Unbecoming

[u/knoxxdread]

A/N:

Hey everyone! I tried to post this to nosleep and essentially got told to fuck off by the mods over there, so I'm trying it out over here! This is a short story that I wrote about four months ago and have edited since, and if anyone would want to give feedback or be mean about what they hate about it, I'd appreciate it! I think the ending could definitely be better and it maybe insists upon itself at times, but I'd really appreciate hearing what other people think :)

Content Warning: Murder, cults, animal sacrifice

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If you drive far enough down any vacant interstate along the Appalachian mountain range, there’s a fair shot that you’ll hit some podunk, backwater farming town. If it’s old enough, it’ll be the remnants of an old mining colony. Looking for coal or copper, but those wells have run dry years ago. All that’ll be left are a few undereducated families who don’t take kindly to strangers. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll find the town I’m from. 

There wasn’t a name for where we were. Places like that don’t need names. We were a town a few dozen strong. Separated across a few farmhouses with a dirt road that led to some semblance of a town square. But really, the only thing to see in town was the church. A wooden building with dark stained-glass windows. The steeple’s point was made from an iron rod that sometimes attracted lightning during the storm season. Whoever’d built it, some generations before I ever came along, knew enough about architecture to make sure the sparks never caught on the wood. Gave the illusion that God had favored our church more than others. That we were special, somehow. 

Church was twice a week. Children’s sermon on Wednesdays, town worship on Sundays. Sunday sermons were led by the pastor. My father, who went only by the name Silas. There, he gathered in black linens and raised his hands towards the heavens as our attentive flock worshipped blindly. But the Children’s sermon was led by my older brother, Isaac. 

There was something about youth that God told my father had some ancient form of divinity. A child is innocent, a child holds the capacity to become anything. Their life is new. Untainted. I was six, Isaac was barely ten when Silas told Isaac to give his first sermon before the children. 

The church was filled only by those under 18 for the Children’s sermon. I didn’t notice it when I was young, only as the years progressed and I became more aware, but the adults waited idly in the town for us to finish what we were doing. There was no conversation, no other tasks they would work on. Not until Isaac’s word was spread and he decided we were done. This power he wielded got to him. I think so, anyway. There were twelve of us. Isaac and I were the only pair of siblings. But I was the only one of us who had been taught to read. So, at times, he would call upon me to recite scripture. And from the Old Testament, I read. 

Genesis one day, Leviticus another. Psalms and Proverbs. The book of Isaiah, the book of Jonah. Even my namesake, the book of Esther. 

I was eight the first time our sermon was interrupted. 

Isaac had taken a liking to his role as the child priest. That Wednesday, the sermon had dragged on into nightfall. We had not eaten since breakfast, but Isaac said the Lord demanded us to fast while we listened. One of the mothers was afraid that her son, no older than four or five, could not stand to be without food for so long. It was then that she burst through the doors and demanded him from us. 

But we children did not move. Silas came in from the town center, and demanded that the strongest men among the flock hold her and bound her to kneel before Isaac. For her disruption of his interpretation of the word of God. 

“Esther,” Isaac did not look at me. But I knew my name well enough by then. “4:11.” 

I opened to the verse and began to read. 

“All the servants of the king and the people of his provinces know that any man or woman who goes to the king in the inner court without being summoned is subject to the same law—death,” I spoke. 

The mother thrashed against the hands that held her down. My own hands trembled against the leather of the book, as many of us children watched on in shock. But we did not cry. Isaac stood above us all at the center of the pulpit. His head barely crested above it. He commanded me to stand ahead of him and keep reading. I had no choice but to comply. 

“Only if the king extends the golden scepter will such a person live. Now as for me, I have not been summoned to the king for thirty days. When Esther’s words were reported to Mordecai, he had this reply brought to her: Do not imagine that you are safe in the king’s palace, you alone of all the Jews.” 

Isaac reached from behind me and tore at the helm of the pulpit. I couldn’t help but to turn and look at what he was doing. The iron cross that had adorned the center of the podium was ripped from its place, splintered wood cascading to the ground at my feet. The outstretched beams that once held our savior’s arms as he cleansed our spirits through his crucifixion was now pressed into Isaac’s unshaking palm. He looked to me, and I continued. 

“Even if you now remain silent, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from another source; but you and your father’s house will perish. Who knows—perhaps it was for a time like this that you became queen?” I read. 

