by Keija Parssinen

When Brin Lambert started her first Regimen, she began to have visions. Unlike other dieters, who hallucinated slices of black forest cake or supersized French fries, Brin, in the fever of hunger, saw Jesus. The more she gave up—sugar, fat, dairy, carbs—the more elaborate the visions became. Neighbors and co-workers took notice of her transformation, complimenting her new figure and beatific glow. In a matter of months, she went from a mediocre real estate agent to the firm’s top saleswoman. With the extra income, she bought a bigger house in a better neighborhood, a 4-2 with a small above-ground swimming pool for her daughter, Laney.
For the first time in her life, Brin felt beautiful. Often, she would stand in front of the deep freeze in the garage, staring at the freezer-burned bacon and ice cream bars and frozen lasagnas that she had been careful to save in the move, as a reminder. There, she would weep from gratitude that she no longer weighed two hundred and thirty seven pounds, that she could, for the first time in her adult life, wear pants. Moments like these, she felt powerful sense of duty to share her message with others, so that they, too, could be freed from the bondage of food.
Six months later, with a proper ad campaign that included radio and television spots, purchased with the commission from the last house she sold, Brin started the Feast of Love church. People came from outlying towns and Plano proper, obese mothers and fathers and children seeking Brin’s cure. Even before the TV spots, they had heard of it from Brin’s realtor friends, who had started the Regimen and never felt or looked better. As word of the church’s successes spread well beyond the Dallas metro area, Brin appeared on Larry King Live and on the cover of Texas Monthly, and parishioners began to call her Brin Lambert, Lamb of God.
Because of this, Laney Lambert often found it difficult to call Brin mother. Laney was unnerved by her mother’s rapturous sheen and the flagrant emotion that came along with it. The Texas Monthly cover featured a picture of Brin looking arachnid as she sat folded on a chair. Above her, the headline read: “Feast of Love, or Fasting to Death?” The article came out just after Laney’s father, Brin’s first husband, had nearly died thirty-one weeks into a year-long fast. Water in the mornings and evenings, a cup of apple cider vinegar mixed with half a cup of honey at midday. Gradually, he had grown pungent, vinegar steaming off him in the July heat. Laney could barely bring herself to hug him for fear of the sour wavelets of moisture, a fact that shamed her after he was hospitalized. He left them soon after and now lived with a new family outside Tulsa. Sometimes, she still missed him, but she never told Brin.
Under scrutiny after the debacle with the first husband, Brin modified the Regimen, but only slightly. Privately, she was convinced that he had failed because he hadn’t truly believed. She had only to look at the pews spilling over with happy, skinny people to know that the church was a success story. And when that wasn’t enough, she pulled out the issue of Forbes magazine in which she came in second after Joel Osteen on the list of wealthiest Christian motivational speakers.
The church celebrated its five-year anniversary by releasing a special edition line of nutritional products and giving every congregant a voucher for any Feast of Love item sold in the gift shop. Soon thereafter, Brin remarried, a tall, God-fearing man named Corson. They agreed she should keep her first married name, because Schifferdecker hardly leant itself to puns. Brin and her family moved again, this time to a stately stone mansion with a long driveway that encircled a fountain and a topiary maze in the spacious backyard.
**
It was in one of the mansion’s seven bathrooms that Laney, fifteen, now stood, examining her body in the mirror. She had small breasts, more suggestion than flesh, but she liked what she saw. She touched her flat stomach, could practically feel it puckering with hunger. Sometimes, the pain got so bad she felt she would fold up like a tent.
She pulled open the bottom drawer of the bathroom cabinet, fumbled around for what she’d hidden there—a small tin of frizz-control pomade that smelled of sickly sweet green apples. Her stomach burbled. Scooping a gob of clear green gel onto her fingers, she brought it close to her nose, then licked it off. But there was no hint of the apples or sugar she smelled. She spat it into the sink.
Downstairs, a door slammed.
“Elaine?” Brin called up from the base of the spiral staircase. “Are you home?”
