Revelations: Parts I and II

Story about scripture, poetry, and being a Jehovah's Witness daughter

This is a 10-part series that braids fiction with personal essay—about a Jehovah’s Witness girl’s turmoiled relationship to literature and poetry (and an infinite amount of other things). I spent a year and a half working on Revelations. It was all I really dreamt about for that time and about 6 months after I finished it.

As I wrote it, I didn’t imagine a broader audience beyond my younger self and maybe other Jehovah’s Witnesses, current and especially former, or those raised in similar religious communities. I’ve yet to submit Revelations for publication because I don’t think a home for it exists (due to both subject matter and structure). But I want (need?) it to breathe, so here it is!

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I

The image glints in the sunlight, as if to call for our attention, and draws us both at once. I watch as she lifts it slowly from the pile of photographs, each print uniquely stained and creased by three decades of life.

In it, she is sitting on a floral couch in the Southeast LA apartment where I would soon be born, her soft black curls framing a face that, at twenty-three, is plump with hope (She often says of these days, “What did I know? I was just a girl”). She is beaming down at the thin and yellow hardcover book she holds over her belly, which is round and vibrating with life. She is reading to her womb: to me and to herself.

This is one of her favorite photos of us, she says; she would read to me every night, praying that the lessons would stay with me deep into my lifetime. But she speaks this not with the brightness of the young woman in the picture. Her face is sunken and mournful. Fine lines sharpen around her eyes as she studies it, trying to decide if she cursed me instead.

The words on the front cover of that book are etched in a typeface that looks like a red ribbon: My Book of Bible Stories.

I peer at the photo and try to imagine what it must’ve been like sleeping in the primordial waters of my mother’s womb, dreaming of the sugary lullabies being read to me. There is a dream, an epic playing on a stage: the eternal, divine Good sparring the mortal, earthbound Evil. Who will win? Bible stories wove around me as my eyes and toes and strands of hair materialized. I absorbed those words, embedding them one by one into the helixes braiding inside each of my cells, just as I absorbed everything my mother ate and drank.

How could I forget any of it? Long suppressed memories rise to the surface, and I remember that yellow book like a flame that once lit up every moment of my life.

II

We had long since moved out of Southeast LA to the arid valley at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. It was October, and the mountain ranges that circled the horizon loomed behind clouds of gray-brown. That night, Santa Ana winds flew down from the mountains, gaining momentum as they hit the hills, spinning debris and smog, rousing embers and smoke.

I had been dreaming of a snake. Though I couldn’t see it, I could hear its rattle growing closer. I opened my eyes, and the rattle turned into the sound of blinds crashing against my window, lifting and slamming against the glass, letting in flashes of moonlight. I could feel the gritty air sweep through.

Realizing I had left my window open, I tried to rise. I couldn’t. I tried again, to lift my arm, my neck, but gravity’s pull was too strong. Breathing was difficult. When I tried to speak, I choked. My heart felt like it had traveled to my head for safety, where it thumped painfully in my ears.

Finally, it was over. I could lift my torso, and I sensed that only a few minutes had passed. I heaved and gasped, like breaking through the surface of the ocean in the midst of drowning, and called for my mother with my first full breath.

The nighttime air soon morphed into her face. Wildly and half dreaming herself—she had just woken up—she asked, “What happened? Are you okay?”

I needed to close the window. The sweat coating my skin began to chill, and I shivered. Recognizing fear, she ran out of my room and returned with water. “It’s okay,” she whispered, soothing my damp head as I drank. “When you’re ready, tell me what happened from the beginning.”

I started with the nightmare and described how it all progressed from there. Then came another gust—the sound of an ocean wave crashing. She shut the window, and suddenly it was very dark, quiet, and still in the room.

“That doesn’t sound like a nightmare to me,” she said at last. I could not see her face when she continued, “No, that was something else.” She placed the palm of her hand on my chest, where my heart pulsed visibly.

“I think I’m feeling a little better,” I murmured. It was only half true, but now I wanted her to leave and deal with the anxiety on my own. Outside, the winds picked up, howling in and out of spaces. A patio chair smacked against a wall, a terracotta pot tumbled from a table and shattered, a branch creaked before it snapped from a tree. I followed these sounds listlessly.

“I think I know what happened,” she said, taking a deep breath, exhaling, and rising from the bed where we both sat. “I have suspected, for some time, that there are demons in this house.” More than fear, more than pain, there was insult in her voice.

“I don’t understand,” I said soberly. The night’s events now seemed comical and distant.

“You do understand, because you have brought demons into this home!”

“How?”

“Those books you’ve been reading—what are they about?”

She recalled the long summer, how I did little else but rest my eyes upon the splayed pages, even as I walked from one room to the next.

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Parts III and IV will be shared next week. Thank you to whoever made it this far. :)