Mathilda Zeller
We were haunted, and I loved it. Most of the time.
How couldn’t we be haunted? Our church house used to be a funeral home. The basement—where the Primary, kitchen, and cultural hall were—had been where they’d prepared the bodies. The baptismal font still retained the prickly smell of formaldehyde.
We would dare each other to go into the basement bathrooms and turn out the lights. To stand there, underground, in the dark, in a place where hundreds of bodies had lain, was terrifying in the best of ways. We didn’t need to look in the mirror and say “Bloody Mary” three times. Bloody Mary was always there, along with all the Saint Louisians whose bodies had come here before we, the Saint Louisians of the latter days, took over the building.
Our congregation was mostly first generation Latter-day Saints hailing from charismatic protestant churches. Sacrament meeting talks and testimonies were peppered with call and response style preaching, with people giving deep grunts of approbation when a salient point was made, and shouting “Amen” when a poignant truth was uttered.
It alarmed the young missionaries who showed up from Utah.
It was home to us.
I was ten when I finally got Dad to give his permission for me to be baptized. “Might as well,” he said, signing the paper, “just to give me a little peace from all your begging.”
It was a snowy day in January, and I was ready to promise to mourn with those who mourn, comfort those who stand in need of comfort. I was ready for Jesus, I was ready to stand as a witness of God, but it took some convincing, not only Daddy, but Mama too. Despite a lifetime attending church, Mama had insisted that the missionaries teach me every lesson before she let a member of our branch presidency immerse me in that font in the basement in front of our watching congregation.
My Catholic kin were there, clustered together near the back. They did their best to be supportive, but between the formaldehyde smell wafting around and the bishop who was painfully obviously a layman, their smiles were thin.
When I came up out of the water, the first thing I saw was not the faces of the other children pressed against the glass of the font or the soft brown face of Brother Thomas who’d just baptized me, but three people standing behind him.
The man wore Union blues. His left leg was a bloody stump that dripped into the water. His left arm was also a stump, shredded off at the shoulder. What flesh remained on the left side of his face hung ragged and limp.
The girl was my age, with sausage ringlets in her hair. Blood dribbled down her mouth onto her lacy pink dress, her eyes were sunken and dark, her limbs were withered and bent.
The woman was large and pregnant. She would have been perfectly normal, except that, like the other two, I could see straight through her head to the doorway behind her. Like the other two, she looked desperate, haunted.
I was shaking, either from the Holy Ghost or the fact that the water heater was broken and therefore the water was cold, or maybe both. My sins were washed from my soul, my Mama cried tears of joy, my Catholic kin cried tears of something else, and Brother Thomas dropped a sopping, paternal pat on my back. “Welcome to Zion. Now get on up out of here before you freeze, little sister.”
I got on up out of there, climbing the stairs to the women’s bathroom. I turned back to see Brother Thomas climbing the stairs to the men’s. He passed straight through the people and didn’t even shiver.
I was eleven and I couldn’t stop thinking about the people. They’re always there, the stumpy soldier, the thin-limbed girl, the pregnant woman. I learned about polio in school, and I was sure the girl had died of it.
The games we played, the stories we told, they stopped being funny. Whenever my friends started to speculate about ghosts, I saw the three of them lurking, staring, waiting.
When Brother Whipple died, they sat on his closed coffin, watching me through the whole funeral.
When we had our Primary program, they stood next to me, behind me, enveloping me in their coldness.
No one else could see them, and I knew I’d get sent to the head doctor if I tried to tell. Sometimes, if I shut my eyes hard and imagined them leaving, I could open them again and they’d be gone. Sometimes.
I was leaving Primary. I was going to Young Women’s, with the teenage girls, the Personal Progress medallions, the weekly activities. I was getting too old for ghost stories and children’s games. I needed to shake this off.
I went to the basement bathroom on my last day of Primary. The lights went out while I was washing my hands.
The air filled with a formaldehyde smell and I felt them standing there in the dark, radiating cold the way the sun radiates heat.
Goosebumps rose on my arms, and not from the spirit.
“Get thee behind me,” I muttered. It was a dumb thing to say. They were already behind me.
I flung my hand to the wall, found the light switch, and flipped it down, then up again. With a metallic buzz, the lights flickered and lit back up. In that flash between darkness and light I saw them in the mirror, their faces gray, their eyes sunken, their flesh contorted.
