Excerpt -
AGNES AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Prologue
Once, a girl lived in a double-wide trailer on ranchland, beneath a wide white sky tumbled with clouds. The Prophet, a scowling crow of a man, presided over everyone and everything.
When the girl wasn’t praying or busy with chores, she’d spin in meadows dancing with bees and dandelions, until Father called her name from the porch: “Agnes, back in the house!”
Run.
In Agnes’s world, secular music was forbidden, as was television, radio, and all technologies of sin. She wore homemade dresses that draped every inch of skin, though they were far too hot. At twelve, boys and girls were forbidden to play together, and the Prophet called the children little sinners with a sneer.
Nevertheless, Agnes loved her world. Loved the meadow and the rocky canyon and the hawks that screeched overhead, winging impossibly high.
One day, the meadow spoke. She was dancing when the hum rose up through the bottoms of her feet and into her small, little-girl bones.
It was like a song. An old song. She pressed her ear to the ground and listened. Rocks pulsed, stones echoed, and clouds, trees, leaves rustled with melody. The girl smiled, her heart full, because God had opened her ears. He’d scratched the earth with His fingernail and revealed a hidden world.
The girl was too young to see the danger in being singled out in a land where the Prophet expected his faithful to march like paper dolls, arm in arm, and all the same.
Perfect obedience produces perfect faith.
In Sunday school, Mrs. King asked the children if they remembered to pray.
“I don’t need to pray,” said Agnes. “Because God is singing, everywhere, all the time.”
Children snickered. Their teacher swiftly crossed the room. She grabbed Agnes’s arm, her face purple with anger, and stretched it across the desk. Then she slammed a Bible’s spine across her knuckles, over and over, until the middle knuckle of her left hand cracked like a nut.
Pain exploded up her arm. She knew better than to scream. The woman bent and poured poison into her ear. “Insolent child. Only the Prophet hears the voice of God. Lie again and I’ll show you real pain.”
That night, hand throbbing and swollen, the girl told herself she didn’t hear the sky singing or the earth humming. That she’d never heard such lovely, evil things.
Never. Never.
Perfect obedience produces perfect faith.
Agnes pretended so hard not to hear that one day, she didn’t.
The world went silent, all song snuffed out like a candle flame.
When she returned, hesitant and barefoot, to the bee-spun meadow, she heard nothing.
Nothing at all.