“Yes, mother,” Laney shouted. She threw on a robe, then took the steps two at a time. She would have to increase her aerobic output if she hoped to keep her new breasts from getting obscene. Sometimes when they passed a large-bosomed woman, Brin sighed quietly and told Laney that only weak-willed women let food dictate their body shape. “Laney,” she would say. “Do you think our Lord would give a woman breasts so big they would give her back pain? A woman’s breasts are one hundred percent fat. If those women would only come to a retreat or try one of our Full Souls cleanses, then Double D cups wouldn’t be such an epidemic.” Brin’s own breasts formed two triangular teabags beneath her oversized shirts.
When Laney arrived in the kitchen, she stood silently in the doorway for a moment, watching her mother unpack a bag of groceries. Brin Lambert, she thought. Her mother filled her with awe, and not a little fear. When Brin stood up, Laney could see the vertebrae moving under her mother’s thin shirt.
Brin noticed her and said, “Laney dear, come here and give Mother a hug.” Laney approached, reaching tentatively around Brin’s mid-section. Laney felt Brin’s long arms coil around her waist, the hands at once caressing and inspecting. When Brin pulled back, she gave Laney a little pinch where her hip started its outward curve. Ouch, thought Laney. Their eyes met.
“You’re glowing, sweetheart,” Brin said. “Have you just cleansed?”
“Not today,” Laney said, thinking guiltily of the pomade.
“If we could capture that flush in your cheeks and turn it into some sort of powder or cream blusher, women would buy it by the pound. We could call it…” She paused, and Laney held her breath, wary of interrupting a moment of illumination. “…Prince of Peach Blush. You could be the spokesmodel. A woman whose body reflects the respect she has for the instrument God gave her.” She took Laney’s chin between her fingers. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of the way take care of yourself. Your body is a prayer, I tell you. A prayer!”
Brin pulled a tiny notepad from her purse and jotted the blush name down.
“What have you had to eat today?”
“A banana.”
“Oh good,” Brin said. “Good.”
As she helped unpack and put away groceries, Laney thought about the calories in the banana; eighty, according to a Weight Watchers calorie guide that she’d found in the West Plano High cafeteria. If Brin knew that Laney was counting calories, she’d be livid. It was against church doctrine. A few years earlier, when Laney had first learned of the concept of burning calories from a friend’s dieting mother, she had asked her friend’s pinched, gray-skinned mother where the burned calories went. The woman had taken a long drag on her cigarette and said, They go to feed the hungry children in Africa.
“How was the Trial of Will, mother?” Laney asked.
“Tough,” Brin said. “Always tough, always a blessed lesson in restraint. Golden calves at every turn. But all of them got through it with divine strength, praise Jesus. Even Bob Taylor, though Edith Pickler caught him hovering in the packaged foods aisle, holding a box of donuts. She said the licentiousness in his gaze was just shocking.”
“Licentiousness?” Laney asked.
“Depravity, honey. God hates it.” Brin paused and looked ceiling-ward. “Laney darling, aren’t you excited to meet Jesus one day? To look upon His perfect beauty?”
Laney nodded yes, but the truth was, she didn’t like to think about it, because it meant thinking about death. “Poor Mr. Taylor,” Laney said, remembering the time that she and Hannah Best had, out of curiosity, gotten drunk off of Mr. Best’s bourbon, then walked two miles to the country store, purchased a box of Entenmanns’s crumb-topped donuts, and finished the entire thing before they got home, the powdered sugar sticking to their gums like glue.
“Well, Bob won’t advance if he stays at his current weight. But he knows the consequences. He must choose his own path. Feast of Love is not a good fit for everyone.”
“Because they’re fat?”
“No, Laney. Heavy people are just sinners in search of grace, and we help them find that grace. But sinners who keep on sinning, that’s another matter altogether. The Bible teaches us that some people cannot be steered away from the Golden Calf. And the Lord smote those people, did he not?”
“Are you going to smote Bob?”
“Smite, honey. And no, only God can smite. But I may have to excommunicate him.”
