My husband isn’t dead, but he needs to be. That’s what they tell me in the church basement. I’m sitting on the Vesselite emblem. I could sit in a chair like the forefathers, but I like being on top of the lamb. She’s peeling from the floor in dried paint strips. Her eyes are gone. Her mouth is jagged. The same emblem is painted in the sanctuary, so I get to look at her during sermons too, but the upstairs lamb is newer, kinder.

“But the church is about life,” I say. The highfathers smile at me and James moves just an inch closer to me, just an inch further down his chair, so my lips are a finger-length from his knees.  

Highfather Ezra responds, “Yes, but Aaron can’t do God’s will anymore.”

I didn’t go to the hospital to see Aaron. It was an outsider hospital, and Highfather Ezra said, “too many machines for female frailty.”

I shake my head. The outsiders should never have plugged him into that machine, but Aaron had been on a mission trip in the city, and the doctors had done it without asking permission.

“He can’t provide for the church or his wives like this,” Highfather Ezra goes on. “He can’t ascend to higher homes like this.” He needs his body to move on. I know this. “His wife needs to sign the paperwork. It’s an outsiders’ rule.”

“I’ll do it,” I say.

James and highfather Ezra exchange looks.

This time, James speaks. His voice is soft. I imagine this is what he sounds like right after waking up. I wish I could reach out, pull his voice from him and hold it in my lap.

“Unfortunately, the outsiders’ government only acknowledges his first wife.”

Abigail.

“Abigail needs to sign the paperwork.”

“But she’s gone.”

“We know where she is.”

Of course they do.

“We need you to go to her.”

“Me?” I ask. I’ve never been outside. I still haven’t been everywhere in the two-hundred acre Vesselite Village.

“We’ve tried to retrieve her in the past.” Highfather Ezra is talking again. “We’ve always been unsuccessful. She’s afraid to come back. But you’re her sisterwife. She’ll trust you.”

I look to James for help. He places his hand on my head. He says, “Aaron’s wives cannot remarry until he is released.”

And so I agree to go.

James gives me outsider clothes to wear. The harness is small, pink and covered in lace like a first moon dress. I go into the bathroom to change. Ezra and James wait outside, Ezra still instructing me, or warning me, or lecturing me, or something, but I’m not listening. I’m thinking about the last time they saw me naked.

I had come to them for help, to tell them Aaron was hurting my vessel. I quoted the sermon about our bodies being temples. I hadn’t wanted them to see, but James peeled my dress off and I was too distracted by his hands to stop him. He was, and still is, the youngest marriage-age man in the village. And his hands, without popped-out veins or discoloration or wrinkles, looked as pretty as the angel pictures in the Woman’s Bible.

I remember bumps raising on my limbs and wishing I could suck them back in.

“It’s okay,” he said, like I was  stupid. And then he pushed his whole palm into me, measuring his hands against Aaron’s marks.

“We’ll talk to Aaron,” Ezra had said in the background, but when Ezra was gone, and I was stepping back into my dress, James put his hand back on that bruise and said, “We’ll stop this. I promise”

And it stopped.

◆

Highfather Ezra is my escort. When we come to the gate, he uses a normal key. It looks identical to the ones that open husband cupboards. I had imagined something large and reddened with rust. Something more like a scythe. I don’t notice I’m outside at first. I’m so distracted by the key and how easy it would be to lose it, trapping us forever.

Then Highfather Ezra slips the key into his pants pocket and the gate snaps into focus. It’s not white like it is on the inside, like an extension of the clouds. Outside, it’s shovel-colored and covered in drawings. Children’s drawings, I’m assuming by the flatness of the colors: reds and greens and blacks in shaky, bleeding lines.

“Elephants?” I ask, pointing to one of the drawings. It looks like a severed head, no body or legs, or even mouth. Just two round ears and a fat, long snout. Only a few have tusks, and those are detached and drip-shaped, like puss-colored rain.

