The Unchosen Child
1970s, Wiregrass, Alabama
The day Veronica failed to fulfill the ancient prophecy was the day she became my daughter. But I don’t care that she’s not the Chosen One, only that she’s loved.
“Mommeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Veronica’s shrieks are sharp and insistent, verging on that dog-whistle high pitch that always signals her impatience. “Mommy! Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! Want you!”
I should be firm, not give in to her every little demand, but she’s just so stinking cute that it’s hard to resist. Here I am, crouched down in my striped seersucker shorts set, squatting on the patterned green and white linoleum in the kitchen, next to my little one with her white-blonde curls bouncing on her shoulders. My red apron, freshly floured by my handprints and hers, is askew, thanks to my toddler’s little hands pulling at it as if it’s a game to get my attention.
“Mommy!” Even louder this time, shriller, her voice competes with the latest disco song crackling from the FM radio, which sits among the newly woven macramé plant holders on the counter.
I shush her quickly. The last thing I need is Mrs. Casey next door overhearing and getting the wrong idea, calling the cops on some wild suspicion. The older woman—maybe late thirties?—already watches me like a hawk, ever since I tainted her neighborhood three years ago by showing up as a teen mom with a newborn and neither a husband nor an obvious source of income.
“Maybe selling drugs,” she’d gossiped, trying to guess how I could afford to live here. “Maybe in cahoots with the devil.”
She was dead wrong about what kind of activities funded my secretive lifestyle in a country club community behind tall iron gates, but closer than she realized about who was behind my presence here. As long as I could keep her nose out of my business, my adopted daughter and I would live here, for eighteen years, the two of us quietly discarded. Veronica, because she hadn’t fulfilled the prophecy when she was born, and me, because I was the only person who knew other than Veronica’s birth mother, an elite council of High Priestesses, and a couple of recruiters with the supposed ability to read souls.
Not that I can blame my sweet baby. I’d never hurt a hair on Veronica’s head; I adore her more than anything.
More than anyone. Considering how she came into my life, I’m probably the only person in the universe who truly loves her for who she is, not for who she should have been.
“What’s the matter, Peanut?” I keep my tone light, soothing enough to convince her to lower her voice. “As soon as I finish frosting your birthday cake, we’ll go outside and you can play in the sandbox in the back yard, okay?”
“No! Play now!” She pulls at me with surprising strength for a three-year-old. Immediately, I lose my balance and land bruisingly hard on one bare knee. She stops, fascinated just as suddenly by the inside of my right wrist. She jabs her tiny index finger at my tattoo. “What dis?”
Instantly, I curl my fist inward, concealing the Walking Lightning bind rune that’s almost like a relic from my past life, away from her innocent gaze. “Just a mark, Peanut. Nothing for you to worry about.”
“Why you have a mark, Mommy?”
I muster a gentle smile. “It’s okay, my little one. It’s a symbol of a promise I made a long, long time ago.”
“When you and the witches used to dance in the woods with the big black birds that said caw, caw, caw?”
I laugh. I’ve told her stories of my time with the Daeganean priesthood, but her imagination has transformed them into cheerful fairytales far from the grim reality—a reality she will hopefully never know. The secret Order of Daegan has been around for thousands of years and, Lord Daegan willing, it will endure for several millennia more as it ushers humanity into a new era after the coming pole shift. No one knows when the next extinction event is coming, even with our divination gifts and the special power bestowed upon Initiation into the order—if one chooses to accept the gift—of seeing across one’s own lifetime. We always assume the end is near and prepare as if we’ll see it in our own lifetimes, just like so many other religions in the world. So far, no one who has accepted the gift of “all time is now” has memories of the end of the world as we know it.
“I wanna play!” Veronica wails. “Now!”
“Okay, okay, little one. Hold still while I get the chocolate frosting off your face.”
Earlier, I had let her lick the beaters, our usual mommy-daughter baking ritual. She makes a mess every single time, but I never mind. My heart always brightens as I watch her little tongue lapping at the mixer’s two detachable beaters as if they’re chocolate-covered lollipops. This time, she managed to get most of the frosting in her mouth but left a perfect half-circle on her chin with dabs on her nose and smears on her cheeks.
Licking the beaters clean is her favorite part of our baking ritual, even better than eating the cake while it’s still warm inside the yellow layers. She’s spent the last hour giggling, before turning impatient, and the air is heavy with the smell of batter and sugar. It’s the scent of home, happiness, and comfort, blissfully ignorant of a world run by an elite group of witches who sacrifice everything to guide the human race through what they will not let be its end. Sometimes I wonder about what I left behind, but I prefer not to know.
I grab a washcloth and turn on the water at the sink, but nothing comes out. Odd. I paid the water bill. I’m always careful to stay invisible and not give anyone reason to come looking for us or disrupt the life I’ve built for Veronica here. I haven’t used any water since last night when I gave Veronica a bath and put her to bed. I’ll need it today, not only to clean Veronica’s face but also for my own shower and the kitchen cleanup of all the dirty dishes waiting in the sink.
Shrugging, I turn back to Veronica with a dry washcloth and, careful not to be too rough, wipe the excess frosting from her face. She scrunches up her nose and bats me away playfully, turning to run toward the screen door that leads out of the kitchen and into the back yard beyond the giant willow tree that shades the corner of the house.
“Wait, wait, wait!” I grab the floppy sun hat I made for her birthday and chase after her. The white hat with red grosgrain ribbon, which matches her homemade sundress, perches atop her curls, just enough to shade her face from the sunshine as I open the door and shoo her out. “Stay in your sandbox,” I call after her, “so I can see you from the window, and I’ll be out in five minutes.”
