Page 3

Punishment

“Mama,” I choked out.

“I can explai?—”

That was all I managed before a barrage of the metal dishes and spoons she used for her poultices came flying at me.

“Explain what, you filthy… slutty Jezebel? Why would you shame yourself like this?! Shame me?!”

She yanked off her left boot and came flying around the counter to slap my shoulders and arms with the hard sole.

“No, don’t cover your head. Don’t try to hide your disgraceful self now,” she screeched when I made the mistake of shielding my face.

She swung her boot again and again, so fast and furious, I didn’t realize she was herding me into my room until it was too late and the door slammed behind me.

Click .

She locked the door.

No! No! No! Not again!

An old terror surged through me, left over from when she’d locked me in here for months when I was sixteen—for daring to even suggest I wanted to go to college to learn a trade of my own choosing.

I banged the side of my fist against the metal door she’d commissioned from Naomi’s father, Danso, a furniture maker with a store along the route to Waterloo.

“Let me out!” I pleaded.

“Mama, please, please! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m so sorry!”

Silence.

No matter how hard I sobbed and begged, only silence answered me.

Hours passed. Then days.

Then weeks. Maybe. I lost track of the date quickly.

Mama had boarded up all the windows in the house when I was a child.

“To keep the gossipers from having their look,” she said when I asked why.

Without the sun’s rise and fall, time melted.

Reuben’s scent faded from my skin.

I carved three wolves and added intricate details, like deep-set eyes, toothy smiles, and waves of fur.

A Mama, a Papa, and a Baby Wolf who they treasured.

Winter was over, but I slept.

A lot. And made up stories for my happy wolf family in between.

They loved and respected each other.

Never yelled. Never shamed.

Just went on whatever adventures they could find inside my room.

A full moon came and went, then another.

Maybe three. It was hard to tell.

But the morning after one of them, I woke up to find strange gouges at the foot of my bed—deep claw marks, bigger and angrier than anything I’d seen on any of the community buildings leftover by someone getting stuck outside during a full moon.

Had I done that?

The Spring Fire had vanished around the time I lost track of the days, but the violence I worked so hard to keep suppressed hummed inside of me as I stared at the shredded wood.

And stared.

And stared.

Anywhere but here.

Who said that?

Oh.

It was me. Or, at least something inside of me, half-growling, half-whispering…

Anywhere but here…. Anywhere but here…

Anywhere but here.

It was a wish.

A wish, my soul couldn’t stop repeating.

But wishes were futile in a room where you couldn’t even see the sky, though.

More time passed. I stopped wondering how much and found myself sleeping whole days away.

But one morning, when I was actually awake and playing with my wolf family, the metal door banged open without warning.

“What is this nonsense?” My mother’s eyes narrowed on the wolves gathered around the little den I’d built for them out of buttons, fabric strips, and mattress stuffing.

I could only imagine how the scene looked to her--her overgrown six-foot-plus daughter playing a game of make-believe on the floor.

“I rebuke this tomfoolery!” my mother cried out with more fervor than our Bishop warning us against the devil.

Before I could stop her, she reached down and picked up both the Papa and Mama wolf.

One in each hand.

Crack .

She crushed them inside her palms—splinters of wood falling like judgment from her fists.

She was small, just five foot four, but I’d seen her snap thick tree limbs without wrinkling her blue dress.

Her brown eyes glittered underneath the prayer covering she always wore tied tight over her braids, even though they weren’t required in the privacy of your own home.

“Think I didn’t hear you in here, telling yourself those silly stories, girl?” she asked, her words overpronounced and scornful.

I didn’t answer. Only stared at the remnants of my wolf carvings on the floor.

“When are you going to realize that none of these wolves will ever want you for real like that?” she asked above me.

“If they come sniffing, it is only because they smell your desperation and know my idiot daughter will defy everything I’ve taught her to open her legs for any daft boy who looks at her twice.”

Anywhere but here .

I kept my eyes on the floor, knowing she didn’t want answers—only obedience.

“Stand up!” she commanded.

I climbed to my feet.