“THIS IS A HOUSE OF GOD,” I hollered at the mirror, at the spectral figures who were no longer here. “You don’t have a right to be here!”
“Oh, honey girl.” There was someone behind me, coming in through the door. It was my new Young Women’s leader, Sister King. I trusted her; she was actually from here, not from somewhere out west. She wrapped her arms around me, and the smell of cocoa butter pushed back the smell of formaldehyde. “You belong here. Everyone belongs here. Don’t you ever let anyone tell you different. It says right there on our sign—Visitors Welcome.”
I hugged her back. Her warmth stilled my trembling. Not these visitors.
It’s funny how precious things can erode over time, how they can weaken till they crack in a thousand different places, hairline fractures, barely visible until the day that they shatter, all together.
The erosion came gently at first, but by the time I was fourteen, the cracks were numerous and my patience was thin. “My pioneer ancestors built this church,” said Sister Jones. “They built it, and I carry on their legacy. I am so blessed to be their descendant. And now, God has called me out to this mission field of Saint Louis, Missouri, to carry on his work.”
I had no pioneer ancestors. None of us Young Women had pioneer ancestors, and neither did Sister King. Did God really call Sister Jones all the way out to Saint Louis so she could tell us how special she was, to tell us she was special in a way we were not? She was special with a specialness that was out of our control, that none of us could hope to attain.
“Families can be together forever,” Sister Jones told us the next Sunday, her voice dreamy and singsong. “I was so blessed to grow up in a home with a priesthood-holding father who gave me father’s blessings. It is such a special and important blessing to be born in the covenant of my parents’ temple sealing.”
My father was a Catholic, and a lapsed Catholic at that. There were no temple covenants surrounding my birth. My father barely let me get baptized after years of begging. Did Sister Jones think she was better than me?
“What about us?” I asked.
Sister Jones looked confused. “What about you?”
“You were born in the covenant, you get your father’s blessings, you have pioneer ancestors. We don’t. What about us?”
Sister Jones looked uncomfortable. “Well, I mean . . . you can always get them when you grow up.”
“Not father’s blessings I won’t.” Union Soldier appeared behind Sister Jones and gave me a thunderous look. I did my best to ignore him. “I’ll never have a father’s blessing in my life.”
Sister Jones shrugged. “Your husband could bless you.”
Sister King caught my eye and gave a nearly imperceptible shake of the head. I knew what she was thinking. Put up and shut up. It’s not worth it with this one.
But it mattered. Sister Jones was the center of her own church universe, sitting in her own smug glory while ignoring us and our lives, while ignoring her own first counselor sitting right there next to her.
“What husband, huh?” My palms were sweating. Pregnant Lady appeared next to the Union Soldier. Her face darkened as she glared at me. The lights in the room flickered, but I didn’t care. “Who am I going to marry? The only church-going boy within spitting distance of here is Moroni, and there’s four of us young women. What are we gonna do, bring back polygamy?”
Sister Jones bit her lip. “There are lots of good boys at BYU.”
“Oh yes,” I could taste the bile rising in my throat. “We have to go to the special school in the special land of Utah, in hopes that one of those special pioneer-stock boys will deign to bless us with their special wonderfulness. I’ve seen your husband. I’ve seen every missionary that’s passed through here my whole life. They’re all boring as hell.”
Sister King stifled a laugh.
Sister Jones flushed deep pink. “Please watch your language.”
Oh, she went there. I was a fire, a flood, a cloud of locusts; I couldn’t be stopped now. “Yes, yes, of course. Watch my language, watch my hemline, watch my piercings and media and beverages, watch every stupid detail of my life only to go to church and listen to how much better you are, only to go home and be told I’m stupid for caring about this stuff, only for me to keep trying to do it.” I stood up. “I’m done with this damn church.”
The little girl was there now, opening her mouth wide. As it grew, the lights above us exploded, and her black mouth expanded to envelope us all, plunging us into darkness.
Everyone shouted and muttered, cries of confusion rising from all corners, but I walked out of that dark mouth, out of that classroom, out of the building.
I left.
I didn’t come back.
There were notes and phone calls, a plate of cookies and a flock of construction paper hearts taped to our front door, a visit where Dad humored my request for him to holler Sister Jones off our front porch. Part of me felt bad, but most of me didn’t care. That was the last I saw of them.
