Revival Season - Monica West (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📗

together in front of her, swimming their way to the light. Carnal, Papa probably would have muttered if he had been here, but this wasn’t the evil of the flesh that he said was sin. For a moment, I saw the dancer that she’d been before she met Papa.

I leaned against the doorjamb, my shoulder touching the wall. I couldn’t shift my eyes from her, from the smile that tickled the sides of her mouth as her lips formed words to lyrics that I’d never heard her say: “I’ll be your lover. Better than any other. I’ll make you moan and scream with ecstasy.” Her lips should have stumbled over these words, but there was only unfettered joy behind her closed, fluttering eyelids as her languid limbs moved like they were floating underwater. I wondered how many nights she went downstairs while we slept, a thin floor the only thing separating us.

The song ended and her eyes opened and focused on me as the opening chords to a new song filled the room. Her mouth widened in shock, and she wrapped her hands around her nightgown as though she were naked.

“Did I wake you up?” She transformed in front of me, jamming the screen of her phone until the room was quiet. Her scared eyes darted as her neck craned around me.

“He’s not here.”

Her shoulders relaxed, and she collapsed in the kitchen chair—all the vibrancy in her face and body slowly left the room. I took the chair across from her.

“I’ve never seen you dance like that, Ma.”

She shrugged.

“Can you teach me?”

A sparkle in the corner of her normally dimmed eyes provided a glimmer of the Ma I’d just seen. She pressed both hands against the table and turned toward the door once more. When she got to her feet, she stretched out her hand toward me. I grabbed it, and she pulled me to a standing position—soon we were in the middle of the kitchen floor. Her phone began another song with a quicker beat like the rat tat tat tat of sudden rain against a windowsill. She crooked her arm around the small of my back and pressed me against the hard, protruding mound of her stomach, flattening her breasts against mine as she collapsed the gap between us with one swift jerk of her arm. Our bodies moved as one, her hips rocking a couple seconds before mine caught up. My clumsy body was off-kilter as it rammed into hers, bouncing us off each other and sending me away from her in a twirl—when I stopped spinning and found her again, she was extending her arm across the kitchen toward me.

She spun me again, all while singing along to the lyrics. We danced until that song ended and then through another few songs until I lost count.

By the time the sun burned the sky orange, we fell to the floor breathless, spread-eagle beside one another. My laugh intertwined with hers until they were inextricable from each other, and her chest heaved and fell in rapid succession. I’d heard her laugh before—at Caleb’s dumb jokes over dinner or Papa’s impressions of church members. But this laugh was different—it was bright and bold. The first real laugh since what had happened with Papa the night after Micah’s healing service. I looked over next to me at where she lay with eyes closed and hair splayed against the floor like a sunburst.

“You’re pretty good,” she said to the ceiling when her breathing returned to normal.

“You’re not so bad yourself.”

“It’s all the contemporary classes I took in high school. Before things got bad.” She rolled over on her side and perched her chin in her palm. Her laughing eyes became mournful as they searched mine. She reached out and placed a palm on the side of my face, her fingertips grazing my cheekbone that was prominent like hers. Our twin faces in different bodies, she liked to say.

“I kept saying that I couldn’t marry a man like my father. And your dad was different in the early years. But I feel like I don’t know him anymore. And I’ve been meaning to say that I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” I asked.

The front door clicked. We sprang from where we were sprawled on the floor—Ma opened cupboards, clanging pots and pans together in an elaborate charade of making breakfast as I pressed the pause button on her phone and shoved it in the pocket of my robe. Papa’s loud footsteps came down the hallway, and Ma’s trembling hands made the heavy cast-iron skillet handle rattle against the burner. As he stopped at the edge of the kitchen, I folded and refolded a dish towel into sections, watching the thread loops line up like a row of tiny nooses.

I sidestepped to the edge of the kitchen until my spine flattened against the refrigerator door. Ma greeted him with a tentative embrace, her face seemingly trying to gauge how long he had been waiting on the porch, what he had heard. His arms were relaxed by his sides even as Ma hugged him hello.

“You’re back early. Do you want some breakfast?”

“I’m starving.”

With Papa’s focus on Ma, I slowly crept upstairs. Back in my room, I sank into my bed—feeling some comfort that I wasn’t the only one with twin selves. Ma didn’t heal, but she kept a whole other side shielded from Papa. I would have to follow her example and separate my selves as well. When alone, I would drape my power around my shoulders like a cape, but before leaving the sanctum of my room, I would have to revert to the Miriam I had learned how to be—the Miriam who held her tongue and stayed quiet the way Papa expected.

The following week after services, I felt a delicate hand on my shoulder. It was a girl from the congregation whose round face I recognized even though I didn’t know her name. “Nadia,” she whispered before asking me to heal her. There