And we stood in silence, her gaze pressing down on me like a blanket made of lead.

She was more than half a foot shorter, but somehow, she always loomed over me.

“You hungry?” she asked after several moments of watching me stare at the wood splinters on the floor.

Am I?

I hadn’t eaten in…

I didn’t know how long.

But the moment she said the word, hunger came rushing in like a flood, along with the need to pee.

My bladder filled in an instant, and my stomach let out a low, embarrassing growl.

“Alright, then. Go shower.” My mother sucked her teeth and waved me toward the door.

“I’ll have something ready when you get out.”

True to her word, there was a steaming bowl waiting for me after my cold shower—sweet cornmeal porridge, thick and golden, with extra condensed milk and a dash of nutmeg.

My favorite. She must’ve felt guilty.

Cooking comfort food was the only version of an apology you’d get from Claudine Ellis.

I sat at our little wooden table—the one Naomi’s father had gifted to us when I was small.

As I ate, I glanced up at the handwritten devotional calendar on the wall above the cupboard.

She made them every Advent for the next year, spending all four weeks painstakingly choosing and writing out the verses.

Today’s devotion: Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Proverbs 22:6

The date underneath it made my stomach twist.

Nearly four full moon cycles had passed.

I’d been locked in my room for an entire season.

Spring was over, and summer had begun.

The longest punishment she’d ever given me.

Because, in her mind, having sex with a boy—actually daring to hope for another life—was the worst thing I’d ever done.

“This world is cruel, Sadie.”As if reading my thoughts, Mama sat down on the other side of the table with her own bowl of corn porridge.

“It’ll eat an idiot girl like you alive. I am only trying to protect you—even from yourself. Them wolves—marriage and babies—like I told you, that is not your path.”

She had told me that.

Over and over.

Since the moment I started to change, she’d made it clear: I was not for love.

I was not for wanting.

I would serve, like she had served.

I would learn her ways, become a woman of the same purpose, and not stray from her path.

Ever.

“Girl, eat,” she said, tapping the counter.

“Don’t dilly-dally. I only let you out because I need you to help me jar these summer vegetables before they go to rot.”

I nodded and ate faster.

Then I helped, slicing and jarring up the wooden boxes of corn, green beans, and young carrots we’d received as our portion of the community crop, while my mother cooked down the spinach and kale.

“There’s another community meeting tomorrow about the Bridal Exchange. Don’t get me started on that foolishness,” she muttered as she stirred the greens in a large steel pot.

“How ridiculous is it that all these parents are letting their girls break the Ordnung and fly across the sea to that heathen Hamilton girl’s kingdom?”

That heathen Hamilton girl was what Mama called Naomi’s second-oldest sister—the one who’d run away from the village and somehow returned a decade later with a wolf king as her mate and a kingdom full of eligible males looking for mates.

“The nerve of her,” my mother muttered as she ladled the greens into a jar with a slotted spoon.

I made the proper sounds.

Tsked in all the right places.

But my fingers compulsively kept dipping into my apron pocket, rubbing a thumb over the orphaned baby wolf.

Eventually, the day ended.

And I left the door to my room open, as I always did after a punishment.

But I lay awake long after the house went quiet, thinking, Anywhere but here.

And listening for her soft snores in the next room.

“Sadie!” Naomi whispered in surprise when she answered my tap at her bedroom window.

“What are you doing here at this time of night?”

It was so late, I’d expected to have to wake her up from a dead sleep.

But her eyes were bright and alert on the other side of her now opened window, and her delicate face was haloed by a strange, faint light—something cool and blue that couldn’t possibly be candle glow.

I blinked at it, confused.

“Sadie?” Naomi asked again.

“Everything okay? I haven’t seen you since spring. Your mom just kept saying you were too busy to come to church or see anybody.”

My eyes swung back to hers, the reason I’d come echoing louder than my curiosity about the blue glow.

Anywhere but here.

“I want to sign up, too,” I told her on a great burst of breath, fingering the baby wolf in my pocket.

The only one left.

“I want to sign up for the Bridal Exchange.”