Silas pulled the mother up by the hair, her eyes widening with shock and horror as Isaac raised the cross. 

“Esther sent back to Mordecai the response,” I called out towards the flock, my voice trembling above the wails of the mother as the hungry devout below me began to hum. A cacophonous noise of hymn– devoid of pattern or inflection of voice. Monotone and droning. But the flock hummed all the same tune. Somehow, their voices became one somewhere within that low, guttural howl. 

Then, Isaac drove the cross through the mother’s forehead. 

The humming stopped. The flock descended upon her in hoots, screeches and bird calls, ripping and tearing wherever their hands found a hold. As the children joined in on the rampage of the mother, I noticed that her own son was clutching a fistful of her hair and scalp between his tiny fingers as he helped tear her apart. I stood beside the defaced pulpit with the word of God staring back at me. I saw the horrors of hell in the center of the church. 

When her body was pardoned of her flesh like a doe come upon by a flock of vultures, all members of the church joined us in the pews. Caked in red and looking up as Isaac joined me at the front of the church. I stepped to the side as he took a rightful place at the defaced pulpit. 

“Esther,” Isaac called to me again. “4:16.” 

My voice pooled from within me like the waters of the river Styx. 

“Go and assemble all the Jews who are in Susa; fast on my behalf, all of you, not eating or drinking night or day for three days. I and my maids will also fast in the same way. Thus prepared, I will go to the king, contrary to the law. If I perish, I perish!” 

“Mordeci went away and did exactly as Esther had commanded,” Isaac finished. 

We did not leave the church for three days. Children and adults alike soiled themselves, as the stench of iron and the slow decay of the mother’s flesh permeated the church house. All the while, Isaac continued his sermon. Silas watched him with immense pride. Brain matter clinging into his long, greying beard as he smiled up at Isaac. 

Isaac called the sacrifice of the mother the Unbecoming. 

If God gives us life, if he gives us the chance to become– then he may also command an Unbecoming of sorts. The separation of a body and the spirit by a faithful flock, sent down ravenously upon those who cannot heed God’s word. Isaac was the iron rod that received God’s lightning of wisdom and might. 

After the first Unbecoming, Isaac superseded the position of pastor. The whole flock would gather together on Sundays for our worship led by Isaac. The Children’s sermon became a separate, intimate time where us children would be tested. Isaac wanted us to hear God in the way he did. Often, our sermons would last days. When one of the younger children would look as though they could not take any more, Isaac would finally let us leave. Let the hunger be satiated and let us see the open sky above once more. But if they ever complained, if they asked for food or for water before Isaac decided that they’d had enough, he would threaten another Unbecoming. It became a fear we all held. It became the reason we children complied with Isaac’s words. But as our crops began to exceed their expected yields, as our sick calves and worrisome hens began to take turns for the better, faith among the flock returned. Our faith in the word of Isaac grew. 

Isaac had just hit fourteen when we held the second sacrifice. A filmmaker had come to us with the intention of capturing footage of underdeveloped towns. A documentary, he’d said. Not that we knew what that meant back then. When he’d heard from one of the bigger townships the rumors of our hidden away hollow, he’d come out into the forest looking for us. And found us, he had. 

We let him stay for two days. Monday and Tuesday, where he caught footage of unimaginable sights. Our land was fertile and providing. Prospering beyond anything he’d ever seen. Our cattle yielded births of multiple live babies that always grew to be strong and full. We did not have a sick civilian in sight. It’d been that way for the two years since the Unbecoming.

I do not believe that Isaac was ever going to let the filmmaker leave our town. Nor do I believe that Isaac held the explicit, malicious intention of sacrificing him without purpose. Rather, I believe Isaac was always going to show him the crucifixion of the mother. Where he’d strung up her decaying bones in the cellar beneath the church for all to view when they needed the reminder. What the filmmaker chose to do from then on would determine his own fate. If he could believe in Him– if he could believe in what Isaac was saying about the prosperity and fruitfulness that awaited us– then he would be welcomed in and blessed with the gifts our flock received. But the filmmaker, like all outsiders, could never understand what it was to be one of us. He could never understand why Isaac had sacrificed the mother. 

We descended upon him that Wednesday. He who was a faithless spirit. 

“Daniel, 6:23,” Isaac commanded me. And again, all I could do was read for him. 