Union Soldier, Pregnant Lady, and Polio Girl didn’t leave. They sat next to me at mass with my Catholic kin. They lurked in the coffee shop where Dad took me for my first coffee. I ignored them, savoring the buzz of caffeine in my blood.
On my sixteenth birthday, I won a scholarship to the Catholic school downtown. By fall I was outfitted in pleated plaid. I looked like someone else entirely.
Maybe I could be someone else entirely.
I had to take the city bus to school. On the first day, there was only one seat open—the one next to Moroni Alvarez.
I stood and held onto one of the straps that looped from a bar from the roof of the bus.
“You don’t need to do that.”
I cringed. He’d seen me. “I’m fine.”
“I’ll stand, you can take the seat.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. The bus driver braked hard and I lurched forward.
Moroni stood and took the loop across the aisle from me. “It’s there for you now if you want it.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s ridiculous for you to be standing there when you’ve got a perfectly good seat.”
He grinned. He’d lost his braces sometime in the last year. He’s also gotten taller. “Look who’s talking.”
The bus driver braked hard again, and I stumbled, pulling myself back upright by the loop. “Fine. Fine. We’ll both sit down. Just don’t . . . make it weird.” Why did I say that? I had already made it weird.
I sat down and he sat next to me.
“How’ve you been?”
I bit my lip. There was a whole elephant on this bus. He probably knew about me swearing at Sister Jones and stomping out of the church. He wasn’t going to bring it up, but I couldn’t ignore it.
“You mean since I apostatized?”
He laughed. “I wasn’t going to say it.”
“But you were thinking it.”
Moroni had the decency to look slightly abashed. “Not with the ‘a’ word I wasn’t.”
“What were you thinking, then?”
“I was thinking, ‘How have you been?’” He sounded sincere. I almost believed him.
“I’ve been fine. I got into Sacred Heart.”
“I noticed.” He gestured at the embroidery on my cardigan.
“I’m thinking about becoming a Catholic.”
“Good for you.”
His stubborn neutrality made me mad. “I like coffee. It’s delicious.”
He laughed. “It is, isn’t it?”
This was unexpected. “How would you know?”
“When I was in middle school, coffee and arepas were all my abuela would give me for breakfast. My parents had night shifts; she was in charge of my mornings.”
“Oooh,” I gave him a shocked side eye. “So we’re both going to hell for drinking coffee then.”
The Union Soldier appeared, sitting on the lap of the man across the aisle, and for once, his attention wasn’t on me. It was on Moroni.
Moroni dropped his head back against the seat. “I don’t believe in hell.”
I gently kicked the leg of the seat in front of us. “Fine. We’re going to outer darkness, then.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you honestly believe that?”
My face warmed a little. “No.”
“Me either. And neither does anyone else who has half a brain in their head.” He frowned. “Did he bother you?”
“Who?”
Moroni gestured to the man who was occupying the same space as the union soldier. “That guy. Over there. Did he bother you at the bus stop before you got on?”
“No. Why?” I knew why. Heat rose to my face. The idea of Moroni knowing about my ghosts made me want to become one myself.
“You keep on looking over at him. And not like you think he’s hot.” Moroni was assessing the man now, sizing him up.
I shook my head. “No. No, he’s fine.”
Moroni wasn’t convinced. “Are you sure? Because if not . . . .”
“You’ll what?” I didn’t want to laugh, but a little smile pulled at my mouth. Moroni was the gentlest human on the planet. The idea of him deliberately hurting anyone was ludicrous. That being said, he was, well, taller now.
“A lot of stupid shi—stuff happens on the city buses,” Moroni said. “I’m not about to let it happen to you. Or anyone else if I can help it.” He slid his hand into his jacket pocket, and when he withdrew it, four of his fingers were ringed in brass knuckles. Not only were they brass knuckles, they were brass knuckles with the old school green CTR shield emblazoned on each knuckle.
I burst out laughing. I laughed so loud the man sitting with the union soldier glared at us. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Also, did you almost swear, Brother Alvarez?” I doubled over into a fresh fit of laughter. This wasn’t the same skinny kid who’d passed me the sacrament every Sunday. He’d changed a lot in the last two years.
He grinned. “Every morning Mama makes me promise to return with honor. I’m doing my best.”
I took a deep breath, shuddery from laughter. “Where—where did you get those?”
“My cousin’s a welder. He made them for me when I got ordained a priest.”
“Is your cousin a Mormon?”
“Some of them are. He’s not.”