Laney wondered if she could be excommunicated for the Weight Watchers calorie guide or the pedometer or the Vogue article crumpled in her bedside dresser in which Beyonce lauded the effects of the cranberry juice-flax seed-cayenne pepper diet. Laney was sorry if her behavior disappointed God, but she was sure He’d understand her methods were a means to an end.
Her stomach growled loudly. “I’m going over to Hannah’s for a Supper Meditation,” she said. Was it her imagination, or did the lie burn a little on her tongue?
“Fine, but we’ll eat at six, sharp. Hurry back.”
As she pulled out of the garage, Laney recalled her own Trial of Will advancement ceremony from last year. Her step-father, Corson, said she was too young, but her mother, tall and august as a Corinthian column, said, “Dear, I hardly think you are the moral authority.”
By that point, Corson had just started to noticeably flesh out, and later, at the advancement ceremony that followed each Trial, Brin burned with righteousness as she delivered the sermon:
“I ask you, Feast of Love congregation, IS IT or IS IT NOT a BLESSING to be FREE of scales and calories and exercise and obsessive thoughts of FOOD? To give your body and soul over to HE WHO KNOWS YOU BEST, HE WHO CAN BRING YOU PEACE?”
A thousand congregants met her questions with a roar and uplifted, waving arms. On the huge television screens that projected her face to the furthest corner of the expansive church, Brin’s eyes gleamed.
“Or would you RATHER be back where you WERE, waiting for the next GODLESS CELEBRITY to tell you how to LOOK GOOD IN A BIKINI in TWO WEEKS?”
She stood triumphantly beside the lectern, her headset microphone feeding back ever so slightly, giving an electronic twang to her Texas drawl. The stage lights transformed her blonde highlights into a shining corona.
“Feast of Love congregants, I ask you, to whom do you ENTRUST your TEMPLE? Kirstie Alley? Oprah? Anna Nicole Smith?” At this, she paused and grinned at the shouts of No, Lord, No!, letting her flock become frenzied before ending the ceremony with her favorite line: “How about THIS for a celebrity SPOKESperson, AMERICA? THE LORD JESUS CHRIST!”
**
Laney steered towards the main road that divided the city, a weary stretch of highway lined with brightly-colored but cheerless fast food places. Laney felt sorry for Corson. When he had first joined their family, he’d been muscular and handsome, self-assured in the way of athletic men, and Brin showed him off to all her friends. She daubed on perfume and teased up her hair extra high and stiff before they left on dates. And Laney’s mother was magnetic: beautiful, confident, and suddenly wealthy. Together she and Corson looked like prom queen and king. But then they had married and within a year, Corson started to sneak chicken nuggets and Ho-Hos out to his workbench in the garage. When Laney found a splayed cardboard burger box crushed at the bottom of the trash, she had covered it up with paper towels, trying to protect Corson. But after a while, he couldn’t hide it anymore.
Laney shifted into the turn lane and cut across the road at a break in traffic, turning into the Whataburger parking lot. She pulled around back so the car wouldn’t be visible from the highway. Even though the BMW was a discreet gray and could be mistaken for any number of sedans in the area, she didn’t want to risk Brin’s questions if a nosey congregant saw her there. As she cut the engine, her hands trembled. The orange glow of the sign’s giant “W” fell across the dashboard. Clutching five dollars, she got out and locked the car. From the large vents next to the kitchen, thick steam reeking of fried food poured out. She hoped the smell wouldn’t linger in her hair. Through the glass door, she could see Marshall Barrett smiling. Tyler, the older boy he worked with, was moving his hands as he talked, eyebrows rising and falling as he shook his head dramatically. The dining area was empty, and when she opened the door, both boys looked over.
“Hey there, Lambert,” Marshall said. “Been waiting for you, babe.”
“Hi Marshall,” she said. “Hey, Tyler.” She flipped her hand up in a small, self-conscious wave. She loved it when Marshall called her babe. It sounded so adult. “How’s the burger business?”
“Pretty good,” Tyler said. “Not all of us are as pious as y’all Lamberts.” He thumped his belly.
