiver. ‘She wants to speak to you.’ She handed the phone off, drained. 

‘Hello?’ But there was only silence on the other end. I crossed my legs, foot jiggling. ‘Sookie?’ My mother looked at me, mouthed something I couldn’t make out. I plugged my ear against her. ‘I got to see Sunny today, he seems…pretty grown up. And Pastor Tom said he’s gonna send some men over next week to fix the hole in the…’ 

‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.’ There she was. But something was wrong with her voice; it was guttural and rough. I opened my mouth to say something; I have no idea what, but she started sermonising into the phone with such viciousness her words distorted like the bass in a car speaker.  

She said, ‘I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion, and the dragon gave him his power and his seat and great authority…’ 

My mother waved her hands wildly at me. 

I put my hand over the receiver. ‘Is this the kind of stuff she says to you?’ 

‘How should I know? I don’t know what she’s saying!’ 

But then the phone erupted. Sookie screamed, ‘From now on all generations will call me blessed. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her! The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you! Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God; let me not see this great fire anymore, or I will die!’’ 

My mother snatched the receiver from my fingers like a dog bite. ‘Sookie. That’s enough. That’s enough!’ She was halfway through the front door before remembering me. ‘Come on,’ she said and grabbed the keys. 

‘Am I driving?’ 

‘Nope.’ 

And I had to run to catch her. 

When we got out of the car, the night seemed to press us down, crickets creaking from the crush of trees. There was no wind. The yellow light from the bungalow’s tiny windows shot out into the darkness like the eyes of some strange animal. 

No one answered when we knocked. ‘Mom? We should just go in.’  

My mother looked at me and nodded, her eyes wide and round as she pushed on the door. There came the smell of bleach, the undertone of mildew. 

Leaves of paper lay all through the hallway. They were scattered across the kitchen table, strewn on the floor. Page after page black with scrawlings. The frantic lightening of someone trying to get down their thoughts. Fast as they happened. 

‘Sookie?’ my mother called. Her hand at her throat. 

Our eyes traced the trail of paper. How suddenly the words on the page leaped to the wall. All over the walls and the floors. Bible verses, or something like them. The paint ran in slow drops to the carpet, pooled and black. 

‘Jesus,’ I heard my mother gasp. She was not praying. ‘Sookie! Sunny! Where are you?’ 

The paintbrush lay outside the closed bathroom door. I pulled her sleeve. My mother held me back.  

But I was behind her. A great humidity hit us in the face. We peered through the steam. Somehow the air was red and thick. Sookie had Sunny in the tub. Violently scrubbing him with steel wool. His skin raw.  

My mother sagged, fell into the doorframe. 

They never saw us.  

‘I am Mary Mother of God. I am Mary Mother of God. Jesus has come. I have to get him ready…’  

Sunny hunch-shouldered, pink and blank-eyed. Gone completely. 

My mother must have called the police; she must have gone for the phone. All I saw was Sookie leaning over the tub, shirt plastered to her like a thin new skin. Sunny staring off at the coming angels. And somewhere a siren, like a song come down from the sky. 

2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist: Issue 3