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wasn’t enough to make up for the lonely.
    I missed the days when I was small enough to climb into bed with Mamma and Daddy and stretch out on Daddy’s belly, tapping out hymns on his shiny front teeth while Mamma played my back like a drum and we all sang together.
    Evenings when Mamma and Daddy sat out on the doorsteps talking to David and Laura, who were expecting a child that next March, when I knew I was inside alone, I crept into their bedroom, pulled back a blanket, and buried my face in their sheets, sniffing for something that would fill me up.
     
     
     
    A t Fire and Brimstone, we all looked alike, and that made me lonely too. We didn’t all have the same color eyes or the same textured hair, but it really didn’t matter. Our shadows came in two varieties: male and female.
    We were all lanky. We all dressed alike. We slept in the same hard beds and washed with soaps made from the same iron pot. All the men wore beards clipped close and work boots that left the same muddy tracks. All the women pulled their hair into buns and left their faces bare for the sun to adorn as it would.
    We may as well have been skeletons, unidentifiable. We may as well have interchanged our bones.
    I used to pray that God would stunt my growth and keep me little—so at least my frame wouldn’t be confused with anyone else’s.
    Pammy was the relative closest to my size, and as we grew towards being lost in bodies all the same, I’d do my best to make my shadow different, even from hers. Afternoons as we marched through fields, I’d study our shapes bruised on the ground and pull myself up taller or fling out my arms to keep from getting confused about which shape belonged to her and which shape belonged to me.
     
     
     
    I t was the middle of October when David knocked at our door before daylight. I heard him downstairs, crying to Daddy about how Laura’s unborn baby was demanding to get out. By the time I was dressed, Mamma and Nanna, Bethany and Wanda, the aunts and women cousins all sat in the living room inside David and Laura’s house, praying and drinking hot water with honey. Laura was in bed. Nanna made her keep her feet up, forbid her to even stand to go to the bathroom. Pammy and I peeked in from the windows, listening to whispered words like “spotting” and watching Nanna remove soiled towels from between Laura’s legs, watching Laura crying until Mamma crawled into bed beside her and held her head.
    We crouched down in the bushes, and Pammy, who had a face like Grandpa Herman’s, speckled as a trout, asked, “Will it die?”
    “Yeah, it will die,” I snapped at her. “If it comes out now, it probably won’t even have lungs yet. It won’t be able to breathe.”
    “But God’s wind’s almighty,” Pammy insisted. “It won’t die if God doesn’t let it.”
    “Even God won’t be able to help it if it don’t have lungs,” I whispered back.
    “Yes he will,” Pammy sniffed. “God can do anything,” and she stomped off, leaving me sitting behind the bush alone.
    Pammy and I were in charge of the chicken coop. It was time for us to get the eggs, only an hour before the bus would come to pick us up and take us away for the day. I hurried to join her, running down the dirt road and feeling the morning air hit at my bare legs in the places where my socks had already slipped down.
    By the time I caught up, Pammy was crying hard, and she looked at me and yelled, “You don’t have no faith.”
    “I do too,” I said.
    We fed the chickens. She threw them the corn, and I threw them the laying mash that we kept in metal trash cans beneath an oak tree. While they were eating, we entered the lopsided doorway of their dark old pen that smelled hot and like a secret no matter how cold it was outside. We walked around opposite walls, lifting the eggs from the nests, wiping the ones streaked in manure onto the straw, and placing them in our baskets. Above us on the rafters, one old hen who had missed the