I watch first from the screen door and then from the window as she races to the wooden sandbox not over twenty feet from the corner of the house where I’ve shoved her favorite playscape against the chain-link fence that separates Mrs. Casey’s back yard from mine. Her son, Ronan, who can’t be over ten years old, joins Veronica, the fence between them, as he happily shows off his latest yo-yo tricks and his new cowboy hat. He reaches through the fence to snap off a drooping branch of the willow and try unsuccessfully to fashion a crown out of it for Veronica.
Through the open window, I can hear my toddler babbling away about the sugar-white sand in the box, but thankfully not plainly enough to reveal that I’d “borrowed” a car load of beach sand when we drove home from Panama City’s Miracle Strip Amusement Park last weekend. Both kids seem happy enough chattering through the fence that I can look away for a moment, without Mrs. Casey criticizing me as “overprotective” yet again.
“The child is in a fenced-in back yard,” Mrs. Casey tells me at least once a week, accompanied by an overly dramatic eye roll and the distinct smell of too many afternoon sherries to lubricate her soap operas. “She’s perfectly safe. You don’t need to stand over her all the time. Good Lord. You’re gonna give that baby a complex just because you yourself are too young and immature to have a baby. You don’t want your little girl to be spoiled, do you? Good grief. It’s the 1970s, not the 1870s.” Then she’d excuse herself to go back inside to watch her game shows and leave me to ponder my lack of maternal aptitude.
Was I really making my little girl a weakling by not giving her more space to be independent? Did I, as Mrs. Casey often suggested, need some of the pills her doctor could prescribe so I wouldn’t be an anxious mother and damage my daughter’s psyche?
Somehow, I don’t think I’m the wrong one in this ever-repeating argument. The priesthood would kill me if anything happened to Veronica, even if she wasn’t as special as they had hoped. Her birth mother, Siobhan, had been my best friend since we were Veronica’s age or younger. We’d grown up together in the shadow of the priesthood, and we’d both Initiated by the time we were fourteen. I’d been an orphan taken in by a High Priest and his wife before I was out of diapers, but Siobhan had been the daughter of the Ranking High Priestess and had a destiny of her own to lead the priesthood one day. She was the one regarded as the superhero, and I was her pudgy sidekick. We had played six-string and twelve-string guitars in high school, framing ourselves as a duet, yet Siobhan was the one with star power and I was the one singing harmony to her melody. We’d been sixteen when she got it in her head that she would be the mother of the Chosen One—in her own way, not how the council of elders dictated.
Hot tears well in my eyes. I glance again at Veronica and then at the butter knife in my hand as I sculpt the frosting on her birthday cake. Almost done. I glance up again at Veronica and Ronan, then back down at my handiwork. I miss Siobhan. I miss my family, but Veronica is now the only family I have.
According to the prophecy—one of many prophecies within the priesthood—a thousand years would pass before the most powerful witch in the history of the order, the one destined to lead humanity through an extinction event and hasten the resurrection of our sleeping God, would be born to a powerful High Priestess and her even more powerful lover. Siobhan decided to create her own destiny, disappearing for several months and returning home pregnant. I’d helped her keep her secret.
But when Veronica was born, that’s when reality hit hard, even harder than her mother.
Siobhan already knew, thanks to the talented diviners in the priesthood, that she, like her mother before her, would one day lead the priesthood.
Siobhan also already knew, again courtesy of our diviners, that one day her daughter would take the reins from her.
Siobhan knew, too, that the greatest honor she could hope for within the priesthood, second only to leading the human race through its next extinction event, was to give birth to the next incarnation of our ancient leader.
What Siobhan didn’t know was how to count to a thousand. Old curses and punitive bindings are specific, and when a witch is cursed not to return for a thousand years—no matter how powerful they are—they’re not returning in approximately a thousand years but in exactly a thousand years.
I flip the lever at the sink to wash the excess frosting off the knife and, again, nothing comes out. I’ll have to call the water department or a plumber to have it checked, I guess. Or maybe Mr. Casey next door.
High-pitched laughter outside pulls my attention back to the children. Veronica waves goodbye to her buddy as he gallops away on an imaginary horse. She plops down on the sand, her hat hiding her eyes as she gathers sand into mounds and pats them with her tiny fingers.
Smiling to myself, I place three tiny pink candles on the top of the chocolate cake, then add a fourth.
To grow on.
I’d thought my purpose to the priesthood, to my God, and to the human race, was the greatest gift I could ask for, but Veronica topped it all. The leaders of the priesthood had given me a new mission in life: disconnect myself permanently from my best friend but care for her daughter in secret so Siobhan could go on one day to have another child who would become the Chosen One. They’d told me it would be a sacrifice, but when I look at Veronica, it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice at all.
It feels like love.
How could the council and the priesthood’s recruiters take one look at that sweet baby and call her a mistake to be hidden away in preparation for an ancient witch who once stood with her wolves on the edge of the world and condemned it to burn? Maybe that old soul was the only one with the power to save the world now, but Veronica is no throwaway. I don’t care if she has power or not or that she looks just like my best friend.
Sighing, I put the last dirty dishes in the sink and cover the cake with a glass bowl. We’ll have spaghetti and cake later tonight, and Veronica will make a wish and blow out the candles. Just the two of us. Because she and I are all we have in this world.
I brush my hands on my apron as I glance out the window toward Veronica’s sandbox. I. . .I’m not sure what I’m looking at.
The fence.
Veronica’s sunhat on the ground where the sandbox had been.
A lake of mud and water where the ground had been.
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