The Book of Sara: Mark I - The Table
Abigail walked Adam’s street in the year they numbered 1986. She was not enrolled. She was not a girl among girls. She appeared in a house of bells and fluorescent light called Hazelwood West, wearing the long black dress the surface would tolerate, barefoot as the rite requires. At a corner table sat five the school had already discarded. One of them was named Sara. This book is hers.
1. In the house of bells the floor was polished and the speakers were old, and the children of Adam moved between routine and rebellion as if those were the only two rooms.
2. The cafeteria carved itself into tribes under a dead white light. At one corner table five sat apart, bound by the fact that no other table would keep them.
3. Deanna held the head of that table. Her loyalty was a blade she kept pointed outward so no one would see it shake. Jared and Tim made a religion of the joke, so the room would look at their mouths and not their fear. Lisa kept to the corner with a sketchbook open like a second country, drawing the room as she read it, beasts and all, the small weather sitting on her like a coat she had forgotten how to take off. And Sara sat hunched in a hoodie drawn tight, present as a weight, almost not present at all.
4. On a Thursday that the school called ordinary, the doors opened and Abigail came in. She did not glide. She did not ask the room for a path. Her steps had a measure no bell in that building kept. Bare feet on their waxed floor. The black dress moving like smoke around her legs. Wild dark hair. A face that held both the child’s stillness and the thing that does not flinch.
5. The clamor faltered. Her silence was louder than their chatter.
6. She stopped at the outcasts’ table as if the seat had been set before the building was poured.
7. “May I sit with you?”
8. Her voice was calm. Her hazel eyes passed over each face and stayed a breath longer on Sara. There was no plea in her. No expectation of refusal. Only certainty.
9. Deanna leaned back. “Why us?”
10. Abigail’s mouth found a thin smile. “Because, you are interesting.”
11. Jared snorted toward Tim. “We’re the nobodies around here. What’s interesting about that?”
12. Abigail’s gaze left him and settled on Sara. “Everything,” she said. Soft. Firm. As if the word were a hand on a hidden pulse.
13. Deanna shrugged at the empty chair. “Suit yourself, I guess.”
14. Abigail sat. She did not try to belong. Belonging is a farmed hunger. She had not come to be numbered by them. She had come to see which of them still owned their own fire.
15. Jared and Tim named her Witchy Woman for the bare feet and the dress. The name was a joke with a flinch inside it. Lisa’s pencil found her without asking permission; the hair, the stillness, the look that did not bounce off the room.
16. But it was Sara that Abigail watched. Every hesitation. Every flinch when a voice rose or a body moved too fast. Sara felt the watching and folded smaller inside the hoodie, as if cloth could hide an altar.
17. Thus the first sitting was accomplished. The table did not know it had become a threshold. Sara did not know she had been seen.
Lisa’s pad. The first sitting. The table is still only a table.
18. Praise be to the sovereign flesh.
19. Let the hunger go unfarmed.
End of Mark 1
