00:01

CW: religious trauma, neglect

23:55

A tinny radio warbles hymns out of the window behind me as I sit huddled on the porch, the pine-scented night air pulling goose pimples up on my skin. The crickets unwittingly harmonise with it as the trees bend in their slow dance, and the waters of the lake in front of the cabin lap gently against its loamy dirt shoreline.

We are high enough up the mountain that the light pollution from the town below is just a dim glow.

The digital clock, sat on its table by my elbow, boasts numbers as red as a sunrise that would make a sailor quake, and I look at my phone one last time, my lungs constricting at the hive of activity shown on the lock screen — 43 missed calls, 56 texts — before I switch it off. I hide it back inside the pillow beneath me, although it doesn’t matter if she catches me with it now.

23:56

I close my eyes, but it doesn’t help; I see the message previews burned onto the back of my eyelids, the majority of which are from my Dad and increasingly frantic. My heart sinks, as though it were trying to bury itself in the dirt, to anchor itself so it can stay here in the world, with him and my friends, no matter what Mom says about them all. But I can’t, and I know I can’t take them with me. How do I tell them that tomorrow, I’ll be gone?

Nauseated, I taste salt from my tears, and iron from the blood in my mouth where I’ve chewed my cheek raw.

It hurts, but it doesn’t matter when the body will be left behind anyway, and for now, the sting tells me that I am still here.

23:57

It’s too fast. It’s all happening too fast. I should have tried harder to save them. But I didn’t, and now it’s too late, and I can’t stifle my sobs as they come thick and ragged, mourning the friends I didn’t get to say goodbye to. I grieve for the future I could have had, after the court date that will now never come, where Dad could have been granted custody. My whole body shakes, causing the rocking chair beneath me to sway as though in effort to soothe me.

Behind me, the door to the house opens, and my eyes fly wide.

Mom, made divine by her unwavering faith as the hem of her white bathrobe whispers against the floor, steps into the moonlight, leaving the door open wide behind her.

She doesn’t look at me as she walks off of the porch towards the lake, the water mirroring the perfect, star-speckled sky.

No reprimand for my snivelling. No curt remark at my weakness. She doesn’t even look at me; after all, she and I both know that if I do ascend with her, it will be because of her, and if I am doomed to remain here, it will be because of me.

Maybe she will be made a Saint.

The thought makes my hands tremble, the swaying trees overhead blurring through the moisture in my eyes as I continue to try and muffle my laboured breathing, so as not to disturb her, so I don’t run to her and beg her not to leave me.

23:59

She has waded into the lake, up to her knees, long blonde hair mere centimeters from the water.

I am still crying, and she still hasn’t looked back.

Unbidden, an eleventh hour wicked thought creeps in: if ascension is with her, the perfect mother, the perfect devotee, and she never makes me feel anything other than alone, would that be my eternity? My reward for my own faith? An eternity creating my own lake from the tears she hates?

Maybe a Saint could stop me from crying altogether.

The radio’s hymns have fallen silent.

00:00

The beeping of the alarm for midnight transforms the numbness into staccato panic.

I can’t tear my eyes away from the clock.

Scarlet letters. A shrill warning that feels anything but Holy.

My body feels too heavy and my head too light, and I wonder, is this it? Is it happening? Through my tears, my Mom’s form duplicates as she raises her hands to the sky, and even still, she doesn’t look back.

All at once, I scramble from the chair with a ragged gasp, clinging to the porch railings hard, digging my nails in tight, and in this moment, I do what I have never had the strength to. I choose.

I want to stay. I want to stay!

I chant it in my mind until I’m dizzy, and the seconds stretch into eternity. Mom’s arms are still stretched up, in exaltation to the vastness of the cosmos, as I finally answer the question that has been a silent passenger in my chest for years: if Mom loves me, why does she do this to me? If God loves me, why does He let her?

She wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.

Dad doesn’t.

00:01

The beeping has stopped.

I blink at the clock. The seconds tick over into the next minute of a new day.

Nothing happens. No flash of light. No trumpets. No ascension.

Finally, mom looks back, confusion clear across her face, but not to look at me; to look at the clock, as though reprimanding it with her eyes.

The storm inside me hardens into resolve, grief rapidly becoming anger, as though the strings she’s tied to my limbs have all been severed. I watch her confusion turn to disbelief, and then slowly begin to crumple into despair, but I turn away as I scramble to my feet and grab my phone from inside the chair cushion, switching it back on.

Water splashing against skin alerts me as Mom starts to wade out of the lake, but I don’t wait.

As the little rectangular screen flickers to life, I stride into the trees, turn location on, and share it with Dad in hopes that mobile signal will find me as I descend.

00:02

Behind me, I hear the thud of Mom falling to her knees.

From her lips, I hear a forlorn, choked gasp, and I imagine the damp earth soaking into the perfect white of her robe like rot eating at fresh paint.

But I don’t look back.

Carried by the low breeze as the pine needles brush my skin, the crickets harmonise with her sobs as I leave her under the empty sky.