as always. Five blouses, five pairs of slacks, all starched and pressed. That raspberry stain came out too.” I picked up the sleeve of the first blouse to show her the bright white cuff, and when she bent to study the material, I took a can of beef stew from the shelf at my back and slid it into the pocket of my oversized jacket.
“Good. Here’s next week’s batch.” Marta straightened and gestured to a bulging brown paper bag sitting on the tile countertop. “Sarah cut herself and bled on one of them….” She opened the bag and lifted the stained tail of a blouse at the top of the pile. “I told her blood won’t come out of white cotton, so she’s already replaced it, which means you’re welcome to keep this one. The stain’ll never show with it tucked in.”
“Thanks.” I mentally added the secondhand blouse to the small collection of school uniforms my sister and I actually owned.
Marta rolled down the top of the bag and shoved it at me, and when she turned to open a drawer beneath the counter, I slid another can of stew into my other pocket. My coat hung evenly now, and the weight of real food was reassuring.
“And here’s your cash.” She pressed a five and a ten from the drawer into my hand, then ushered me out the back door.
I grinned in spite of the cold as I jogged down the steps, then onto the Turners’ manicured back lawn, running my thumb over the sacred flames printed in the center of the worn, faded bills. That fifteen dollars put me within ten of paying this month’s electric bill, which wasn’t due for another week and might actually be paid on time, thanks to my arrangement with Marta.
Every week, Mrs. Turner gave her housekeeper twenty dollars to have Sarah’s school uniforms cleaned and pressed. Every Monday, Marta kept five of those dollars for herself and gave the rest to me, along with that week’s dirty clothes. Sarah had two full sets of school clothes. As long as she got five clean uniforms every Monday morning, Marta didn’t care what my sister and I did with them until then. So we laundered them on Monday afternoon, wore them throughout the week to supplement our own hand-me-down, piecemeal collection of school clothes, then laundered them again over the weekend in time to deliver them fresh and clean on Monday morning.
Marta got a little pocket money. Sarah got clean uniforms. My sister and I got cash we desperately needed, as well as the use of clothes nice enough to keep the sisters from investigating our home life.
So what if deception was a sin? You can’t get convicted if you don’t get caught.
Shivering again, I crept around square hedges, careful not to step on the layer of white rocks in the empty flower bed, then into the yard next door. The Turners’ house was only three-quarters of a mile from mine, but at 5:50 in the morning, with the temperature near freezing, that felt like the longest three-quarters of a mile in the world. Especially considering that from Sarah’s backyard, closer to the center of town, the town wall wasn’t even visible.
From my backyard, that hulking, razor-wire-topped steel wall was the primary landmark.
I cut through several backyards and a small alley on the way home, and to avoid Mr. Howard’s locked gate, I had to detour onto Third Street, where most of the store windows were still dark, the parking lots empty. The exception was the Grab-n-Go, which stayed open twenty-four hours a day. As I skirted the brightly lit parking lot and gas pumps, I glanced through the glass wall of the store at the huge wall-mounted television dutifully broadcasting the news, as required by the Church during all business hours. In the interest of public awareness, of course.
Willful ignorance was a sin.
The Grab-n-Go was playing the national news feed. The only other choice was the local news, which repeated on a much shorter, more annoying loop. Still, I kind of felt sorry for the night clerk, sentenced to listen to the same headlines repeated hour after hour, with few customers to break the monotony.
I couldn’t actually hear the newscaster, in her purple Church cassock with the broad, gold-embroidered cuffs, but I could tell what she was saying because in the absence of actual breaking news, newscasters all said the same things. Tithes are up. Reports of demonic possession are at an all-time low. Our citizens are safe inside their steel cages—I mean, walls. The battle still rages overseas and degenerates still roam the badlands, but the Church is vigilant, both at home and abroad, for your safety.
It had been more than a century since the Unified Church and its army of exorcists wiped the bulk of the great demon horde from the face of the earth—the face of America, anyway—yet the headlines never changed.
I stuck to the shadows, walking along the windowless side of the convenience store. Old posters tacked to the brick wall read “Put your talents to work for your country—consider serving the Church!” and “Report suspicions of possession—the Church needs your eyes and ears!” and “Tithe generously! Every dime makes a difference!”
That last one was especially funny. As if tithing were optional. My mom owed several thousand in overdue tithes, from back when she was still working, and if the Church came looking for it, we were screwed.
Behind the store, I rolled the top of the bag tighter to protect the clothes inside, then tossed my bundle over the six-foot chain-link fence stretched across the width of the alley, shielding the Grab-n-Go’s industrial trash bin from casual dumping by the adjoining neighborhood. My neighborhood.
The bag landed with the crunch of gravel and the crinkle of thick paper. I had the toe of one sneaker wedged into the chain-link, my fingers already curled around cold metal, when I heard a rustle from the deep shadows at the other end of the alley. I froze, listening. Something scraped concrete in the darkness.
I let go of the fence and took a step back, my heart thudding in my ears.
Dog. But it’d have to be a big one.
Bum. But there weren’t many of those anymore—the Church had been taking them off the street and conscripting them into service for more than a decade.
Psycho. There were still plenty of those, and my mom seemed to know them all. But not-quite six in the morning was early, even for most psychos.
Something shuffled closer on the other side of the fence, and I saw movement in the shadows. My fists clenched and unclenched. My pulse whooshed in my ears, and I regretted throwing Sarah’s clothes over the fence. I regretted not taking the even longer way home, through the park. I regretted having a mother who couldn’t shake off chemical oblivion in order to feed and clothe her children.
The thing shuffled forward again, and two pinpoints of light appeared in the darkness, bright and steady. Then they disappeared. Then reappeared.
Something was blinking. Watching me.
Shit! I glanced at the paper bag through the fence, clearly visible in the moonlight, just feet from deep shadows cast by the building. Deep shadows hiding … a dog.
It’s just a dog…. It had to be. People’s eyes don’t shine in the dark.
You know whose eyes do shine in the dark, Nina? Degenerates’.
My pulse spiked. There hadn’t been a confirmed possession in New Temperance in years, and the last time a degenerate made it over the town wall, I was in the first grade.
It’s a dog.
No stray dog was going to scare me away from a bag of uniforms that cost more than I could make in six months of washing and pressing them. That wouldn’t just be the end of my work for the Turners, it would be the end of Marta’s work for the Turners and the beginning of my conviction for the sin of stealing. Or falsehood. Or whatever they decided to call borrowing and laundering someone else’s clothes under false pretenses.
I stepped up to the chain-link, mentally berating myself for being such a coward. I was halfway up the fence when the shuffling started again, an uneven gait, as if the dog—or the shiny-eyed psycho?—was injured and dragging one foot. I could hear it breathing now, a rasping, whistling