Following Jesus in rejecting empire
“I’ll fetch Father Fitzpatrick,” Doyle tells Brother O’Brien as he pulls Magdalene and Adrienne clandestinely through the back door and into the kitchen. Brother O’Brien is setting some bread and cheese on a plate when Father Fitzpatrick walks in. “Brother, O’Brien. We weren’t expecting you back for another month.” “I’m afraid that plague has visited…
Except for the slow, quiet clacking of Adrienne’s crutches upon the cobbled walk, the approach of the three women in the wee hours of Thursday morning is undetectable. Jackson’s body jolts when Shelly whispers, “Hey!” His nerves have been set upon a hair trigger. The Rourk brothers are tucked behind a stack of pallets at…
Tonight, the Rourk brothers sit at a corner booth in the Corporate Arms with their distant cousin. Their hushed conversation must be kept out of public earshot. “It’s kidnapping,” Shelly is telling them. “Pure and simple kidnapping.” “I’d rather think of it as liberation.” Ash says. “Bullshit. You don’t even know if the woman wants…
Delaney walks back to the room by herself and feels the full force of her otherness. It is exacerbated as she listens to the play of the boys outside after their evening chores are finished. She peers across the room and out one of the windows from her bunk. They are laughing and roughhousing in…
When they enter, Ash is overcome with the suffocating heat of the room and the stench of body odor. There are about ten or twelve adults on bicycles. It takes his eyes a moment to adjust since there is a single lamp in the windowless room. Ash recognizes the young woman he saw on the…