Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. Arwen Dayton Elys

sign—Why Do You HATE What You Are?—so she didn’t have to see the girl’s face, because that giant had been compressing her chest again.

      The giant was squeezing her right now. She rose from the cot, fought off a spell of dizziness, and dashed out of the room into the cold hallway outside. Across the hall stood a little bathroom, which she stepped into in order to examine herself in the mirror over the sink.

      Except the mirror was gone. Someone had pulled the whole medicine cabinet from the wall—recently, judging by the freshness of the broken plaster surrounding the large cavity that had been left over the sink. The cabinet was sitting on the floor with the mirror side toward the wall, as if the mirror had been offensive, as if it had been ordered to stand in the corner.

      Elsie noticed deep scrapes on her elbows now, and these tugged more memories free: Congolese men pouring into the town square, rocks being thrown, people yelling. An old woman with her head wrapped in a brightly colored scarf, spitting at Elsie’s father, throwing clods of dirt. Elsie’s mother leaping forward.

      “Mama,” Elsie whispered. “What happened to us?”

      Elsie was afraid she already knew the answer. There had been another hospital, bright lights. People lifting Elsie onto a rolling bed, the endless floating of drugs in her bloodstream …

      She reached for the medicine cabinet, to turn it around, but a sound from down the hall stopped her. It was her father’s voice, deep and soothing, and he was saying, “Elsie, are you awake? Come here to me, girl.”

      “Daddy?” she asked, sticking her head out of the bathroom. It was slightly frightening to hear him in the stillness of the basement. She’d been hoping for her mother’s voice, she realized. Or Teddy’s.

      “Daddy?” she called again. Elsie was fourteen years old. Calling her father Daddy was beginning to sound childish. Yet that was the only way she’d ever been allowed to address him.

      He didn’t say anything else to her, but her father’s voice continued on in a murmur. She followed the sound down the hall and found him in the old storage room, among the props for the Christmas pageant and the Easter decorations, the extra folding tables and chairs, and stacks of out-of-date paper hymnals that had long since been replaced by tablets. The Reverend Mr. Tad Tadd, Elsie’s father, was kneeling in one corner of the room, facing a large plaster Jesus that had once hung on the wall in the room where Elsie had woken up, before one of its feet had fallen off. Elsie had thought the Jesus looked more roguish with one foot missing, and perhaps more historically accurate, considering his injuries on the cross; however, most people were not looking for roguishness or perfect realism in their Savior, Elsie’s mother had explained, and so the broken Jesus had been relegated to the storage room.

      Her father, turned toward the wall, was murmuring to himself, with his personal Bible open in his hands. Elsie could catch only a word here and there. He might have been saying, “We are all the fish … You tried to tell me … Fish of different sorts, the fish …” Which made no sense, since her father did not care to eat fish of any kind. And yet he sounded as though he were holding up one end of a quite serious conversation with God.

      His hands and arms, like Elsie’s, were scratched, but she could see nothing else amiss from where she stood.

      Tentatively, she asked, “Daddy, what are we doing here?” She didn’t like the idea of interrupting, but her father sometimes spoke to God at such length that it wasn’t practical to wait until he was done.

      “They never changed the door codes,” her father said,without turning from the plaster Jesus. “I didn’t want to bring you home just yet.”

      “But how did we get here?” Elsie asked.

      “Joel helped me. We got you released and brought you here so you could wake up in peace.” Joel, a doctor, had been one of her father’s parishioners and his best friend, before the Reverend’s fall from grace.

      “But … Tshikapa, the Congo,” she said.

      “Yes, Africa,” her father answered heavily. And then, as if to explain, he added, “Airlift and two hospitals.”

      Yes. That. The mirage in her head was taking on solid form. The mob, and the rocks.

      Elsie had been standing just inside the doorway, but now she got closer. Hoping the words were wrong, she asked, “Mama and Teddy are dead? I didn’t dream it?”

      One of her father’s hands went to his face, and when it came away, Elsie could see that it was wet. He was crying. He turned his head slightly as he said, “You didn’t dream it, baby girl.”

      She wanted to feel shocked, but she didn’t. Part of her had known the moment she woke up.

      Elsie took a seat on an aged footstool with the stuffing coming out of it. A broken hymnal tablet shared the stool with her. When her leg brushed against it, a four-inch-high three-dimensional Japanese woman sprang up from the tablet’s screen, lifted her arms, and began to sing the Japanese version of “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” A crack down the center of the tablet caused half of the woman’s body to be a smudged rainbow of disconnected colors. Elsie switched off the tablet.

      “Are they gone?” her father went on. “In a sense, yes. My beautiful wife and beautiful little boy, but—”

      “But they’ll live on in heaven at the end of time?” Elsie interjected automatically, because that was the sort of thing her father would say at a moment like this one.

      “Yes, they will. But they don’t have to wait, because they are living on already.”

      A rock to the back of her mother’s head. Teddy trampled. She had seen those things.

      “How?” she whispered.

      The Reverend had his forehead leaned against his Bible in an attitude of most fierce prayer, and Elsie wondered if it was possible that he had conjured up a miracle. She imagined a mural of this very moment, herself and her father and God hovering above them in his radiant robes, and she saw the speech bubble above her own head: “Excuse me, Lord God? Have You got something remarkable up those flowing sleeves of Yours?” But the God in the imagined mural looked as curious as Elsie was to hear what her father was going to say.

      “If there’s one thing I’ve always said,” the Reverend told his daughter, “it’s that a man who cannot admit he’s wrong is not much of a man.”

      It was true, she’d heard him say that, but—

      “Do you mean you, Daddy?” she asked.

      “I do.”

      This surprising admission took several seconds to unfold within Elsie. Her father was criticizing himself?

      “What—what were you wrong about, Daddy?” she asked.

      In the mural, God gave Elsie a look of disappointment. “You know what he was wrong about, Elsie,” His speech bubble admonished her.

      Elsie’s speech bubble said, “I need to hear him say it.”

      The Reverend Tadd said, “A revelation, my sweet girl, is like turning on a light or opening a window. Have I told you that?” Elsie still couldn’t see his expression, but she imagined that it looked as it often did during the most ecstatic portions of his sermons—one part joy, one part pain. “You’re in a dark room and then—poof!—the sun floods in. And what you thought were formless shapes and terrible shadows are not. In God’s light, you understand that they’re something else entirely.

      “Do you want to know what I’ve been shown?” her father asked. “Should I try to put it into words, even though words won’t do it justice?”

      “Sure, Daddy.” If there was one thing Elsie understood about her father, it was that he knew how to use words that would do his ideas justice. His pride in his verbal skill burned intensely. In the mural in Elsie’s mind, she saw that pride like a glowing coal where his heart should be. Her father’s skill with words was the only