I thought of my family huddled at the back of our tiny cultural hall, trying to make sense of my baptism six years ago. “It’s complicated, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Yeah. It is.”
The person in the seat in front of us disembarked, and there sat Polio Girl, facing backwards so she could stare at me. Unlike Union Soldier, her eyes were exclusively on me. I winced as she started casually vomiting transparent ectoplasmic vomit onto my lap.
“Hey—are you OK?” Moroni touched my elbow and I jumped. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I started laughing again, unable to keep the hysterical edge out of my voice. “I have.”
She had never vomited on me before. No one else could see it, but it was still gross.
The automated bus voice announced my stop. “That’s me.”
Moroni nodded. “Before you leave—” he stopped, chewing his lip.
“What?”
“I don’t want you to think this is some sort of come on.”
“I won’t.” I kinda wished it was going to be.
“Or like I’m trying to get you back to church.”
Oh crap.
“There’s a stake dance on Saturday night.”
I shook my head. “My mom’s working evenings; we only have one car.” The stake center, that place out in the suburbs, probably wasn’t even on a bus route.
“I can pick you up.”
“You have a car?”
“On Saturday night I will.”
I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to go back. It was too difficult to straddle the world I lived in and the world Sister Jones lived in. It was too difficult to listen to them speak of how things should be, how things existed for them, knowing that my life was not like that and probably never would be. I had no family temple sealing, no rich promises in store. I had nothing but a buttload of ghosts whose only purpose was to make my life awkward and gross. On the other hand, Moroni was maybe willing to bludgeon a random stranger with CTR brass knuckles because I was looking at him wrong. Which is to say, he wasn’t boring.
“Fine. What time?”
“6:30. Only—” he trailed off again, furrowing his brow.
“What?”
“The last time I came to your house, your dad yelled at me till he was blue in the face.”
Something twisted inside of me. “Oh. I’m sorry about that.”
He must have been with Sister Jones.
The realization posed another, worse question: what if Sister King had been there too? Something inside me tightened painfully.
“Maybe give him a heads up that I’m coming?”
“It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “I’ll give you my number. Just text me when you’re almost there.”
Saturday night came. I was trying to do my makeup in the bathroom, but the ghosts were worse than usual. Union Soldier stood in the tub, blood streaming from his limb nubs and swirling down the drain as his half-gone face stared at me in the mirror. Pregnant lady sat on the toilet lid, occasionally trying to lift a makeup brush. I was glad they couldn’t move things. It would have made my life far more complicated. Polio girl ran in, climbed on the sink until her face occupied the same space as mine, distorting my features, making them look more childlike.
“Knock it off,” I said, slapping at my own face in an attempt to get her to leave. It was a dumb thing to try; it never worked before. She would leave when she pleased, and not a minute sooner.
When I finished, I headed out to wait on the front porch.
“Where are you going?” Dad asked.
“Study group, with some friends from school.”
“On a Saturday night?” Dad looked skeptical. “You put on makeup for that?”
Polio Girl aimed a kick at Dad’s shin. As always, her foot passed right through him.
I shrugged, trying to look nonchalant. Why was I nervous? There was no reason for that. Dad was chill. It was just a dance. With the boy I’d gotten Dad to holler off the porch.
I left before he could ask any more questions, jogging up the one-way street to catch Moroni in his mom’s minivan at the corner.
“Hey.” He looked surprised. “I was going to come and get you.”
“It’s better for the environment,” I said, climbing in. “You don’t have to drive as much now.”
He rolled his eyes but pulled forward instead of turning onto our street.
It was dark by the time he pulled off the highway and onto the suburban road where the stake center was. Trees loomed over the road, deepening the darkness.
“Almost there,” Moroni said. “Thanks for coming—”
Union Soldier appeared in the headlights. Moroni slammed on the brakes, sending the minivan into a fishtail. We screeched to a stop on the shoulder of the road. Moroni’s breath came in fast shuddery gasps.
“I’m sorry. That was so stupid of me. I shouldn’t have stopped. I braked for no reason. I—”
“You can see them too.” I knew it, but I had to hear it from him. If he denied it, I knew I was going to cry.
He froze, then swallowed hard. “What do you mean ‘them’?”
“Union Soldier. Pregnant Lady. Polio Girl.” It felt strange to be saying them out loud.
Moroni looked like he was about to throw up. “There’s more than just that guy?”
“There’s a woman. And a girl, too.”