“You look like you could use a bacon double yourself, girl,” Marshall said. “Got to give me at least a little something to hold on to.”
Now he was teasing, but in a way she liked. He reached out and put his hand over hers on the counter. She shivered. A Mexican woman walked in with a small child, so Laney stepped back to let the boys work.
When she had turned thirteen and got her period, Brin told her that if she let boys touch her before she was married, her skin would break out in a rash. She said it was God’s way of exposing the sin of Lust, just like fat was His way of exposing the sin of Gluttony. The first time Marshall had touched her—rubbing the back of her neck, up down, up down, up down, so slowly—they were at the last football game of the year. With the rain coming down like shards of cold glass and the players’ white helmets streaked brown with mud and the sound of tubas low and victorious from the band section, she’d arched away from his touch, though it had felt so good. When she got home, she rushed to the bathroom, half expecting to see her skin bump and pucker before her eyes. But all she saw were goose bumps, the pale hairs on her neck stiff with electricity.
Laney watched as the woman gathered her food and her child and left.
“Man, it’s boring as fuck around here on Sundays,” Tyler said.
“Got a preacher’s daughter here,” Marshall said, smiling. “Mind yourself, Ty.”
Tyler rolled his eyes. Inhaling quietly, Laney ordered a kid’s meal and handed Marshall the five dollar bill. When he gave her the change, he took hold of her hand and squeezed it around the quarters until it hurt, but in a good way.
“Enjoy that burger, ok?” He tossed some extra condiments into the bag. “See you at school tomorrow.”
Outside, the street lamps formed a chain of orange discs melting into one another. For a moment, Laney didn’t think about food. She didn’t count calories. She closed her eyes and thought of Marshall’s hand on hers. After weeks of hunger, she felt full.
From the road, she heard the blast of a horn. She blinked, straightened up, and walked towards the car. When she passed the trashcan, she jammed the unopened burger bag into the hole.
**
“Corson, didn’t you hear me?” Brin called. “Dinner’s ready.”
She stood in the doorway to the kitchen, backlit by its rows of expensive spotlights. He pulled himself up out of the chair, pelvis first, his knees popping loudly under his substantial weight. He did not like being fat. After enjoying women’s attention for most of his life, starting when he was thirteen and first poured himself into a spandex football uniform, he did not much care for his exile from female notice. But the weight, which originally resulted from unhappiness, now made him weirdly proud, his love handles a revolt against Brin’s despotism.
On the dining room table, a roasted chicken sat in a pool of melted butter, its skin flecked with rosemary. There were whipped red potatoes and a row of fat white asparagus lining the silver tray that Brin’s mother had given them for their wedding. For Corson, Sunday dinners were a torment. Brin took care to make everything look perfect, though they weren’t supposed to eat more than what could fit in their palm. The rest, they donated to the soup kitchen.
“Mother, this looks delicious,” Laney said, glancing at the clock and noticing with relief that she was on time.
“Elaine.” Brin looked horrified.
“I’m sorry Mother,” Laney said, realizing her mistake. “I…I was distracted.”
“Reveling in earthly pleasure will only hinder your faith, you know that.”
“Brin, she said she was sorry,” Corson said.
“Repentance is a fine thing, but you know what’s finer? Discipline.”
“If you like, I can just drive this over to the soup kitchen right now,” he said, gesturing toward the table. “Why wait until the end of the meal if we’re just going to pretend it’s not here?”
He stuffed his napkin under his plate. As they sat in silence, Brin carved the chicken. Corson and Laney watched its juices pool near the blade of the knife with each determined saw.
“Laney, I’m sorry,” Brin said. “But I must follow Church guidelines in this situation.”
“Aw, Brin,” Corson started, before Brin interrupted.
“A supper offense warrants a water week. I want you to think about what you’ve done, and I want you to pray extra hard while you have the advantage of hunger’s clarity.”
“Yes, mother,” Laney said. “Thank you.”
Laney got up and left the room, her sneakers noiseless on the carpet, her smile broadening, unseen, as she walked away. A water week would work faster than any diet.