“No,” Highfather Ezra snaps. “Don’t look at those.”

And so I don’t. I look at the trees. They look like our trees.

“We’re going to walk to a bus. It’s like the elder bus, but bigger, and noisier.”

We’re already walking. The air feels wet on my skin, like something is seeping into me.

“You remember the buses from the Outsider History class?”

“And the elephants,” I answer.

He sighs and says, “Remember when I said we’re getting off the bus?”

I hold up three fingers.

“Yes. The third stop. There will be a restaurant there, across the street.” He stops, closes his eyes for a moment and then sighs again. “There’s a kitchen there. It looks like the church kitchen, with tables and people eating inside. You won’t go into the kitchen, but you’ll take the stairs on the side. And up there, on the second floor of the building is Abigail.”

“You’re not coming on the bus?”

“I’m coming on the bus, but you’re going to Abigail alone.”

Suddenly the trees look very different from ours, browner, bigger, older. And between the branches, I can see buildings in the distance. They’re made of bright colors, like they were built with children’s blocks instead of bricks. I walk slower.

Highfather Ezra doesn’t slow down. “You can handle Abigail by yourself. I know you used to be close. I’m here to keep you company. You like my company, don’t you?”

I don’t respond, and we walk in silence until we get to the rows of buildings. The bus is already there, so I have no time to think of protests before Ezra shoves me inside. He gives grass-colored paper to the driver and then hands me an envelope, cloud-colored, gate-colored.

I trace the writing on the front. It’s her name. Abigail’s. I recognize her name’s shape, how the end and front are tall and the middle is small, like two mountains with a river between .  On her third day in the church kitchen, she’d carved it into the pantry wall. I was supposed to report it, but instead I pushed my finger into the letter-shaped spaces of nothing.

“You’ll give that to her,” Ezra says. He takes up too much room on the seat. His elbows stick into my stomach. On the envelope, her name feels like paper.

I asked her why she had done it. She told me no one would find it, there in the dark corner of the pantry, but she was wrong. James had found it. A few weeks after she started in the kitchen, I found a letter on the floor, beneath her name, folded until it was the size of a seed packet.

“Look,” I said, holding it up to her. She looked up from the cake she was icing and said, “that’s for me.”

“How do you know?” I asked, bringing it closer to my body. I had never received a letter, but I had seen the other girls pull them from tree knots and bird houses, makeshift mailboxes for admirers. The picking was nearing, and I had been hopeful.

“Because you can’t read,” Abigail said flatly. “Open it.”

I did. There were no pictures, only words. “This isn’t allowed,” I said. “Women aren’t…”

“You can’t just forget how to read,” she snapped and whipped her hands down her apron. “If you keep it a secret, I’ll read them to you.”

I hesitated.

“They’re from James,” she said, and her voice went all sing-song and high. And so I agreed.

◆

This is not my first bus. When I was twelve, I slipped on a broken egg in the kitchen and sprained my ankle. James was the medical apprentice then, and so he and the doctor took turns healing me. That doctor had the biggest nose, and it was covered in block dots, like stippling. I remember because he leaned down to pray at me, so close to my face that his bangs grazed my forehead.

While he prayed, James held ice to my foot. And when that melted, a frozen chunk of meat. And when that began to thaw and bleed and stink, they wrapped my foot in cloth, and then I wrapped the meat in some extra cloth, so I could take it to the kitchen. But I never cooked it.

I got to ride the bus to church for the rest of the summer. Other than the forefathers, it was the only thing from our village allowed to leave.  It was only used for mission trips, and I could swear I smelled its evilness as James carried me to it. He was a teenager then. His nose was bloated with acne. Even so, he was still the most attractive man I had ever seen.

“It’s the fuel you’re smelling,” he said. He was so smart then, even before the forefather chose him.

And so this bus, this outsider bus, isn’t all that scary. It’s loud. And the music sounds empty and lonely with only one person in its invisible choir, but not scary.

