How They Were Found by Matt Bell

pregnant as any woman Spear has ever seen, her belly stressing the seams of her black dress. He can see patches of skin between strained buttons, and momentarily he desires to reach out and touch her stomach, to feel the heat of the baby inside.
    Maud sits, her hands and arms wrapped around the round bulk of her belly. She says, I need your help, Reverend.
    With quivering lips, she says, I don't know where this baby came from, and I don't know what to do with it.
    Spear shudders, trying to imagine who would have impregnated this woman. He realizes it has been weeks since he last saw Maud at services or group meetings. She's been hiding herself away, keeping her shame a secret. The people in the village may not be ready to accept such a thing, but Spear prides himself on his progressive politics, on the radical nature of his insight. He believes a woman should be able to make love to who she wants, that a child can be raised by a village when a father is unavailable. This does not have to be the ruin of this woman, but there must be truth, confession, an accounting.
    Spear says, Do you know who the father is?
    Maud neither nods nor shakes her head. She makes no motion to the affirmative or the negative. She says, There is no father.
    Through the curtain of gray hair falling across her downcast face, she says, I am a virgin.
    She looks up and says, I know you know this.
    Spear shakes his head. He does not want to believe and so he does not. He says, If you cannot admit your sin, then how can you do penance?
    He says, The church can help you, but only if you allow it to. I ask again, Who is the father?
    Spear asks and asks, but she refuses to tell the truth, even when he walks around the desk and shakes her by the shoulder. She says nothing, so he sends her away. She will return when she is ready, and when she is ready he will make sure she is taken care of. There is time to save the child, if only she will listen.
     
    At night, Spear wanders the floors of the small cabin, checking and rechecking the doors. He locks Abigail's door himself each evening but often still awakens in the night, sure her door is open wide. He rushes out into the hall only to find it locked, as he left it. These nights, he stands outside her door with his face pressed to the wood, listening to the sounds of her breathing. Sometimes, he dreams he has been inside the room, that he has said or done something improper, only later he can never remember what. More than once, he wakes up in the morning curled in front of her door, like a guard dog or else a penitent, waiting to be forgiven.
     
    The Electricizers fill Spear's bedroom with more specters than ever before. He can see some of the others, the older spirits he long ago intuited, can hear the creaky whisper of their instructions. These are past leaders of men, undead but still burdened by their great designs, and Spear can sense the revealments these older ghosts once loosed from their spectral tongues: their Towers of Babel, their great Arks. His fingers cramp into claws as he struggles to write fast enough to keep up with the hours of instruction he receives, his pen scratching across countless pages. Near dawn, he looks down and for one moment he sees himself not as a man but as one of the Electricizers. His freezing, fading muscles ache with iced lightning, shooting jolts of pain through his joints. Spear understands that Franklin and Jefferson and Murray and the rest are merely the latest in a long line of those chosen to lead in both this life and the next, and Spear wonders if he too is being groomed to continue their great works. He looks at Franklin, whose face is only inches away from his own. He sees himself in the specter's spectacles, sees how wan and wasted he looks.
    Spear says, Am I dying?
    The ghost shakes his head, suddenly sadder than Spear has ever seen him. Franklin says, There is no longer such a thing as death. Now write.
     
    February and March pass quietly, the work slowing