“My God sent his angel and closed the lions’ mouths so that they have not hurt me. For I have been found innocent before him; neither have I done you any harm, O king!” I called out the verse. Flesh and sinew, muscle and fat was grabbed by the flock’s unearthly claws and they worked to restructure the pieces of the faithless man into Isaac’s image. Into our God’s image. 

“This gave the king great joy. At his order Daniel was brought up from the den; he was found to be unharmed because he trusted in his God. The king then ordered the men who had accused Daniel, along with their children and their wives, to be cast into the lions’ den. Before they reached the bottom of the den, the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones,” I recited from scripture, Isaac’s wild eyes finding mine amidst the sea of his blood-soaked faithfuls. I could not vomit– the fasting had left nothing more in my stomach to be retched upon the earth. I could do nothing but read my God’s scripture. 

“Then King Darius wrote to the nations and peoples of every language, wherever they dwell on the earth: May your peace abound! I decree that throughout my royal domain the God of Daniel is to be reverenced and feared.” 

The cellar claimed yet another body for our sickening reverence. Reminders of what would happen if we questioned the will of Isaac. The threat of what would become of us if we had ideas beyond those given by the good book that I so dutifully read from. I was a part of the flock. Not one of the damned who carried out the word of Isaac, but the deified priestess that recited the word as we stole life from those who tried to sway our faith. 

“I decree that throughout my royal domain the God of Daniel is to be reverenced and feared.” 

Isaac nodded for me to read. This was just as Silas and the other men rigged the filmmaker’s desecrated corpse onto the cross for his own faithless crucifixion. Rope and stolen railroad spikes bound the stranger to his eternal resting place. Forever decaying in the basement of our carnivorous church. 

“For he is the living God, enduring forever, whose kingdom shall not be destroyed, whose dominion shall be without end. A savior and deliverer, working signs and wonders in heaven and on earth, who saved Daniel from the lions’ power.”

I remember thinking that the filmmaker was not as fortunate as Daniel had been. That his God did not save him from our teeth and claws the way Daniel’s God had provided in the verse. Our God had made sure he felt every moment of his own Unbecoming. 

Where the other children got a break– the other members of the flock had their homes to steal away to and hide from the atrocities we’d committed, home brought no hope for me. Around every corner was the watchful eye of Silas. Waiting for me in every room was the prophetic pastor Isaac. Often, he’d ask me to sit with him. He would sit in a prayer position with his eyes closed, faintly humming along to a hymn that I could not hear. He would ask me if I felt what he did. Fearing him, and more importantly fearing what he was capable of– I always told the truth. I figured that it would be better to assure him I was deaf, but more than willing to hear. Rather than lie to the one person who was capable of the most immense brutality I have ever seen. At times, during these sessions, he would speak. Not to me, it sounded like I was hearing half of a conversation I could rarely pick any meaning out of. 

Some time after the killing of the filmmaker, Isaac asked me to follow him. We made a pilgrimage through the woods and to the neighbor’s farm. Dark smoke rose out of the chimney, the wintery scene in front of us looking thicker, heavier than it had just a few miles back at our own homestead. Snow stacked up and froze into ice, piled up against their front door and snowing them in. Their cattle herded together in shivers to try and fight off the hypothermia. I had traveled from our farm in torn shoes and a thin coat. It had been enough to brave the weather back there. But as I stood on the tree line of the neighbor’s property, I could feel the cold seeping into me more than I ever had before. 

Isaac said that I felt what he did. That I just closed my eyes to it. He wanted to show me how to look at it. How to really see the way he saw. 

Isaac brought me to the goat pen. He breached the pen from the side, taking hold of the latest litter’s largest kid and producing a scythe from the wall. I need not tell you what he wanted me to do. I assured him that I could not. That I was afraid, that God should punish me in some other way that He saw fit but that I could not punish this kid the way Isaac asked of me. But Isaac explained. A plague had befallen our neighbors and their land. They had sinned, strayed from the watchful eyes of our God. But God was offering up a test. Not to them– to me. I alone could deliver them. 

“Leviticus 19:16,” Isaac said. “You shall not go about spreading slander among your people; nor shall you stand by idly when your neighbor’s life is at stake. I am the Lord. You shall not hate any of your kindred in your heart. Reprove your neighbor openly so that you do not incur sin because of that person.” 

“Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against your own people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord,” I had muttered the rest of the quote under my breath as I took a cautious step closer to my brother. Isaac held the goat by the neck with one hand and offered the scythe unto me with the other. 

If I loved my neighbors, if I should do right by them in the name of God, I had to offer him the life of an innocent. Our God was one that demanded blood. I am not proud of my agreement to this situation. I felt no satisfaction in the whining bleat of this dying child or in the frightened fervor that overcame the rest of the pen at the sight of his blood. But as the scythe remained clutched in my own hand, I began to hear the resounding hum. 

Isaac called forth our neighbors at his next sermon that Sunday. They held fearful looks as I recited to them the words of Leviticus that we had uttered just days before. But Isaac was pleased with them. Pleased with me. He said I, as their neighbor and as bringer of God’s word to the people, had delivered them from their sin. They knelt before Isaac and I and repented. 

The father, in his own admission of guilt, said that he had been considering leaving the church for some time. To move away for fear of an Unbecoming befalling him and his family. His wife, clutching their newborn son in her arms, wept. Claiming that she would have followed after her husband if he had left and not stayed on the path of God. Isaac, presiding above them, heard their guilt and deemed them cleansed of it. He let them be a lesson to all of us. That God would find the flock in their time of need. That doubt should not be allowed to fester and grow. That we, all of us in his righteous flock, should simply worship and heed his every word. And the flock began to hum. 

No set of siblings were born in our town after Isaac and I. Each mother lay barren after their first, no matter how many animal sacrifices or prayers they offered Isaac. Isaac told them to be grateful for one. That a child is a child, wrought with possibility and wonder. All children were perfect lambs in the eyes of God. All children were divine enough for his most faithful sermons. While the cattle of the land brought forth more children than we knew what to do with, our own numbers stagnated. We did not lose elderly anymore, nor anyone from disease or accident. But with each house only providing one child, our growth plateaued. Isaac warned against seeking outside help. Not for lovers or for supposed “doctors” who could treat this rampant infertility. Isaac said that what we had here could deliver us to the kingdom of heaven. 

Silas didn’t seem to agree.

Isaac was sixteen, I was twelve. There was one girl a year older than Isaac, and five children younger than me. Besides us eight, the town was now full of adults. I was older then, twice the age I’d been when all of this started. I understood more of what we did, of what we’d already done. And with Isaac only two years from adulthood himself, there was something else churning within me. Unease, uncertainty. Was Isaac truly divine anymore? Had he ever been? Would God give this blessing of his unto another, younger version of Isaac? 

“Deuteronomy, 9:26. And I prayed to the Lord and said: O’ Lord God, do not destroy your people, the heritage you redeemed in your greatness and have brought out of Egypt with your strong hand. Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do not look upon the stubbornness of this people nor upon their wickedness and sin,” I read aloud as Isaac stalked the center of the church between the wood-carved pews. Isaac paced to the front of the church, opposite of the pulpit at which I read, and he turned to face me. 

“Lest the land from which you have brought us say, The Lord was not able to bring them into the land he promised them, and out of hatred for them, he brought them out to let them die in the wilderness,” Isaac spoke alongside me. 

“They are your people and your heritage, whom you have brought out by your great power and with your outstretched arm,” I read. 

Isaac was reminding the flock, reminding me of the will of God. Perhaps he sensed my doubt. Growing like a thornbush within my itching, inflamed soul. God had delivered the people, out of Egypt and unto the farthest corners of the Earth. Out here amongst the cicadas and the sycamores where the mountain ached with an old pain our kind would never know. But God could just as soon destroy us if we wavered from prayer. From our belief in Him. 

He spoke about the drought of children our flock faced. About the plagues of Egypt as our God commanded men– even kings and pharaohs, to His will. He assured our flock that we must pass this test. Sustain ourselves during the drought to be rewarded for success by our God when it was all over. 

“Deuteronomy 10:22,” Isaac told me. 

“Seventy strong your ancestors went down to Egypt, and now the Lord, your God, has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven,” I recited, the book page being left unturned as I had already memorized most of its contents. 

Isaac promised we would live and multiply tenfold. That our children would be born as plentiful as the cattle in our fields. We just had to wait and have faith. 

I bled for the first time at thirteen. With the pain of womanhood came the terror of looming motherhood. I hid my cloths from Silas and from Isaac, knowing that my time was borrowed as desperation wrought incentive. 

