Fig by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz Read Free Book Online

me to the priest, and when she does she calls him father even though he’s young enough to be her son. He, too, knows about Mama—I can tell by the way he looks at me. And even though he’s taller than Daddy, he is nowhere near as strong, and his skin is see-through like he never goes outside.
    Gran makes me go to Sunday school.
    Candace Sherman’s teenage sister is our teacher. We’re supposed to call her Miss Sherman, but Candace messes up all the time and calls her Buffy. Candace Sherman is in the same grade as me, and so are her two best friends, Sissy Baxter and Tanya Jenkins.
    Sissy’s family owns and operates Baxter Lumber, and Tanya’s mother works part-time at the salon Curl Up & Dye, which is in Lawrence and happens to be where my grandmother goes to get her hair done. According to Gran, Tanya’s mother is going to night school to be a nurse.
    Candace Sherman lives in a ranch house made from bloodred brick, and her daddy grows corn and alfalfa. Once upon a time, back in high school, Daddy dated Mrs. Sherman. I’ve seen the pictures in his yearbook. Mrs. Sherman was the homecoming queen, and after graduation she was a beauty queen. Gran still has all the newspaper clippings in her scrapbook. The year Daddy finally made his way to Cornell was the same year Mrs. Sherman was crowned Sweetheart of Mid-America. Now she works the beauty counter at Eudora Drug on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Gran often goes to her for advice on how to erase her wrinkles.
    In Sunday school, we color bubbly cartoon pictures of Jesus and his herd of baby sheep, and everyone there knows I’m going straight to hell.
    I can’t help but fall asleep when Buffy reads out loud.
    To wake me, Buffy hits me on the back with a wooden yardstick. It’s exactly like the Little House books before Laura got to be the teacher and was nice instead of mean like Buffy. There’s a little playground in the churchyard where statues of angels watch over the children as they play, but I never get to go outside.
    I have to stand in the corner of the classroom with my arms stretched out.
    I turn my palms toward the ceiling so Buffy can place a bible on each hand. I have to stand like this and hold the bibles without bending at the elbows or lowering my arms. I get in trouble for being double jointed until one of the nuns tells Buffy I can’t help it. The burning begins in the armpits, and from there it spreads.
    For every time I fall asleep in class, I’m to stand like this for five minutes. If an arm wavers or a bible falls, Buffy doubles and sometimes even triples the amount of time I am to be disciplined. The burning moves toward my back, into my shoulder blades. And this is where my wings would attach if only I could fly away. Five minutes turn into ten, and ten minutes turn into fifteen.
    And this is how I learn to tell time.
    *  *  *  *
    Adam and Eve get stuck in my head.
    Like Eve, I was cut out—emergency Cesarean, seven years ago come next week. Daddy says it’s just another creation myth. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” he says. “Your birth has a story too.”
    And this is what I’ve been told.
    Mama and Daddy meet in college, fall in love, and are married—just the two of them, at the courthouse, both in blue jeans. They decide to leave the rat race behind and come to Kansas, to the family farm where Daddy grew up. They begin the long process of converting the farm to all organic, and I’m conceived.
    Daddy tells Mama that she glows.
    Mama joins a home-birth group because she wants to have me all natural. She picks out a midwife and begins to grow me while Daddy plants corn and sweet potatoes. Mama starts a sunflower patch, tall and yellow. She plants herbs in one garden and flowers in yet another.
    I grow bigger and bigger and take up all of Mama. When I’m supposed to turn like all babies do, there isn’t any room. And Mama has