I look out the window at the houses. Some are blue. And purple. And there’s one yellow one. There aren’t any people outside, but if I look down at an angle that hurts my neck, I can see them blurring by in the mini buses.

I’m reminded of Aaron. The highfathers had said he was in one of these mini buses during the accident. I try to think of him. I try to pray for him, but my mind cannot sit still. I think of the yellow house. I imagine everything inside. The bathtub, the chairs, the bowls, the baby bottles. They must all be yellow too. I’m sure of it.

Ezra coughs and his elbow lands close to my heart. I think of my first moon, when he kissed me behind my ear, and how I could smell his unwashed breath for hours after. His smell, like the oldest church dog.

I think of James and the gift he gave me, twelve colored spots that turned to paint when touched with water. All the other girls had giggled. I cannot remember Aaron being at this party, but he must have been.

“You get off at this next step” Ezra says, moving his elbow even further into my organs. It’s like he’s digging for them.

“What about you?”

“I’m staying,” he says.

“How will I get back?”

“This is your stop,” Ezra says and slaps his hand against my knee.

I don’t move.

“Up,” Ezra says, and acts as if he’ll yank on my hair if I don’t do what he wants.

I stand up. I try not to look at the people hunched in the brown seats as I rush forward.

Outside, the first thing I notice is how empty the air smells. Vessilte Village smells like smoke and cooking. This village smells like nothing. The second thing I notice is that there is not a kitchen in front of me, as highfather Ezra said there would be, instead there’s a building of windows displaying headless idols draped in outsider clothing.

I look at them for a moment, because I know that’s what you’re supposed to do with idols.

There’s a woman there, with the idols, she sees me and waves me inside.

I open the door. It’s just like our doors. Inside, it smells like something unclean, though I’m not sure what.

“What are you looking for?” she asks. She’s holding a piece of blue fabric. Behind her is a curtain of tiny dresses. A seamstress shop.

“Oh,” I exhale. “The headless woman is the God of sewing?”

“What?” She asks. Her lips are very red, and her hair is calico, but otherwise, she doesn’t look too different from Vesselite women.

“Is this a temple or a seamstress shop?”

“It’s the Salvation Army.” She laughs. “But really, can I help you?”

I don’t say anything. Instead, I begin folding the envelope Highfather Ezra gave me. The long way. And then the short way. I command myself to remember Salvation Army. That seems like something the highfathers should know about.

“I don’t have time for this,” the lady says, looking down at her fabric. “We don’t even technically open until ten a.m., but I thought I’d be nice.”

“Is there a kitchen around here?” I try to remember the other word Highfather Ezra used. “A resternut?”

“You’re hilarious. Really funny,” the lady says, but doesn’t laugh.

I fold the envelope some more and then stick it down my dress, squeezed between my breast and the harness. The lady is no longer looking at me. “There’s a Starbucks to the right of us,” she says. “I don’t know how you missed it.”

I imagine a twinkling deer. “You’re hilarious,” I say to the woman. “Really funny.”

She asks me to leave, and so I do.

I find the kitchen right next to the seamstress shop. I find the staircase. I cup the doorknob and twist it, but it won’t go around. I do this again and again before I realize that it might be locked, and so I knock.

“I said I’d be right down,” Abigail shouts. “Jesus, wasn’t it enough to call me three times?”

I bend down and look through the space between the door and ground. Abigail isn’t wearing socks. Her toenails are pink. I knock again, still on the ground.

She opens the door. “Fuck me for getting an apartment above my job,” she says, but by the end of the sentence her voice is quiet. “Felicity?” she asks.

“Hi.”

She’s on the ground too now. Her hands are on my shoulders. “I am so proud of you,” she says. And then she says it again. And again.

I tell her I haven’t run away. “Then why are you here?” she asks.

“Why are you wearing ceremony paint?” I ask.

