I imagined all these things with a burn of jealousy, for I had not received my woman’s blessing yet, the rush of blood between my legs that would signify me as useful. I imagined her floating above our beloved town of Peaches, dropping God glitter over us like an angel, summoning the rain to cure our droughted fields. I imagined her proselytizing to the vagrants sleeping on rags in the fields at the edge of town, combing the women’s mud-baked hair, holding their hands and exorcising evil from their hearts. I longed to know where she went when she left our apartment each morning, returning in the evening flushed, a bit more peeled back each time. So not even my own mother could tell me what her assignment was that unseasonably warm winter, wouldn’t tell me months into it when spring lifted up more dry heat around us, and everything twisted and changed forever. To speak of them directly would be to mar God’s voice, turn the supernatural human, and ruin it. And you should never reveal your assignment to another soul, for assignments were a holy bargaining between you and your pastor and God Himself. You had to be a man of deep voice and Adam’s apple. To have an assignment, Pastor Vern said, you had to be a woman of blood. Excerpted from GODSHOT, now available from Catapult Books.
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