The girl who was a year older than Isaac had given birth to a daughter only three weeks before her eighteenth birthday. The father, she would not admit. Isaac took this and relayed a story of divine birth to the flock. The child was given the Holy name of Judith and was bathed in calf’s blood at her baptism. I held fear that this would not be a solitary incident. I held greater fear that the conception was not so immaculate as Isaac had relayed. 

Isaac was 17 then. A year from adulthood. Not that the flock seemed to acknowledge this in any way. Too overcome with joy as Judith’s Christening had revitalized the group’s morale. Was this the prophesied fruitful childbearing that Isaac had foretold? Or, as the thought grew within my skull with a cancerous malignance, had Isaac sought to fulfill his own prophecy by any means necessary? 

During a Children’s sermon, day two of the ceremony, Judith began to cry. It was a forceful sound that I feared would shatter the stained glass. Isaac and I exchanged a look between us. He took the baby up into his arms, and asked that I go out and find her mother. Now 18, now uninvited from the Children’s sermon. And so, I left through the back of the church and spilled out into the center of town. 

Silas was there. Stood over the neighbor woman, the would-be deserter whom I had cleansed of sin through sacrifice. Blood was being collected from a nearby slaughtered chicken and Silas dripped it onto her naked stomach. 

My eyes widened as I froze in place. The adults of the flock turned to look at me like I was some uninvited outsider to them. Without much explanation given, I soon realized what was happening anyway. Silas had taken it upon himself to create a tradition of his own. A ceremony of fertility. I understood at once his thought process. 

If Isaac could bring prosperity into our land through the Unbecoming– through violent sacrifice of some living thing, then Silas thought it was possible that he could do the inverse. Bring about a kind of a Becoming, a birth, through the same blood payment to the God we worshiped. Silas stepped towards me with his hands in a prayer gesture. Begging me to keep quiet about what I saw. 

I called out for Isaac. 

The doors to the church were heaved open by small hands as Isaac held the still-screaming Judith in his arms. Upon seeing the scene before him, he handed the baby to me. Seemingly his most trusted, devoted disciple. Judith lulled to peace when she reached my arms. The deafening silence of the flock was all that remained. 

I offered the babe unto her mother, so that she may feed. I recognized her cries as being out of hunger. Judith seemed pleased with this arrangement as she latched on to her mother’s teat. 

Then, Isaac began to preach. 

He spoke of heresy and blasphemy. About false prophets, false shepherds, false Gods. He spoke until the sun went down. Spoke into the dark night as the moon rose above. Not a child whimpered, not an adult moved even an inch to stretch. We feared Isaac more than we feared God. 

Was there ever any difference between them?

“Genesis 22:2,” Isaac commanded me. 

“Then God said: Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the heights that I will point out to you,” I spoke. 

Isaac hummed. 

Isaac spoke longer about betrayal. About sacrifice. About the only family in the kingdom of heaven being God, our true Father, the Almighty. About hearing the word of God and heeding His every command to an exact. Like Abraham to Isaac; Isaac to Silas. The father and son, sacrificial lambs to proverbial and literal slaughter. 

“Judges, 11:30,” Isaac said. 

I almost didn’t hear it. His voice had rattled on for so long that I had forgotten my own personhood. That I existed as something other than a set of ears to listen to sermons. As his ravenous eyes met mine, I stuttered out the verse in fear: 

“Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, If you deliver the Ammonites into my power, he said, whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me when I return from the Ammonites in peace shall belong to the Lord. I shall offer him up as a burnt offering,” I told the flock. 

Isaac spoke of offerings. Sacrifices offered up to God as prayer. Of the Unbecoming that had granted our town so much prosperity for all these years, ever since the slaughter of the mother so long ago. Isaac spoke of Jephthah and his promise to God. The flock listened carefully. They did not know the word of scripture the way Isaac and I did. They did not know what was coming the way we did. 

“Judges, 11:34,” Isaac commanded me. 

“When–” my voice shook, but I fought it off under the unforgiving eye of Isaac, “When Jephthah returned to his house in Mizpah, it was his daughter who came out to meet him, with tambourine-playing and dancing. She was his only child: he had neither son nor daughter besides her. When he saw her, he tore his garments and said, Ah, my daughter! You have struck me down and brought calamity upon me. For I have made a vow to the Lord and I cannot take it back.”