She’s making coffee. I can tell by the smell. I want to tell her I can’t drink anything that came from a machine, but I forgive her, for now. “I forgot how stupid that place is,” she says. “Ceremony paint? What the fuck. It’s not paint. It’s makeup. And they weren’t ceremonies. They were orgies.”

I’m not sure what language Abigail is speaking.

“Did you join a new church?” I ask. “There’s an emblem on your shirt.”

“It’s a logo. I was about to go to work,” she says. “I forget, do you like cream?”

“A little.”

“So what do you think of being outside?”

I shrug. “It’s not all that different. The clothing is more intricate. The seamstresses must be better.” I count at least four machines in Abigail’s apartment, most of them box-shaped and jutting from the wall. “This village looks almost like ours.”

She places a mug in front of me. 

“I guess suburbia is the same no matter where you go.”

◆

After Aaron picked us as his first and second wives, about a month apart on account of there being so many converts that year, and thus extra unmarried women, Abigail continued to read James’s old letters to me. There was one from the beginning, I think it was the second, that was my favorite. He was the only real-life person I’d met who wrote poetry. We hid it in the flour canister. Even when Abigail wasn’t there, I’d take it and hold it in my hands, pretending I could read it, pretending I could feel words, pretending it was written for me.

I told Abigail I was falling in love with James, and she slumped to the floor, and began to cry. She said, “Why did my fucking father want to move here? Why couldn’t he retire in Florida like everyone else?”

When I tell Abigail about Aaron she says, “This is great for you. Let him stay in a coma. That way you won’t have an old man forcing himself on you all the time.”

I take a sip of coffee, giving myself time to think. “I’ll starve. I’ll have no one to provide for me.”

She exhales out the side of her mouth. “Bullshit. Everything is communal there. Did Ezra tell you that?” I nod. She blows on her coffee and looks toward the ceiling.

I say nothing.

“How old are you now?” She asks. I tell her I’m sixteen. “That’s how old I was when I moved there,” she goes on. “You’re a baby.” I shake my head, but she keeps talking. “They might tell you that you’re an adult, but in the real world, you’re still a child.”

“If you hate us so much, why didn’t you move far away?” I think of where the elephants live. That’s far.

She ignores my question. “You work in the fucking kitchen, Felicity. You know everything is communal. Why would you believe that?”

I shake my head.

“Everything they tell you is a lie. That’s the nature of a cult, but you don’t even know what that word means.” Abigail stands up and puts her hands on her hips. She’s getting ready to pace. I remember her doing this in the kitchen when she was angry.

I inhale and then quickly blurt out, “The Vesselite Village was created to battle the internet and its automated sex and animated girlfriends. We were formed to combat the declining birthrate, to create God’s soldiers, to populate earth with God’s creatures, not man’s. To…”

“Shut up,” Abigail says. She lifts herself onto her counter and sits there, disregarding the crumbs that fall onto the floor. “All of that is a lie. It’s a made-up religion for rich, horny men. That’s why they want Aaron dead. They made up this arbitrary number of forefathers, and now that a spot is open, another rich man can buy his way in and give all his money to them. Think about it. How many men are there? A dozen, maybe. And how many babies? There are like two born a year.”

I shrug. “That’s the way God wants it to be.”

“No, that’s the ratio they want. They give you pills to keep you from having babies.”

“No.”

“I have to go to work.”

I suddenly feel like I’m going to cry. “I need to remarry,” I say. I remember the way James’s hand felt on my head that morning. “I need to be available for the next picking.”

Abigail just stares at me.

“I need to be.”

“You’re going to be eighteen in two years. And then you can leave. Legally. No one will come looking for you. No one will drag you back.”

I shake my head. “My parents are there. My sister is there.”

And then I remember the letter. I slip it out from under the harness. Abigail jumps off the counter. She holds my wrist, twisting it, so my hand flips over and her name is on top. She squints her eyes at the writing, searching for something, and then she smiles and snatches the paper from my hand.