As she rinsed the dishes, Brin watched her husband. Corson was slouched in a corduroy chair watching reruns of Press Your Luck on the Game Show Network. She couldn’t stop staring at his elbows, the way the folds of fat made them look like little faces puffing out of his sleeves. There was no way around it. Corson Lambert was fat. She could see his veins crystallizing with sugar, his body’s unused fuel yellowing to oleaginous fat, thickening as it crawled towards his heart. She had tried everything to get him right with the Lord again. Extra meditation, even a prayer retreat during which he was permitted only water and an occasional Choco-Cherry Love Wafer, when fainting seemed a possibility. She wanted so badly to save him from himself; she had done it for thousands of other people, herself included. How could her own husband continually avoid redemption? Brin knew the Corson situation was getting dire. He was a walking advertisement for sin. But what could she do about it? She closed her eyes and ran her fingers along the raised pink rosebuds rimming the plate she had just washed. When she opened them, Corson stood at the kitchen island.
“I’m going to Peaches,” he said. “Please come. Share a slice of rhubarb pie with me. Please?”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“I’m told you used to love that place.”
She hesitated, thinking about the deliciously sour pie, granular with sugar. She had loved Peaches and their rhubarb pie. She had loved it, and other things, too much. It was why she’d had to sacrifice. That’s what you did to have a good life.
“You should pray to God to release you from your cravings, Corson.”
“Oh, for goodness sake. God made rhubarb, Brin. He gave us sugar and eggs and wheat and milk. He gave us the brains to put it together and make pie!”
“I’ll continue to pray for you to become free, Corson,” Brin said, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “Goodnight.”

Upstairs, Laney sat in bed, entering the day’s meals in the food journal she kept in her closet, beneath the shoe rack. No dinner meant she had finished out the day well under the calorie limit.
A knock at the door and Corson’s muffled voice.
“Come in,” she said, shoving the journal under her quilted bedcover.
He peeked around the door. “Laney honey, you want to go to Peaches with me? Come on, girl. There’s something I need to tell you.”
His face was round and sad, his pale cheeks so fleshy it looked like his lips had to fight to form words. Laney folded her hands in her lap and stared at them. “Maybe you oughta do the Water Week with me.” She waited for him to acquiesce, or get angry, but he did neither. He just said he was worried about her, that she was skin and bones and needed a proper meal. And then he walked over to the side of her bed, knelt down so he could look her in the face, then wrapped her in his huge arms. She closed her eyes and let him press her head against his shoulder. She had always liked Corson, even after he got fat.
“Sweet girl,” he said. “Sweet Laney girl.”
**
The following Sunday, Brin watched Corson slide onto the pine bench closest to the church stage. His shadow swallowed Laney so that Brin could only see her daughter’s pale eyes and dark nostrils. He hadn’t taken a meal with the family since their fight about Peaches, and he came home smelling of fried chicken every night. But Brin had held her tongue because she knew that this level of personal discord required something stronger than nagging.
The crowd rippled with movement as congregants hugged and shook hands and laughed. Look at the abundant happiness, she thought. How dare Corson bring his gnashing, tireless teeth and grease-spattered tie here, among the flock?
Tapping the microphone, Brin silenced the audience. She loved that moment before speech, so pregnant with possibility. They were all waiting on her words.
“My blessed friends,” she said. A few heads nodded as murmurs of affirmation moved through the room.
“Every Sunday, I stand before you and offer my love and assistance to you on your quest to live a life right in the eyes of our Lord. I hope I have helped you. When you’ve been in that dark place, where God seems far away.”
“YES, Bless you!” A balding man shouted from his place towards the back of the room.
“Thank you.” She bit her lip, looked down, nodded her head. “But today, I need your help. I am asking you to stand beside me in my hour of need. Are you willing to stand beside me today?”
