Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley Page B

mother’s wanton wickedness. She thinks Sorrow will be glad of it, to be taken up so that God might rescue her, and that Amity, too, will be free of her.
    Then she sees that the door to the man’s little shop is open. It shouldn’t be.
    Inside is Sorrow, touching his things. Her fingers are everywhere. She opens his glass-fronted refrigerators, where bottles glow blue and orange. The room grows cold from them and the bottles bead and drip. Sorrow runs her fingers through the mist, making smeary lines and swirls, but Amity can only think of the man and his fingers on her mother.
    Sorrow moves to the wooden countertop to touch pouches and packets, stacked in boxes, swinging from metal arms. She picks at everything, pinches and pokes.
    ‘What are you doing, Sorrow?’
    ‘Looking for the key, dolt. Where did you look?’
    Amity swallows. Sorrow told her to look, but she didn’t see any key. What she did see she saw plenty of.
    Sorrow pulls open drawers to rifle through them, ruffling papers and receipts, then scattering them. She tosses everything that isn’t a key onto the counter, onto the floor. ‘Aha!’ she says at last, and holds her hand up. But there is no key. She holds a box of wooden matches and gives it a little seedpod shake.
    ‘What do you want those for?’
    ‘Never you mind.’ Sorrow drops the box into her apron and turns back to her searching.
    Amity’s mouth is dry and she aches to take an orange bottle, to open it and see what’s waiting inside. She knows that it is theft and there must be a rule about it, but she also knows that she comes from a place where everything is shared. If her mother let a man touch her, did that mean that the man belonged to all of them now? Would he touch her next and would she let him? And then she wonders if that is the devil talking, snaking in her reasoning out of want for a drink? Her fingers curl around the neck of an ice-cold bottle. She watches its contents dancing, fizzing like a storm. She pulls at its metal cap, but she cannot turn it or pry it off. It hurts her mouth when she tries to bite it.
    Sorrow rattles tiny boxes of candy and flexes bendy sticks of gum. She pulls on a locked drawer and then pulls it hard. She can’t get it open. Amity slides the bottle back onto its shelf, defeated, and shuts the refrigerator doors, one by one, to keep herself from any further temptation.
    Sorrow bangs her fist down. ‘The key isn’t here. We’ll have to check the truck and if it isn’t there, you’ll have to go inside the house and check the man’s pockets.’
    Amity gapes at her. ‘Go into the house? Touch his pants?’
    ‘It’s for God.’
    Amity follows Sorrow from the shop to where the truck is parked, where the red dirt road starts. God has left its windows rolled down and the doors unlocked. Sorrow slaps dust from the seat and slides behind the steering wheel. She tests the gear stick and the pedals, doubtfully, commanding Amity to open the glove compartment. She finds more bits of colored papers, matches and work gloves and an empty cigarette packet. No key.
    ‘I was certain we would find it,’ Sorrow says. ‘I saw it.’
    ‘You didn’t see where it was?’
    ‘You don’t know anything about being an Oracle.’ Sorrow sets her head on the steering wheel. ‘I have been good. I have been so good and I don’t know how to do it.’
    ‘Do what?’
    ‘Make God come.’

    God says the end of the world will come with fire. But God says a lot of things.
    Sorrow sits in the man’s front seat and prays a key into the ignition. She prays the knowledge of gears and pedals, prays the tank full of gas. She prays while the sun beats down on the two of them, blistering the glass and cooking all they ask for. When she can stand it no longer, she tries to make God come, with fire.
    No one sees her light the match to flame it. No one sees how Amity screams. No one sees Sorrow set fire to the truck.
    No one sees Amity and Sorrow at all, not Dust, who said he