Milk Blood Heat. Dantiel W. Moniz

Zey looks at them all with their faces turned down, eyes closed; the congregation, her mother, father, and Duck. Only she and Pastor keep their eyes open, and Zey examines him, the copper skin sweating from his exultations, the way he searches the room, bowed head to bowed head, as if measuring the effect of his influence. When his eyes find hers, Zey snaps her head down, too late, and doesn’t look up again until the congregation says amen. On the drive home, Zey translates the expression she’d seen flash across Pastor’s face—supercilious, enigmatic. Hungry.

      After Bible study the following week, while her mother makes her rounds in her newest Sunday best, Pastor invites her into the cramped space of his office, which seems to double as storage. Boxes labeled “Christmas” and “Communion” hulk around his desk, and as Zey reads the words, she pictures their contents: Mary and the black baby Jesus in the manger; bulk orders of cheap wine and wafers of Christ’s dry, tasteless flesh. She sits in the chair in front of his desk and Pastor asks, Are you godly, girl? She doesn’t know how to answer. He then tells Zey how to be a woman—soft-spoken, subservient, devout, and clean. He reminds her about the history of Eve, how she took of the tree of knowledge, seduced her husband, and struck the entire world with her sin. How she doomed mankind to suffering, because she didn’t know her place. Zey gnaws the inside of her lip while he speaks. A trapped fly whines in the window.

      Her mother learned how to be a woman here, in the faith, and her father a man, but Zey’s been to the library and looked up real history—slave ships and witch trials and women kept in bare feet. The books she borrowed were full of words like pay-gap and redline, and she noticed that in all genres, no matter literature or biography, men’s fury stained the pages, sowing lies like white seeds inside of people’s hearts. Pastor rises, squeezing around the clutter, and perches on the desk, his feet resting on either side of Zey’s. He leans down and places a heavy hand on her bare knee. We need good young girls—God-fearing girls like you—to be the backbone of our church. Do you understand? he asks, and his fingers flex.

      Zey hears Pastor’s message and understands what’s beneath it: that she can have hair on her head but not in her armpits; hair on her arms but not her legs; hair between her legs . . . depending on what a man liked. That she can be looked on, but not look. Zey stares into his face, her eyes filling, heart hammering in her throat. She says nothing, cannot move until he moves, will not cry in front of him. Finally, she looks down and Pastor sits back, releasing her. He opens the door for her to leave. God blesses you, child, he tells her.

      Zey turns the moment over in her mind—at school and at home and even while she sleeps. For two Sundays, she sits stricken between her parents and even Duck can’t break her free. What did it mean that Pastor, a pinnacle, the link to the Supreme, would bother to threaten her, unimportant though she is? He is Simon to so many: he says Rejoice, and they do; Repent, and they do. He says Pray, and the church goes blind.

      For English, their teacher assigns The Scarlet Letter—the most boring book about an affair Zey has ever read. Her teacher asks the class what they noticed in the interactions between Hester and the town. Most of Zey’s classmates only stare; they fidget and avert their eyes. Then someone says, They hated her.

      Yes! the teacher booms, startling them to attention. But why? Papers rustle in the silence. Because she was immoral? another student tries, and the teacher cocks his head, his way of questioning an answer without claiming that it’s wrong. Think about it as it applies to our own lives, our world, he says. What is the nature of hate? What’s it useful for? And Zey imagines the townspeople, their whispers and cruel laws, their narrowed eyes. How they ostracized the woman, conspired to contain her light.

      They were scared of her, Zey tells the teacher, realizing it as she speaks, and he jabs a finger in her direction. Yes! Exactly that, he says. Now he’s getting excited, pacing before their desks, and Zey tilts forward in her seat, angling closer to his truth. Hate, he continues, is almost always a cover for some perceived psychological threat—our guilt or pain. Our fear. And how do we treat things of which we are afraid?

      The moment with Pastor tumbles round with the grit of Zey’s learnings, chipping down until her understanding of it gleams. After the next Sunday service, as Pastor jokes with Duck and accepts praise from her parents, he lays that same hand on her shoulder, and Zey glares at it and then at Pastor before she shrugs it off. He covers the moment with a laugh, but the hand becomes a fist at his side.

      Pastor phones her parents that night just before dinner and though Zey doesn’t know what’s said, later she’ll imagine him on the other side of the line spinning his lie, toad-like and sullen as he exacts his revenge. After she hangs up, her mother slaps her at the table and calls Zey outside her name­—­embarrassment, disgrace, demimonde. Disrespecting the pastor? What kind of example are you? Duck hides in the hallway, listening; Zey sees his shadow on the wall. Her mother says, What you do reflects on me!

      Zey tries to explain, to defend herself against her mother’s rage, her own coursing underneath, but her mother’s so ashamed, so unwilling to see. She sends Zey to her room without dinner while her father watches from the living room, complicit in his silence.

      Under the covers that night, her bedroom door taken from its hinges, Zey thinks of Ms. Addler, curled around the body of her lover like a snake, soft in her sin. She wishes she could ask her parents if it’s better to be a sinner or a prisoner, but she knows now that her mother is afraid of truth and her father wouldn’t recognize it, even if it invited him inside, offered fresh fruit.

      Zey rebels against her parents for their failure to believe her, to protect her, in any small way she can. She refuses food, both physical and spiritual; she won’t step foot inside the church. She lets their punishments slide off her back. Zey makes Lucifer a mantra, speaking the name aloud, blurring it until it becomes nothing more than the language of hisses, her own version of tongues. The vibration fills her stripped room, sinking into the walls and passing through to her brother, who is sad Mama and Pop now leave Zey home on Sundays. He overhears their confusion at her behavior. Their mother wonders if they should send her away.

      Duck sneaks into Zey’s room one night, climbing into bed with her, like he used to when he was small. Zey can feel him trying to word his question about why things aren’t how they used to be: Zey packing his lunches with folded notes or borrowing Pop’s car to run an errand to the grocery. He could come-with as long as he sat in the backseat, wore his seat belt, listened to his sister. Now, their parents hover like buzzards and only in the dark hours are they free.

      Finally, he says, Why can’t you stop? and Zey guesses at what he means—being changed, being bad. She twines her fingers into the soft mat of his hair. There’s nothing she can tell him that he’d understand, that might bring comfort. It is the nature of light to illuminate, and she can’t, like so many, forget what she’s seen. She wishes this moment of connection was enough, but Duck’s waiting and she has to speak. Truth is beautiful, she tells her brother, quoting Emerson, but so are lies.

      Duck now understands the word possessed and tells his two best friends at school he thinks this is what his sister is. He describes how she lies on the floor of her room with her legs straight up against the wall, how that peculiar sound she makes glows in the air around her head like the letter ‘S’ come to life. He tells them how Pastor pulled him aside last Sunday and told him the devil came in many forms, but most shaped like women.

      They are his best friends, but he is not theirs. His friends tell other friends until the word breaks out, and suddenly, Rylan stands before him on the playground, fresh-cut fade, fat lips sneering, his father’s gold chains around his neck. His big hands hang loose as if just passing the time, the knuckles cracked and dry. He’s in Duck’s grade but held back—almost fourteen, dumb in his anger at all these smaller boys who belong.

      I heard your sister’s on some Exorcist shit, he says. Head spinning around and shit. Duck mumbles, tries to move around him, but Rylan puts a solid hand on his chest. Think that bitch can spin like that on my dick?

      The playground erupts, Duck’s classmates pouring one out for his defeat. Duck knows that, next to an insult to his mother, this is the worst a boy can say. He knows he can’t allow this to slide, not here with all the other boys listening. He knows before he