“YES!” Their collective reply echoed off the stone walls of the church. Brin breathed deeply. Yes. Today, the Spirit was there. She glanced at Corson, who sat with his ankles crossed, looking uneasy. I’m coming for you baby, she thought. Ready or not. She clipped her microphone to her collar and walked to the edge of the stage, following the stairs down to her family’s bench. She stopped in front of Corson, who kept his eyes fixed on the ground.
“Today, my blessed friends, I am filled up with the Spirit,” she said, voice rising. “I feel it in my bones. I am alive! The Lord is here!”
She raised both hands and the hall burst out in applause, a waterfall of amens spilling from the uppermost benches. A few people jumped to their feet.
“My problem today, blessed friends, is that I love too much. I love my husband too much. I am not going to stand here and watch him turn himself over to the devil!”
At this point, as she had predicted, Corson stood up and took a step toward the door. But this was how much she loved him: she would not allow him to leave. As had been planned prior to the service, Bob Taylor and Grady Wahler stood up from the bench behind Corson and took him firmly by the shoulders.
“Get your hands off me,” Corson said. He shook free from their grip, but the two men grabbed him again, harder this time.
Brin knew she had to work quickly. “Pray with me now! Lord, I feel you here in this room. I know You’ve come to save this man. He is good but plagued by evil urges. Help to free him from these urges. Free his mind, free his heart. Re-dedicate him to you, O Lord! Help him value the body with which You have blessed him.”
She reached out both hands towards the struggling Corson, whose head whipped this way and that like a tethered mustang. She placed her hands firmly on his forehead, threading her fingers into his hair at the roots and pulling tight. She needed to sustain the physical connection, to give the Spirit enough time to move through her fingers and into his scalp, down deep into his brain, deeper still into his heart. She counted one two three four five before Corson let out a roar, then stepped hard on Grady’s left foot, elbowed Bob in the stomach, and lumbered up the aisle towards the door. As he passed by, congregants shrank from him as if he were contagious.
Let him go, thought Brin. She had succeeded in laying hands. The rest was up to God. “Thank you, witnesses!” She cried. “Praise Jesus!” She glanced around the room. A single tear streaked down her flushed cheek. Ecstasy, these moments. People exclaimed. They danced. They sang. Brin skipped back up the steps onto the stage, clasped her hands over her heart, and did a small, spontaneous bow.
**
When Brin arrived home, she nearly stumbled over Corson, who sat on the floor with his back against the cabinets.
“I want a divorce,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I said I want a divorce,” he said.
She saw her reflection, orange, distorted, in the copper pots which hung from the kitchen ceiling.
“What?” She’d heard him, but it was a reflex.
“You’re lucky I don’t claim spousal abuse, after that show you put on today. And all those fasts. The damned berry cleanses that turned my shit pink.”
No, she thought. Absolutely not. Brin Lambert could not be twice divorced. Better to be married to a fat man than not at all.
“Now, Corson…”
“Stop,” he said. “I’m weary. You exhaust me. I thought I could do it. Or maybe I thought you’d lighten up a little after we got married. But you know there’s no room for me in your plan anymore.”
“You’re rushing this,” she said. “Why don’t we wait and see how the Spirit moves you?”
“If you think that being miserable for three years counts as rushing, then yes, by all means, I’m rushing my ass out the door.”
She felt her throat go dry. Steadying herself against the counter, she glanced at the knife drawer. She had the urge to run him through—to puncture his fat, unappreciative gut and ribbon him up into neat filets that she could store next to the bacon in the deep freeze. Clenching her jaw, closing her eyes, she said a quick prayer begging forgiveness.
“Very well, Corson,” she said. “I can’t control you. But I wish you the very best, I really do.”
“It’s like I was your accountant or something.” He turned and went upstairs while she stuck fast to the floor, unable to move. Finally, after she heard the swish of the front door closing behind him, she retreated into her bedroom, and further, into her closet. She plugged in the rotating fan and lay flat on her back under the rows of tailored suits that she had collected from years of public speaking. Hours passed and she fell asleep. That night, she dreamed of Jesus. He was so beautiful, his body lean and well-muscled, his eyes kindly and wise. When she finally dared to look up at him, he took her face between her hands and kissed her long and hard. The next morning, she woke flushed and confused, heart thundering. Could a dream be sacrilegious? But it had been so wonderful, that kiss!
