Devotion

Everyone expected the woman to be like God, full of sacrifice and love for the greater good. But the woman wasn’t like God. So she let the townspeople die, the thousands of people, then hundreds of thousands more. She let them die and watched her town burn, and the horses set on fire, and heard her neighbors screaming. She did this to save her daughter. Because she couldn’t open up her daughter with a knife like God had asked and then watch as her daughter’s soul went running for God’s great paradise, while the woman was left behind holding a split-open, bleeding carcass of her daughter. Once she thought she could, but she couldn’t. In her ear God cursed her, and he tried to take her daughter away, but he couldn’t because she would not let her daughter go. God should have asked someone else to help. He should have asked someone who didn’t love her daughter as much.

When the woman took the cursed knife and threw it into the river and it sunk, her daughter Ella howled like a broken animal. Because God had promised her that everyone would love her once she was dead. So Ella tried to throw herself in the river too, but her mother saved her. Her mother kept saving her. “Mama, what have you done to me?” Ella cried. Then silence for weeks, and the girl refused to open her eyes. They lived in the woods a long time. The woman made her daughter wear a black cloth around her hair as a disguise. They hid from any person they saw. Before they emerged from the forest, the woman took a blunt cooking knife from her sack and chopped off her daughter’s blond hair so she looked like a son. They left the hair behind them in the bushes like something dead.

Now they lived on the cliffs above the ruins of their town in a deserted miner’s cottage, the single room divided with bedsheets instead of walls. No one bothered them because there was no one. Below them, in the valley, forests fell, towns smoldered, the battles continued on. But over what? The corpses of children? The stupid, useless fields? At night, bombs lit the sky, and God brought down his mouth to the woman’s ear, like he always had, though his voice was no longer made from bright streamers of pretty sounds. He told her about the hostilities. He said, You would not believe what pain makes a person do. God goaded her with possible endings for her husband, who had followed an army out of town and then disappeared: The husband’s head on a stick? The husband’s head burnt on a pile of tinder? His lower stomach slit open and the insides pulled out? God said he would continue the fighting until all of them were gone. Like the Great Flood, only not even the animals would be saved this time. He brought his mouth to her ear and filled her head with the wasteland of the world. How not even one bird would be left, not even one ant. All because of you, God said. In the morning, the woman found her daughter at the window, waiting for God to come down in his little machine and tie a rope around her waist and get her out of there.

God said, I will make sure they find you and find your daughter.

The woman asked, Is that a threat?

It’s a prophecy, God said.

One afternoon, Ella returned from her day’s walk carrying a heavy bag in her arms. A boy trailed behind her. His name was Tom; he was a dirty nothing-boy whose parents died in the fighting and, after appearing one day outside the cabin, he would not go away. He followed Ella everywhere and slept—where? The woman wasn’t entirely sure. On the porch, sometimes, but other nights, in the road’s ditch? In a cave hidden by the trees? She knew she was supposed to care about such things. He...