◆

After we were bound to Aaron, James kept writing letters to Abigail. Never to me. I always found them first though, a little pile in the pantry. I asked her to read them to me and she would say, “later,” but she never did. When James came to the kitchen, he thanked Abigail for the food, never me. Sometimes he’d pass her a note right in front of me, like I was blind.

I don’t think Abigail knows I was the one to report her reading. And maybe I wouldn’t have if I had known how reluctant she’d be to repent, how much punishment they’d assign her, how bland the replacement kitchen hand would be. But I did. And then three days after her eighteenth birthday, she disappeared. She was put on the board of lost people. I know because I had memorized the shape of her name.

◆

I do not ask Abigail to read me the new letter. She takes it from me and gets up, walking far away from me, even though I do not watch her as she reads. I sit there for a while as the machines flash at me. There are numbers on some of them, they glow, and if I look at them hard enough, they change into other numbers. I close my eyes. I recite the cleansing ritual.

After a bit, I go into the only other room, where she is putting folded clothes into a suitcase. Now she’s wearing clothes without emblems, and there’s no paint on her face.

“Aaron’s hospital is a few blocks away,” she says. “We’re going to have to take a taxi.” She looks at me hard.

“Taxi?” I ask.

“A mini bus.”

“Why are you taking him a suitcase of your clothes?”

She ignores this question. “Have they warned you? Did they tell you what he looks like now?”

“Who?”

She plunges her hands into the packed clothing, as if looking for something. “Aaron. You know, the whole point of this meeting. We’re going to see Aaron.”

“I don’t want to see him.”

She is quiet as she presses her clothing down flat on top of a dozen toothbrushes, most of them purple, and then zips the bag closed.

“I don’t want to see him,” I repeat.

“Fine. Then you’ll stay here,” she says. She must see the reaction I was trying to hide because she adds, “it’ll only be for a few hours.” She walks out of the room, into the main room, toward a big box. She pushes a button, and the box blinks into color and music.

“No,” I say.

She ignores me, and the machine blinks a few more times before it shows a church.

“No,” I say.

“Look,” she says, putting her finger on the stained-glass window. “It’s a sermon. Just like ours.”

The people in the box are singing a familiar song, a sadder version of “Amazing Grace,” but still I say, “no.”

“Then don’t look at it,” she says. “It’s either you stay here, or you come see Aaron.”

“I’ll stay.”

“Whatever, Felicity.” She walks toward the door, grabs a small bag from the table and leaves.

I try not looking, but even with my eyes closed, the light of the machine hovers in front of me. I walk toward it. I place my hand on it, right on the pastor, and he feels almost like nothing, almost like a name on paper. I recite the cleansing ritual, but I feel rude, talking over this pastor, and so I sit down and watch him.

There is another box on the floor. A little one, only a little larger than my hand. It’s covered in colored dots. It reminds me of the spots of paint James gave me at my first moon, back before Abigail had ever joined, before either James or Aaron or I knew she existed. I press down on a yellow one. Yellow like the house I saw.

The pastor disappears. A man and a woman take his place. They are sitting in front of a window. Behind them it’s snowing, but neither of them are wearing a coat. She says, “I guess this is an okay first date,” and invisible people laugh.

I watch them find a cat beneath a car. I watch them order coffee and drink it in a park, in a kitchen, on a bench, in a bus, in an even bigger, nosier bus. I watch them buy clothes for the cat. I watch them cry when the cat runs away. The man runs after it, but it escapes. I watch them buy a dog. I watch them sleep together, with no one else, in a bed of white cloth. I watch them fight.  I watch them dress as pumpkins and then dance in a room of people dressed as demons. “Well, this is awkward,” he says. “One of us is going to have to change.” And the invisible people laugh. But they don’t change. And when the demon people scare the woman, he holds her and kisses her and tells her, “this is why you’re the only woman I could ever love. You’re my little pumpkin.” And she asks, “you love me?” And then she’s jumping around, her orange dress bouncing over her head, the invisible people laughing, as she says over and over, “I love you too.” I watch them sleep in that bed of white cloth again and again. They ride so many mini buses and go to so many places that I lose track, but they always go back to the bed.

