No Love For The Villain - vanish into fiction

Around the time the blood flowing from her nose began to stop, the bedroom door swung open.

Pastor Miles entered the room. Mrs. Miles was by his side.

Sierra knew instinctively. Mrs. Miles had told the Pastor everything. Everything she had seen in front of Miriam’s house.

“Sierra.”

The moment the Pastor called her name, her hands and feet went numb. The leg that hadn’t been struck yet throbbed with a dull ache. The name called by the man in her dream vanished. The name that had felt like her own turned back into a bell.

It was the sound of a bell shaken threateningly at a leashed dog. Come here. Stop it. Countless commands were tangled up in that single name.

“Did you go to Miriam’s house?”

Pastor Miles asked in a tone as generous as a priest awaiting a confession. Pastor Miles, standing before Sierra, slowly removed his scarf.

“I actually thought it was good that Miriam remained in our village. Now all the girls in our village know. What happens if you don’t live according to your father’s will…”

Pastor Miles spoke as if Miriam’s misfortune was a fine example. The loneliness of being cut off from one’s neighbors was the punishment for disobedience.

As the Pastor pulled the scarf down, Sierra flinched, the object in his hand looking to her like a whip.

“Daniel said you’d stopped drawing pictures and had improved greatly.”

Pastor Miles spoke like a doctor checking a patient’s condition as he examined Sierra’s face.

Stopped drawing pictures…

No. It wasn’t that she stopped. She couldn’t draw anymore.

All that remained for Sierra were broken brushes, a shattered palette, and hardened paint. The person who had broken the brushes was Pastor Miles.

The corner of Pastor Miles’s mouth lifted in his shadowed face. He looked satisfied, like a doctor who had sewn shut the lips of a patient screaming in pain and declared them ‘improved.’

But the moment he saw the pitch-black drawing scattered under the desk, Pastor Miles frowned.

“An ugly man is roaming the village. He’s even managed to enter our home, spreading sin like a disease.”

The look in Pastor Miles’s eyes as he glared at the man’s face in the drawing was filled with contempt, like looking at a stray dog that had wandered into a livestock pen.

Something filthy and ugly, breaking through the family’s sturdy fence—its name was Satan, it was a demon, and now, it was that man. A man who lords over sinners. Satan, devil, murderer, adulterer, the prodigal son who would abandon his family—all things wrong were bound to him.

Pastor Miles cupped Sierra’s cheek. Even before this seemingly affectionate touch, Sierra trembled as if she had been struck hard across the face.

Pastor Miles pressed his forehead against Sierra’s and clasped his hands together.

“Prayer will save the sick…”

“Prayer will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. Though he has sinned, he will receive forgiveness.”

The Bible verses she had recited until her throat was sore circled in her mind, independent of her will.

“Don’t worry. Everything will be alright, Sierra.”

Everything will be alright. That single phrase terrified Sierra. She knew the punishment that would follow those words.

“I was wrong. I did wrong. Pastor, I was wrong.”

The drawing was ruthlessly torn apart in the Pastor’s hands. After shredding the man’s face to pieces, Pastor Miles grabbed Sierra by the collar and dragged her.

Sierra was pulled along like a puppet with its limbs tied to strings. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I won’t do it again. The words flowed out just as Pastor Miles had engraved them in her mouth.

When she was dragged to the bathroom, Sierra clung to Mrs. Miles’s leg. But the eyes looking down at her in silence were merciless. Pastor Miles shoved Sierra into the bathroom.

The door closed. Bang. A heavy sound, like a judge’s gavel delivering a sentence, struck her eardrums. Only silence and darkness remained in the unlit bathroom.

It was a punishment more frightening than a beating.

“Pastor, I was wrong. I was, I was…”

The door wouldn’t open no matter how much she knocked. No answer came no matter how much she pleaded. Only a desolate silence remained, as if she were left utterly alone in the world.