![]() They didn’t take her to the city to save her, because she was damned already. Jonas’s mother died of her last pregnancy: she put a knitting needle all the way in and scraped around inside until she bled to death. Jonas lived with his father and siblings in a house near the perimeter, and when the Feinman brothers were little they used to play with the magnetic field, approaching it to see who could stand the electric shocks the longest. Since we’d started meeting Jonas Feinman in the fields, Olga had changed. I went Sh-h-h, because Father was not far away. That’s why Olga spat in the marmalade: at least a part of her, she said, would leave the colony and travel to the city. The men went to the city, with the Reverend’s permission, to buy supplies, and sometimes they came back different, bareheaded, happier. ![]() What did you see? What’s there? Not a word. ![]() Whenever we asked her what it was like, she would suddenly go deaf. ![]() Mother had gone to the city once, many years earlier, not long after I was born. Olga and I dreamed of the city and everything that lay beyond the perimeter we seized on snatches of music from vehicles driving past on the highway and scoured the sky for aircraft, full of passengers, brushing the stars. It wasn’t for us, that marmalade: Father took it to the city when money was running short. Olga spat into the pan of boiling marmalade for the sheer pleasure of watching the phlegm dissolve slowly among the red bubbles. We wanted to see if the pockets of his overalls were bulging, because that was the sign that he had come back with delicious things we don’t have in the colony, like locoto candies or liquid-center bubble gum, but the only thing bulging in Father’s overalls was his belly. We were making marmalade in the kitchen through the window, we could see Father unhitching the horse and unloading the gallons of herbicide he had bought in the city to spray on the cornfields. The Devil gets into our thoughts, coiling up, spying, spinning his web. It’s not like there are two skies we’re all the same, them and us and the animals.” “For the people out there, we’re the Outside. “There are no rivers of blood or flying letters or any of that stuff,” Olga said. But, according to Olga, the adults made up those stories about the Outside just to scare us. The perimeter is our heritage, a reminder of our triumph over the world. If we are ever tempted to see what there is outside the colony, the obedience collar reminds us where we belong: at a distance of forty yards from the perimeter the current is a mere tickle, but as we approach the magnetic field the shocks become more intense, more compelling, until we turn back to the way of the Lord. Beyond the perimeter lies the jungle with its shadows, and beyond that the city with its illusions. Here we conquer nature by the force of tractors and prayer, taming the wilderness, subjecting it to order. We never see them again, because we are the people of the narrow way, who work the earth and speak the name of God while waiting for the end of time. When people leave, they vanish into the shadows, Mother used to say. I sucked on her tit as if I were the little calf that Jacinta the cow had just dropped, and Olga had to cover her mouth so she wouldn’t wake Father and Mother. Her armpit hairs tickled my face like corn floss, and the inside of her arm smelled like warm ashes and bonfire smoke. Susana, let’s play cows and calves, she’d say, and lift up her nightie to offer me her tit. She and I used to sleep together, and sometimes, in the darkness, we’d play cows and calves. My sister, Olga, got tired of life on the narrow way. Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” That is why we must not let ourselves be diverted from the narrow way, the way of our Lord. “The World Outside is made of darkness,” the Reverend says, “and whoever crosses the perimeter shall be swept away by the shadows. But the Devil is also the scarecrow that runs across the fields when everyone is asleep. There are those who swear that he hides in the jungle, beyond the perimeter, where the branches whisper secrets that drive men crazy. Some say that he travels with the wind, others that he dwells in electricity. He can be the nightjar flying across the sky or a reflection on the surface of the river. The Devil can be a cloud, a shadow, a gust of wind that shakes the leaves.
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