ignorant man; he can’t even tell the difference.
I press closer to the tank and my reflection superimposes over the animal, my eyes a dark glinting on its body. The man is panicking, perceiving madness or danger—some invisible, toxic signal radiating across the current. But I know this act is natural, a truth beneath it, muscled and gleaming; I had heard the creature speak. Sometimes you must consume the damaged body, digest it cell by cell, to taste the new beginning.
I lean in, lips almost to glass, before the onlookers come to gawk, before the workers can interrupt this godly process, and look into its eye.
“Good,” I tell the octopus. “Like that. One bite at a time.”
Ms. Addler keeps a word-of-the-day calendar on her desk, so in fourth period, while Zeyah tunes out her teacher’s prattle on American history, she learns new words: censure, vicissitude, caliginous, exegesis. Slick words, shape-shifting, Zey devours them, voracious.
Learn something every day, Ms. Addler’s always saying. Her teacher is young, Call-Me-Katie outside the classroom, red lipstick and stitched flowers on her garter-topped stockings that show when she crosses her legs. Once, Zey saw her French-kiss a man after school, then hop into his nice car, her grin spread large as if she, too, were a high school senior, seventeen.
Today’s word is luciferous, and Zey pronounces it wrong. No, Ms. Addler says, loo-SIF-fur-us. But Zey can’t ignore the prefix. She knows Lucifer: fallen angel, Prince of Darkness. Little horned man on the candy cigarette box. How could this word mean light? Ms. Addler says, There are all kinds of things “they” don’t want you to know. She says it real mysterious, like some slim, blonde-haired prophet—but this idea, that word, quickens in Zey, growing big in the eternal Southern heat.
At home she takes her dictionary into the bathroom—locks the door, a blasphemy—to see what it knows about the devil. She seeks a different opinion than what Pastor or her family’s Sunday Bible have to offer: 1) a proud, rebellious archangel, identified as Satan, who fell from Heaven. 2) the planet Venus when appearing as the morning star. 3) (lowercase) a friction match.
At New Life First Baptist that Sunday—Zey and her brother bookended by their parents in the pew—Duck slips his fingers into hers and tickles her palm, their signal for boredom, for something funny or ridiculous an adult has said. Duck is twelve, still accepting of his nickname and blessedly silly. Zey remembers him small, head smooth as a pebble, her mother placing him in her arms. How sweet he’d felt, yawning mouth, breath scented with their mother’s milk. He was hers in a way nothing else was. Duck sings along with the hymns, he always does, intentionally off-key, but this time Zey isn’t bored; she doesn’t sing. Instead, she watches: the collection plate going round once, twice; Pastor roaring at the pulpit, royal purple trailing from his arms; people asking for blessings, to be touched by the Spirit, falling out when Pastor presses his thumb hard between their eyes.
She listens to Pastor’s words: Brothers and Sisters, all those who accept me as the Savior shall live forever in the Kingdom of Heaven! Repent! He whips the air as if spurring something invisible. Benediction or absolution—his necessary position in the power of such things. The congregation writhes. In the pew in front of them, Sister Ruth in her flower-box hat slumps backward, speaking in tongues, this strange language flowing from the deep place where the soul lives, waiting for God to free it. The long, stray hairs under her chin tremble; her grown daughter fans her face. Others catch the Spirit, the Ghost licking through the church like flame. Pastor says, Bow your heads, let us pray, and Zey looks at them all with their faces turned down, eyes closed; the congregation, her mother, father, and Duck. Only she and Pastor keep their eyes open, and Zey examines him, the copper skin sweating from his exultations, the way he searches the room, bowed head to bowed head, as if measuring the effect of his influence. When his eyes find hers, Zey snaps her head down, too late, and doesn’t look up again until the congregation says amen. On the drive home, Zey translates the expression she’d seen flash across Pastor’s face—supercilious, enigmatic. Hungry.
After Bible study the following week, while her mother makes her rounds in her newest Sunday best, Pastor invites her into the cramped space of his office, which seems to double as storage. Boxes labeled “Christmas” and “Communion” hulk around his desk, and as Zey reads the words, she pictures their contents: Mary and the black baby Jesus in the manger; bulk orders of cheap wine and wafers of Christ’s dry, tasteless flesh. She sits in the chair in front of his desk and Pastor asks, Are you godly, girl? She doesn’t know how to answer. He then tells Zey how to be a woman—soft-spoken, subservient, devout, and clean. He reminds her about the history of Eve, how she took of the tree of knowledge, seduced her husband, and struck the entire world with her sin. How she doomed mankind to suffering, because she didn’t know her place. Zey gnaws the inside of her lip while he speaks. A trapped fly whines in the window.
Her mother learned how to be a woman here, in the faith, and her father a man, but Zey’s been to the library and looked up real history—slave ships and witch trials and women kept in bare feet. The books she borrowed were full of words like pay-gap and redline, and she noticed that in all genres, no matter literature or biography, men’s fury stained the pages, sowing lies like white seeds inside of people’s hearts. Pastor rises, squeezing around the clutter, and perches on the desk, his feet resting on either side of Zey’s. He leans down and places a heavy hand on her bare knee. We need good young girls—God-fearing girls like you—to be the backbone of our church. Do you understand? he asks, and his fingers flex.
Zey hears Pastor’s message and understands what’s beneath it: that she can have hair on her head but not in her armpits; hair on her arms but not her legs; hair between her legs . . . depending on what a man liked. That she can be looked on, but not look. Zey stares into his face, her eyes filling, heart hammering in her throat. She says nothing, cannot move until he moves, will not cry in front of him. Finally, she looks down and Pastor sits back, releasing her. He opens the door for her to leave. God blesses you, child, he tells her.
Zey turns the moment over in her mind—at school and at home and even while she sleeps. For two Sundays, she sits stricken between her parents and even Duck can’t break her free. What did it mean that Pastor, a pinnacle, the link to the Supreme, would bother to threaten her, unimportant though she is? He is Simon to so many: he says Rejoice, and they do; Repent, and they do. He says Pray, and the church goes blind.
For English, their teacher assigns The Scarlet Letter—the most boring book about an affair Zey has ever read. Her teacher asks the class what they noticed in the interactions between Hester and the town. Most of Zey’s classmates only stare; they fidget and avert their eyes. Then someone says, They hated her.
Yes! the teacher booms, startling them to attention. But why? Papers rustle in the silence. Because she was immoral? another student tries, and the teacher cocks his head, his way of questioning an answer without claiming that it’s wrong. Think about it as it applies to our own lives, our world, he says. What is the nature of hate? What’s it useful for? And Zey imagines the townspeople, their whispers and cruel laws, their narrowed eyes. How they ostracized the woman, conspired to contain her light.
They were scared of her, Zey tells the teacher, realizing it as she speaks, and he jabs a finger in her direction. Yes! Exactly that, he says. Now he’s getting excited, pacing before their desks, and Zey tilts forward in her seat, angling closer to his truth. Hate, he continues, is almost always a cover for some perceived psychological threat—our guilt or pain. Our fear. And how do we treat things of which we are afraid?
The moment with Pastor tumbles round with the grit of Zey’s learnings, chipping down until her understanding of it gleams. After the next Sunday service, as Pastor