Moroni pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. “I only ever see him, and I can’t stand him.”
“When did you start seeing him?”
“The day I was baptized.”
“Me too.” I took a deep breath. “I think I have an idea.”
“What?”
I gestured towards the stake center. “There’s a family history center in there, isn’t there?”
He nodded, still processing my ghost confession.
My mind is racing. This is a stupid idea, but I can’t not say it. “What if we’re related?”
He raises his eyebrows. “What?”
“You, me, Union Soldier.” I don’t want to say it. If there’s a reason why these ghosts won’t leave us alone, and that reason involves what I think it will—I shrug it off. “Let’s just go look.”
It takes twenty minutes to convince the family-history missionaries to let us sit at the computers instead of going to the dance and another half hour of searching, but we find them. Estelle Winters, my second-great-grandmother, died of pregnancy complications. Ethel Overton, my great-great-aunt, died of polio at ten years old. Aloysious Patrick Farnon, my third-great-grandfather and Moroni’s fourth-great-uncle, blown away in the Civil War.
“Well look at that! The pair of you are cousins!” said Elder Hammersmith, slapping his knee.
“Not that cousin-y,” muttered Moroni, glancing at me in a way that flips my stomach.
“The spirit of Elijah sure must be with you two,” Elder Hammersmith continued.
“Something like that,” I replied, and Moroni stifled a laugh.
Elder Hammersmith looked from one of us to the other. “Looks like you got some temple work to do,” he said.
“Yep,” Moroni replied, pulling the papers from the printer and a pair of scissors from the desk. “Come on, let’s get these ready.”
“This is it,” Moroni said, slapping the steering wheel. He was taking me home, grinning like an idiot. “You’re a genius, you know that? I would have never thought that that white dude was related to me, but this has to be the reason he won’t leave me alone, why you can see him too. We’re related to him. He wants to be baptized.”
“Not that related,” I said, and he gave me that look again, the one that made me feel fluttery. “You’ll have a great time doing baptisms with everyone else, I’m sure.”
Moroni shook his head. “No. That’s not how this works. It’s gotta be you. It’s you they’re haunting.”
“I haven’t even been to church in two years!” I snapped. “And if I go back, I’m going to have to put up with Sister Jones again.”
Moroni sighed. “You think I don’t know what that’s like, to put up with people at church?”
“Then why do you go? They’re so stupid, self-righteous, self-absorbed—”
“Everyone is, at least some of the time. You know Sister Jones has changed a lot since you’ve been gone.”
“You can’t tell me she’s totally better.”
Moroni laughed. “She’s not. But she’s working on it. Everyone’s working on it. That’s the whole point, I think. Also—” he took a deep breath, “Do you really want to abandon the other girls like that? What about Sister King? They’re all out there putting up with Sister Jones without you.”
“No. Hell no.” My words came out louder than I meant them to, but I didn’t care. “That’s not fair. You are not going to guilt trip me like that, Moroni! They can choose whether they’re there just as much as I can!” Even as I said it, my heart hurt. I missed Sister King. She’d stopped texting me a year ago, probably because I was so bad at texting her back. She deserved better, especially if she was still out there stuck in a presidency with Sister Jones.
Moroni blushed. “You’re right. I’m sorry, that was wrong.”
He wasn’t entirely wrong, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.
He sighed. “The real question is this: what do you want?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but my breath caught up short, and a weird snorting scoff came out. Polio Girl was sitting on my lap again, vomiting ectoplasm all over my blouse. “I want to be rid of you.”
Moroni slapped a hand to his heart and belted out an exaggerated groan. “Harsh.”
“Not you. Her.” I gestured to the girl on my lap.
Moroni glanced sideways and nearly swerved off the road again.
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, now you can see her.”
He struggled to straighten the minivan’s course, his breath coming in short rasps. “She looked a lot better in her Family Search pictures.”
“She wasn’t dying of polio when those were taken.”
Moroni took a deep breath, studiously keeping his eyes off me, Ethel, and the ectoplasmic mess she was still spewing all over me. I don’t know what was stranger, the sickly glow of the vomit or the fact that I’d already gotten used to her disgusting new party trick.
We stopped at a light and Moroni sucked his teeth, still refusing to look at us. “Look, Ethel and Estelle are your problem. They’re in your family tree, not mine. They’ve been following you, not me, for years. They picked you.”
“You can give their ordinance cards to someone in Young Women’s.”