She stumbled down the stairs and ran outside, expecting to find Corson’s truck back in the garage, but there was only a large oil spot in its place. On the other side of the garage, his workbench sagged in the middle from where his bulk had rested on it so many evenings. She noticed that he’d taken his toolbox with him, along with the equipment that usually hung on the wall over his head—handsaws and sandpaper and gleaming drill bits.
Opening the garage door, she stepped out into the humid morning. A whippoorwill called from the rosemary bush in the herb garden she kept by the side of the driveway. She moved towards the garden. Pushing aside the leaves of a tomato plant, she plucked a small fruit from the vine, felt its face smooth as a baby. She tightened her hand around it until it burst, its insides wet against her palm.

Later that day, Laney returned home to find Brin still kneeling in the dirt of her herb garden. She had pulled up all the plants at the roots. Her mother announced that Corson had left them. Laney wondered where Corson would stay that night. Once, when they had passed Happy Buddha on their way home from church, Corson had told her it would be his last supper if the Lord gave him any forewarning. She imagined him there now, ordering a plate of the hot oil dumplings, curling up to sleep beneath the red paper dragons propped on the Formica dining tables.
“Why couldn’t he see the glory of the world he was being offered?” Brin asked, sifting soil through her fingers. “All that glory, right in front of him, and he turned away.”
She scooped the ruined plants together, smelling the lemony basil leaves, the piney rosemary. She held a branch of oregano tight in her fist. She had liked the look of them outside her house, their perfect, tiny leaves and the immaculate white flowers that turned up on the untrimmed stalks. She thought of the lasagna her mother had made every Sunday, its browned crust like a protective shell, the tender noodles and bright red sauce beneath it, flecked with dried herbs. After church, the family—cousins, uncles, some neighbors—took seconds and thirds until it was all gone, washing it down with Coke or root beer, the TV on in the background, some football game. The whole house smelling of burnt cheese. The sloppy chaos of that life. Brin tipped her head forward so her chin touched her chest; she closed her eyes and listened to the silence of her hovering daughter, her absent husband.
**
At school the next day, Laney felt eerily alert. It was the seventh and final day of the fast. It was as if being emptied of food allowed her to be filled up with everything else—facts about the Whiskey Rebellion, special triangles, whole passages of Lord of the Flies catching and sticking in her gray matter like bluebottles to fly tape. She nearly cried when Mrs. Smith read the passage about Piggy falling to his death on the rocks. Piggy and his ass-mar. How could people be so cruel, she wondered. People younger than she was. Her mother would say it was because Piggy was fat, and being fat meant he was weak, and that people reacted cruelly to perceived weakness. Laney felt like that wasn’t what the author had in mind when wrote about Piggy’s brains being dashed on the rocks; that he hadn’t meant to be punitive. She looked out the window and watched the tops of the live oaks rustling, their leaves waxy in the late spring sunlight.
The bell rang, reverberating inside her ribcage. Leaving the classroom, she let herself be pushed down the hallway by the crowd of students. She smelled someone’s peppermint gum, the lavender sweetness of a clean cotton shirt. Out the door, down the steps that led away from the rotunda and out to the student parking lot, one step, another, then another. The sky was a bright May blue, the sun cutting a direct line to her eyes. She stopped, closed her lids against it. She thought of her father, skeletal and small in his hospital bed. In the white light of the Texas sun, Laney felt him there with her. How much she had missed him in the first years after he’d left, like the insane hunger in the early days of a fast. Now she just felt empty.
She heard Marshall’s voice behind her.
“Babe? You ok?”
She turned to him.
“No, I don’t think I am,” she said. She was so dizzy. She swayed, then fell into him.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Laney, what’s wrong with you?”
She wrapped her arms around his neck. Then she opened her mouth wide and pressed her tongue and then her teeth hard against the cords of his neck. He cried out, but even then, she didn’t let go.