And then it’s a different woman. She looks almost the same. Her hair and her eyes are the same, but she is not the woman who dressed like a pumpkin. She asks, “Notice anything different about me?” And I swear, she turns to me and winks at me. And the invisible people laugh.

I say. “Yes. You’re a replacement.”

But the man, he doesn’t notice. This makes the invisible people laugh again. He calls her by the first woman’s name. I feel like I’m going to cry, but I stay there, and I watch as the replacement woman drinks coffee with the man, feeds the dog, rides the buses, and then crawls into the bed.

When Abigail returns, I’ve cried a lot. My throat hurts, and the corners of my eyes itch.

“Sorry,” she says. “I had no idea that would take six hours.” She walks toward me. “Oh, I love this show.” She looks down at me. “Felicity?”

I can’t respond.

She sinks to the floor and puts her hands on my shoulders. “Felicity, what’s wrong?”

“I love him,” I say. “I love him. I love him.”

She pushes her nose into my hair. “Don’t cry. It was the right thing to do. It didn’t even look like him. His face was so swollen and shiny. It looked like a mask. He wasn’t in there.”

My throat is so scratchy. I just nod.

Abigail says that I have to be brave and ride an Uber back to the village. She says she’ll ride it with me so I won’t get lost. She brings the suitcase and I wonder if the clothes are for me. She’s never given me a gift. 

“Do you remember the year there were so many deer in the village? They got so friendly. They’d sleep on our doorsteps, and Brittany was able to pet one, remember?”

I remember. “They ate up our garden.”

Abigail swallows. “Yeah.”

“But they went away.”

“Yeah.”

◆

An Uber is just a mini bus. As we slip inside, the man in the front asks, “is the address correct? I’ve never done a drop off there. I don’t know anyone who’s done a drop off there.”

“It’s correct,” Abigail says. “We just came from a funeral and don’t feel like talking.”

I don’t know what she means.

The man in the front says, “understood,” and then he goes quiet.

I try to find the yellow house, but I can’t. I try to stop crying, and I do for a little bit, but then I remember that replacement woman, and how she had fit in the arms of the man just as well as the first woman. I remember how soft James’s voice had been this morning, and I imagine how it must be softer still when he reads his poetry. I remember how old Highfather Ezra is and think of how he’ll be there, waiting.

“When I left,” Abigail interrupts my thoughts, “I climbed a tree that was higher than the fence and then jumped down. I didn’t even sprain my leg.”

I don’t know how to respond.

“And that’s because I landed in a pile of dead deer. They must have killed them all to keep the population in check, and then they just threw them outside.”

“I’m tired,” I say. But I’m not tired. I’m thinking about the babies, and how full the nursery was last spring, fuller than I’d ever seen it. Highfather Mathew said last year was a record. He wrote a sermon about it. There were twelve of them, and all but two were girls.

“We’re almost there.”

When we get there, the man in the bus tries to stay, but Abigail tells him to leave or she’ll give him one star. Highfather Ezra and James are there, beside the gate, holding lanterns. I can smell fire, and I realize how hungry I am. I hear Abigail walking behind me. I want to tell her she can go, that I’ll be fine, but I don’t because I don’t want to take my attention from James.

I watch his face change, twist up, and then he’s running, just like the man in the box. Abigail runs too. They collide in front of me. She says, “I thought you forgot.” And he says, “never, never, never,” each time the word degrades a little, sounding less real, and he wraps himself around more of her, until they are talking into each other’s necks. They kiss.

Abigail drops her bags. And then it occurs to me. She’s staying. She’s staying and when Aaron’s wives are divvied up, James will pick her first. He might pick me too. But she will come first. He doesn’t thank me for going outside. He doesn’t even look at me. But highfather Ezra does. And I think I can smell something dead, but it’s just the residue of Ezra’s breath on my neck.