“I could, but they picked you. Maybe they’ll leave you alone after you do this. Maybe if it’s not you, they won’t stop.”
“Once they’re baptized, they’ll have better things to do than bug me.”
“See? See?” Moroni looked at me before immediately looking away again, turning greenish. “You know that’s what they want. You know it’s right. This was your idea. It’s your job to see it through.”
Ethel stopped vomiting and grinned, reaching over to pat Moroni on the hand. He clenched his jaw, bracing against his revulsion.
I rolled my eyes to the ragged minivan ceiling. “Fine. Fine. But don’t blame me when the Bishop excommunicates me for my coffee habit.”
As it turned out, the bishop didn’t excommunicate me for my coffee habit. He didn’t even think I was going to hell for it. In fact, he seemed to be trying not to laugh through our interview.
Sister Jones was still annoying as hell. Her husband was still boring as hell. Sister King hollered with joy as she pulled me back into her arms on my first Sunday. I hugged her back hard.
Two months later Sister Jones picked me up at my house and I rode with her, Moroni, and four other kids to the temple. Getting into her car felt like coming home.
Ethel and Aloyisius stood on either side of the temple doors. As we approached, they pulled the doors open.
They weren’t supposed to be able to do that.
“OK, who pushed the handicap button?” Sister Jones said, turning an arched eyebrow on us. “You’re not supposed to use that unless there’s an actual need!”
Moroni caught my eye and I clapped a hand to my mouth, swallowing down nervous laughter. This had to work. I couldn’t keep pretending not to see our ghosts for the rest of my life.
The jumpsuit was stiff and awkward and made me feel like I was twelve, the age I was the last time I was baptized for someone else. Like I was ten, stepping into a cold formaldehyde-smelling font, to be baptized for myself.
Moroni was standing there, water dripping off his earlobes. Brother Jones had just finished baptizing him for Aloysius, and now Moroni waited for me in the water, holding out a hand, taking my wrist gently, speaking the ordinance with my name, then Ethel’s.
His hand was on my back and I went under, buried like she was, for just a moment before coming up, the air suddenly sharp and cold on my face. Tears poured down my face, and blinking through the water caught in my eyelashes, I saw that Moroni was crying too. No one else would notice, not from where they sat to witness this ordinance over the chasm supported by twelve horned oxen.
He said my name again then Estelle’s as the water lapped at my waist, pushing and pulling me. I leveraged his hold on my wrist to stay upright before dropping under again, and up again. Something heavy and dark left me, replaced by joy, lightness, and a strange feeling of loss that, taken together, were almost more than I could hold. Moroni baptized me twice more, and when he spoke, I knew he was feeling it too.
As we left the temple with our backpacks and church clothes, damp hair and tangled feelings, Moroni grabbed my hand, his voice giddy.
“Look. They’re leaving.”
Estelle, Ethel, and Aloysius were indeed leaving, walking out of the temple doors. They stopped on the sidewalk, turning back to wave at us before they went. Aloysius’ limbs were restored to him, Ethel looked markedly more plump, and Estelle was no longer pregnant.
Moroni laughed, his eyes red-rimmed. “They’re gone. They’re gone for good this time, I think.”
“Yeah.” I knew it. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did.
“The temple is no place for flirting,” Sister Jones hissed, and Moroni dropped my hand, blushing.
Sister King pulled me aside, her voice low. “Get it, girl. He’s a good one.”
A sound like a strangled cat popped out of me and I struggled to fix my face, caught between laughter and shock.
“What were you whispering about?” Brother Jones asked.
“Temple work,” I replied, nearly hyperventilating with laughter. “You know, what a blessing it is.”
Brother Jones rolled his eyes and pushed the button for his minivan. The minivan chirped, and as its lights flashed I saw them. Dozens of them. Ragged flesh, missing limbs, blood pouring from eyes and mouths and gaping wounds. All watching Moroni and me. All waiting.
Moroni turned towards me, his eyes wide.
I sighed. “I guess we’re coming back next month.”
Mathilda Zeller writes horror and fantasy. Her debut novel, The Revenge of Bridget Cleary, was a 2022 Whitney Awards Finalist. Her other work has appeared in Mermaids Monthly. “Kushtuka,” her short story in Never Whistle at Night, an anthology of indigenous horror released from Penguin Random House in September, was heralded by the Kirkus Reviews and “poignant and gripping.” She lives in Michigan with her husband and six children.