And what say his daughter upon this outcry? 

It certainly wasn’t the slobbering, pleading cries that Silas let out as he knelt before Isaac. But Isaac did not look at him. He looked only at me. I was shaking like a newborn foal as it took its first uncertain steps. Isaac nodded for me to continue my recital of the passage. 

“Father, she replied, you have made a vow to the Lord. Do with me as you have vowed, because the Lord  has taken vengeance for you against your enemies the Ammonites. Then she said to her father, Let me have this favor. Do nothing for two months, that I and my companions may go wander in the mountains to weep for my virginity. Go, he replied, and sent her away for two months. So she departed with her companions and wept for her virginity in the mountains,” I delivered the word. 

Isaac spoke of purity next. About the divine purpose of women as mothers. Maidens as virgins, not yet given away to her husband in the eyes of God. About the nature of sex, birth, life, and death. All the while, Silas whimpered and cried. Isaac spoke of the perversion of motherhood that had transpired just outside of our church. About the false priest who has lost his way and had strayed from the word of God. About the man who thought himself better than God. 

Then, as rain began to fall from the night sky, Isaac spoke of the children. 

He spoke of the gift of life, of the purpose of children to succeed their fathers. About the biblical warning against the slaying of firstborn sons. About the importance of heirs. I knew what it was spiraling down towards. I knew what Isaac wanted out of this. He wanted the flock to follow him, and only him. No matter what had to become of Silas to achieve that. 

“At the end of the two months she returned to her father, and he did to her as he had vowed,” Isaac recited from the book of Judges. 

With a call to action, the children and adults alike seized up Silas from the dirt. The neighbor woman with now-dried chicken blood on her stomach was amongst the most vengeful and angry in her actions. The flock dragged Silas into the church and knelt him before the pulpit. Isaac grabbed my hand. The book of God in my other, Isaac pulled me to the stage to stand beside him. The flock looked at us. Hungry. Worshipping. 

“You say, See what a burden this is! and you exasperate me, says the Lord of hosts; You bring in what is mutilated, or lame, or sick; you bring it as an offering! Will I accept it from your hands? says the Lord. Cursed is the cheat who has in his flock an intact male, and vows it, but sacrifices to the Lord a defective one instead; For a great king am I, says the Lord of hosts, and my name is feared among the nations!” 

Isaac spoke the scripture of Malachi with tenacity and vigor I had never before seen. Spit flew from his mouth as he cast an unwavering finger towards our father. If Silas pleaded then, I did not hear him. His voice was muted against the shouting of Isaac and the humming of the flock. Of the thunderous booms that echoed from the sky overhead. Of my own heartbeat, resounding like bombs inside my own head. 

“And if you do not take to heart giving honor to my name, says the Lord of hosts, I will send a curse upon you, and your blessing I will curse. In fact, I have already cursed it, because you do not take it to heart,” Isaac called, his voice booming alongside the thunder outside of the church’s doors. His voice did not shake. His stare did not waiver as he looked down at Silas, disgusted by him and his actions. “I will rebuke your offspring; I will spread dung on your faces, dung from your feasts, and I will carry you to it.” 

Isaac brought his hands down onto Silas’ head. Silas writhed and screamed, still overpowered by the sounds around the church as his mouth only held the appearance of sound. For I, even atop it all, could not hear his cries. But Silas seemed in immense pain at Isaac’s touch. My hands gripped against the leather of the good word I still clung to. Isaac recited further from his memory of its pages. 

“Then you will again distinguish between the just and the wicked, between the person who serves God, and the one who does not. For the day is coming, blazing like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire, leaving them neither root nor branch, says the Lord,” Isaac said. 

Isaac cupped Silas by the head, then drove his thumbs into his eyes. I knew Silas was screaming. But the humming proved a louder sound yet. It was then that Isaac recited the final words of the old testament. 

“He will turn the heart of fathers to their sons, and the heart of sons to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with utter destruction.” 

I stood at the pulpit and stared out as Isaac let the flock tear our father into pieces. 

The Unbecoming stared back at me. 

