Read After James for Free Online

only half there, floating, and then upon the next showering was gone, and Denise knew that she had been addressed.
    When he got the story out of her Stefan tried to convince her that the vision was a mistake in perception. Denise said that whatever it was, it had not been an ordinary moment and shouldn’t be explained as such. She refused to talk about it further.
    At four thirty that morning, Stefan asleep, she got out of bed with the intention of driving to Shoad’s farm, but Stefan had hidden the car keys. She put a log on the fire and returned to the cold bedroom. The firelight coming through the doorway made shadow planes like great silent herds moving to near extinction. He spoke without opening his eyes. “If something has happened to your friend, I don’t want you going, and if it hasn’t there’s no need.” When the flashing lights came into their room she was still awake. The power trucks had turned off the road. Men in hard hats were making their way across the field.
    So you see he understood, did Stefan. It wasn’t hard to attribute the understanding. Shoad had bought the farm eight years ago, and Stefan had visited him a few times. Denise had met him twice then, and though they didn’t have much conversation she sensed there was something troubling about the way he kept to himself. There was something inside him he didn’t want others to see. Then he went to Europe and came back many months later, much changed, changed to his true self. He looked different, spoke differently, the halt and lurch of it. It was as if he’d fallen into an accent. Stefan tried to explain it away but she put into evidence the day Shoad entered the feed store where he bought seeds and supplies, and behind the counter the old woman was watching a little TV she had propped on a stool. On the midday news a mass grave was being exhumed—the woman, who’d told her husband, who’d told the man at the butcher counter standing next to Denise, didn’t say where the grave was—and Shoad stared fixed as if he’d never seen images on-screen before. Then he looked atthe woman and she was “horror-struck,” her word, because the set of Shoad’s face was wrong, as if he were having some kind of vision or seizure. She would never forget that face, the woman had said, not for as long as she lived.
    Stefan understood, yes, but his understanding wasn’t the same as a certain kind of knowledge, the kind Denise gained that night and carried with her into the next days. The days themselves lost meaning. Tuesday was not Tuesday, the day Irina was expected, because Denise no longer expected her. She seemed in fact to be somehow outside of expectation, of a world of approaching events, as if resigned to them, even though in any other time in her life this feeling, a red certainty was how she described it, would have been fear, the most acute form of expectation. This was a terrible time, of heavy hours. Though he didn’t say as much, Stefan wanted her to pretend the knowledge away. He himself had a limited ability to pretend, and he used it. But the knowledge Denise had been stricken with was bodily, and she knew it could not be expelled and that trying to do so would be not just folly but a turning away from her friend and from one of God’s mysteries and so she held the red certainty, became its keeper. Nothing, not the doctor Stefan called in, not the medications, not the Scripture he read to her of Naomi’s bitter sufferings relieved (Stefan not hearing how it only confirmed her as a chosen subject of the Lord), nothing could uncolour the knowledge.
    He said it was blasphemy to call a spell a vision. He said it was not a communication but something stirred up by her nerves, and so she kept the next episode to herself. She washanging sheets in the laundry room when it came upon her, brief but intense, and she let it play out. A cold fall day. She is running scared behind a naked woman in the creek, the water splashing their legs, and