Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

A reader, then.” He eyed me. “Dangerous quality in a girl.

In a million years, I never would’ve guessed that the first time I’d fall in love, it would be with the earth itself.

That’s the upside of being the pastor’s daughter and the Devil’s son, two outcasts who became friends the way we did. From the start, nothing has been off-limits.

What is it about us teenage girls that claws so deeply under people’s skin? We’re reviled and desired in equal measure; cringed at, laughed at, then lunged at.

I’m part of it. Not a sinner or a saint—just another creature. Mud and pollen and teeth and sinew. If there is a God, some higher power, it’s here in these woods.

Amazing how, even though sometimes I thought I hated my parents, their commandments still wormed their way so deep into my subconscious that obeying them was more muscle memory than choice. That had to be the worst kind of prison—the one whose bars were buried under your skin, invisible cages around your heart and mind.

was as hungry for stories as the Low Man was for souls, devouring every book that wasn’t a spiritual, each one proof another world existed outside the one I knew.

what I’ve observed is that power is a parasite. It wriggles inside you and takes over so all you can think about is how to get more of it and cut down anyone in your way.

Laws, religion, civil society—they were just veneers, constructions put in place by the powerful to tame us animals, impose control.

And since those systems are things that have never served young women, it’s no wonder they’re longing to escape.

Nature doesn't know good or evil. All nature knows is survival.

Here at the tip of Louisiana, it’s as if the sky and swamp and wild green trees know Holy Fire demands we lead staid, ascetic lives and try to make up for it, giving us all the splendor and decadence we aren’t supposed to want. Sunrises and sunsets are riots of color, the gulf sapphire blue, the black swamp laced with velvet-green lily pads, tall trees almost floating out of the depths. Trees everywhere, in fact: bending over dirt roads and bracing the shore and thick as a wall of sentries in the woods, dripping with Spanish moss. All this beauty stirs the soul, making one feel the pinprick presence of another order: God, perhaps, but maybe also something darker, secret beings with lives that unfold in the slivers between trees, whose slitted eyes blink open at night in the depths of the swamp, yellow and ancient as alligators’.

Love so violent it was a threat, a maelstrom—maybe that could do it. Maybe after it burned through me and I was transfigured, the world would look at me and be afraid. Wouldn’t that be something? The prayer of every teenage girl.

One of my greatest weaknesses has always been that sometimes grief and fear can grip me so completely that I lose control. I could feel it happening then, that old demon clawing: the shortness of breath, a pounding heart, the sense that I was spiraling and couldn’t stop.

I give her a tight smile. The meek shall inherit something. If I have my way, it will be all of Fred Fortenot’s secrets.

Our secret is a wound, a vulnerability. We’re bleeding in the water, and there’s a predator circling, so cunning I never saw it coming.

We’re the same age, but she grew up pretty and well liked, the star in church musicals, until she got pregnant out of wedlock and her life was derailed. My mother was vicious behind the scenes, and my father devoted a whole month’s lectures to the dangers of the fallen woman, a spotlight that humiliated the LeBlanc family

Not many boys want to date a preacher’s daughter, and rightfully so. After all, in a town like ours, it’s best to keep your vices—your underage drinking and late-night fumbling in the back seat—as far from prying eyes as possible.

Unease ripples through the crowd. This is Southern Baptist country, and people are prone to unease, apocalyptic and overly associative, seeing holy warnings in the smallest of things, like the pattern sugar makes when spilled across a counter. My father is where

Homicide investigation. Those were the words I was waiting for. Inside me, the fire catches and erupts. No one can see it, but I'm standing in the middle of Main Street, burning alive.

sometimes a person was bigger than that. Sometimes they were your freedom. The whole woods, the channel through which you first fell in love with the earth, felt at home in it. Sometimes a person was your home, the love you learned to grow for yourself, stored in another’s body. Sometimes they were the way your body first learned what it wanted. Sometimes they were an awakening.

I felt like I did whenever I read a line in a book that peered into my soul, putting into words a feeling that had, until that moment, lived only vaguely inside my brain. How remarkable for another person to capture your feelings exactly. Though I suspected I knew, I asked, “What do you mean?

People’s money might not tell you who they are, but their actions do.

The truth breaks wide open. I belong here on this good green earth. I’m part of it. Not a sinner or a saint—just another creature. Mud and pollen and teeth and sinew. If there is a God, some higher power, it’s here in these woods. In the beautiful strangeness of being a human, an animal wandering the world with soul-deep yearning. I belong here, and nothing can take that away from me.

And then I found Twilight.

I thought once that you might be the answer to the only prayer I ever made. Or my conscience—my heart, beating outside my body. Sometimes…” He swallows. “I think you’re a fistful of sand, and the tighter I clutch, the faster you spill. I don’t know, Ruth. You’re something I’ve never had a name for.

Ah.” His bushy eyebrows raised. “A reader, then.” He eyed me. “Dangerous quality in a girl.

Move careful round dangerous creatures, Miss Ruth. They get cornered and desperate, their first instinct is always going to be to sting you.

We were together through all seasons, but at our best in summer, our most alive when spring growth turned overripe, dizzy and fecund; when the air burst with so much hot, sticky life that you knew it was unsustainable, and fall would have to come and temper it soon. But for now, the days were long, sunlight bleeding into late hours, and when it finally vanished, we had our new world in the dark.