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“There is a universe where Nora and I are happy. I know this to be true. There is a life where she didn’t vanish. I don’t know what comes next for me, but I know that. And I keep that in a sweet little jar in the back of my mind, right next to the feeling of her lips on my own, and I take it out when I need it most.”

à la even though I knew the end

“There’s no me without you,” I echoed back, because it felt truer than the version she had said.

“I think Nora felt trapped more than anything else. I think she maybe made a bad choice or two because she felt like she had to, and then all of a sudden she was a bad person, and bad people get bad consequences, whether they actually deserve them or not.”

The silence of the crowd, the wash of the flames. Nora’s eyes on me—not pleading, not sad. Satisfied. Like she had long been ready for this sort of thing and had just been waiting for someone to finally light the flame.

I wondered how far one person had to go to be considered past the reach of God’s grace. And I wondered who, exactly, had the authority to determine such a thing.

I spent a solid hour just staring at the curve of her hair on my pillow, wishing that this could be my eternity.

If you’d asked her, she would have told you that she hardly ever cried, but I know she was crying that night. Even if I couldn’t see it, even if she wouldn’t admit it, I could feel the gentle shaking of her body.

“I think this is it.” The words felt heavy, like an admission. “I don’t think I’m making it out of this one.”

Seeing Nora was an exercise in instinct more than rationality, and she was slipping through my window before I remembered that she was a murderer, that the devil was in her, that there were a thousand other reasons not to hold her close or think about kissing her again. I had to hold myself back from hugging her, but even then it was not because it might’ve been dangerous for me to do so.”

“What had she and Charity both known about Bethel, and what made not just the deliverance, but God Himself a thing to cower from?

The trouble was, I didn’t have her back, did I? If I had, we wouldn’t be in this situation, and I wouldn’t be telling you all this.”

“The Lord will surely forsake me for this, but I must admit that part of it was . . . well . . . beautiful. I don’t know whether or not she was actually saved, but something about the way the blood shone in the light, and the way her smile seemed to be only for me, no one else in the room . . .”

“I’ll find you,” Nora mouthed, as I was pulled away from the crowd, away from her. “I’ll find you.”

I wish I could say that it was only comfort I felt in that moment, but no.

The idea of that did scare me as well.


let the congregation say fuck yeah

She pulled away from me, and I felt her absence immediately. I didn’t say anything, though I think both of us wished that I had been brave enough to pull her back.

There was a shift in me then, that I don’t like to think about very often. Nora moved from being my closest…friend to something so much more than that. I had lost our friendship in that moment, but in its place, something entirely new had grown, and I loved that even more. I saw her differently, I touched her differently, and in the back of my mind, I pushed away the fear that any of it might’ve been wrong.

We fell against each other in our laughter, our bodies blurring together in the darkness. When I looked at her, I could see the stars reflected in her eyes, and I knew that there was nothing that she could request of me that I wouldn’t do.

Because that’s what Nora was, wasn’t she?

A piece of myself that I couldn’t explain—or maybe didn’t want to explain, and now she’s been carved out of my heart, and I’m never getting her back.

She stuck on my brain, some might say like a leech, but I prefer to think of it like syrup.

I never could remove her all the way.

No one is technically alone as long as there’s God, but there’s an absence that comes with being around Nora, where you’re not really sure whether or not God even matters.

She wasn’t paying attention to them. Her snake had returned to her, and I had to wonder if it was the very same snake from before, years ago in the forest—the same one that she had taken care of, and that owed its life to her.

Rebecca screamed as she died, but no one turned away from Pastor David and his sermon.

Elijah was the next to go. He was the one who really stopped everything because how could they continue to sing if there was no music to go along with it?

She wasn’t sorry, though. I knew she wasn’t. Every single thing Nora ever did was perfectly planned, even if she never bothered to tell anyone else what that plan might be. God forbid, someone might’ve tried to stop her.

“tell people I thought I could save her, and the reason I spent so much time with her was because I was trying to help her get right with God. I don’t really know how true that ever was, but I couldn’t exactly tell them that something about her just called to me. That I couldn’t tear my eyes away.”

I might be young, but I did my time with my knees pressed against wooden hassocks, knowing that my obedience directly influenced just how much God did or didn’t help my hometown.