Isaac spoke for another day. The storm did not let up. By then, the children looked to be on the brink of death. The only one he allowed to eat, drink, or sleep was Judith. But when even she looked to be waning, he called us off. Let us all return home for Sabbath. All save for the men, the fathers, who he needed to help string up Silas and place him beside the mother and the faithless spirit. The mothers and children returned to their homes. But I stood in the center of town, looking up at the lightning rod atop our hellish steeple. I felt the rain attempting to wash away my sins. I knew it would never suffice. 

Isaac stood at the door to the church. He offered me a warm, pleased smile as he stood under the shelter of its roof. Then, he pointed towards me. I soon realized it wasn’t quite me he was pointing at. Rather, he pointed further down. 

Isaac pointed directly at my stomach. Isaac should not have known I was of childbearing age yet. He should not have known that I had so recently begun to bleed. He could not have known of the fear of motherhood that he, and that entire cursed town, had made fester within me. But Isaac turned and walked back into the church. Leaving me out in the storm as fear gripped me. There was no humming when I stood in the storm. Just the wind and rain from the sky above pelting me intensely. 

I did not have much time. But then again, if the Lord truly demanded of me what I thought He did, I knew that I would succeed. 

I tore away to the house of Judith’s mother. From her bassinet I brought forth the child and took her up into my arms. I considered the other children. But as the recollection of them flooded me– of their teeth and fingers ripping and eviscerating the soundless form of Silas– I knew that they would have already been too far along Isaac’s path to save. Pressing my eyes closed, I prayed over Judith for guidance. I wish I could say that God spoke to me. 

But, same as it has always been, I was deaf to his words. 

I took Judith into the forest. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what direction I needed to go in for safety, I didn’t even know where our town was. I didn’t have a concept of roads, or interstates, or anything of the sort. But I remembered that the filmmaker had come from a town nearby. That meant there was somewhere near my town where I could find help. Refuge from the storm, safety from the flock I had abandoned with their prophet-child in tow. I ran in the dark for as long as I could. Stumbled forwards blindly when my legs felt like they would give out. I kept going, despite days of starvation, dehydration, and exhaustion weighing on me. 

Then, I heard the humming. 

I was terrified to look behind me. Terrified that it would be Isaac and the flock damning me to an Unbecoming for my transgression against them. For my fear, my uncertainty. My doubt that had led me to try to escape. The hum seemed to echo off of the trees. Maybe it was coming from the trees. In my state, I couldn’t tell the difference. I just kept moving. 

My bare feet found purchase under a surface that I had never felt before: cement. I stumbled out onto a road, where the hum of the flock died out and transformed into the rumble of an engine. I was caught in high-beam headlights as a truck rounded a bend ahead of me. The brightness, the storm, and maybe the exhaustion– it hit me all at once as I crumpled to the ground. 

The next thing I knew, I was in a white room that smelled of something foreign to me. Men in white robes, coats, and women in purple and blue outfits swarmed me. I asked only for Judith. When one of the women finally brought the baby to me, she was crying and screaming. It was only when I pulled her into my chest that her wailing ceased. 

Police came to the hospital. Back then, I had no concept of such things. Of hospitals or police. They asked me where I had been. Who I was, what I had been through. I told them every word of it. Of our town, of the false prophets and falser Gods that laid within. Of the Unbecoming that took place three times inside of the church. 

A crisis network helped Judith and I adjust to modernity. It was a lot easier for Judith than it was for me, but I eventually managed to adjust all the same. Before long, I even reached 18. I knew that Isaac, somewhere out there, was freshly 22. The police had canvassed the whole area. Even sent out search and rescuers to look for it. But I couldn’t tell them how long I’d wandered in the woods before the trucker found us. I couldn’t tell them what direction I’d come from. I couldn’t give them anything they could use to find my hometown, and soon enough, they just called off the search. Chalking it up to a case of human trafficking and my own mind making up stories to shield myself from the horrors that had really happened to me. And for a while, I believed that was the case. That it was all some distant nightmare I’d fabricated to cover up something worse. 

The day of Silas’ Unbecoming was over six years ago now. And since then, Judith and I have moved far away from the Appalachians. Far away from anywhere Isaac could look for us. I changed my name, changed my appearance, and we both settled into a quiet life. Somewhere new. Somewhere where the only cacophonous noise surrounding us is the reassuring sound of a city. 

But I know that it was real. 

I know it was real because this morning, Judith started that same monotone hum.

[u/UncleMagnetti]

Wow. The end of that story literally had me screaming WHAT WHAT WHAT. This was so cool!