Minor Prophets Read online

  ALSO BY JIMMY CAJOLEAS

  The Good Demon

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cajoleas, Jimmy, author.

  Title: Minor prophets / by Jimmy Cajoleas.

  Description: New York, NY : Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams, 2019. | Summary: After their mother’s death, Lee and his sister escape their horrible stepfather by fleeing to their grandmother’s farm, where Lee hopes to discover the truth behind his haunting visions.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019010422 | ISBN 9781419739040 (hardback) | eISBN 978-1-68335-642-4

  Subjects: | CYAC: Visions—Fiction. | Cults—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.C265 Mi 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Text copyright © 2019 Jimmy Cajoleas

  Illustrations copyright © 2019 Jay Miceli

  Book design by Siobhán Gallagher

  Published in 2019 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  Amulet Books® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

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  “With Dreams upon my bed thou scarest me &

  affrightest me with Visions”

  —William Blake

  The night Mom died I had a vision.

  I was half drowsing in my bed, my headphones cranked, watching the ceiling fan swirl. It was probably four in the morning, and I couldn’t sleep. I could never sleep. I’d read until two thirty, when my eyes had started burning, and I’d shut all the lights off, turned the music up, and prayed for a sleep miracle, but that miracle just wasn’t coming. I was in the middle of that kind of gray state between waking and dreaming, and I got this strange feeling like I was being watched, like I wasn’t alone in the room anymore.

  I looked toward my window.

  A man’s face was there, grizzled and wild-eyed, staring into my bedroom. It was like I was paralyzed, like I couldn’t move at all, not even to scream. Because I knew this man, and I knew he wasn’t real, that he only came in my visions. I called him the Hobo, and when I saw him he was always watching me, his eyes bloodshot, his beard ragged, his face pressed against the glass, like any moment he would smash his face through and come for me. He was a bad omen, a promise of awful things to come.

  I felt the terror grip my chest, the horrible tingling in my arms and legs and face that meant the rest of the vision was coming, that meant the world was about to split in half and reveal itself to me.

  In a flash, I saw it all.

  Mom’s car swerving through the night. The right front tire rattling weirdly, shaking itself free, rolling off toward the highway median. Mom’s car jerking and sparking, yanking itself from the road, slamming into a tree. The car crumpling, now half a car, the hood smashed skyward, tree limbs gouging the windshield. The stillness after the collision. Smoke and the smell of burnt tires.

  Mom’s bare bloody arm, limp, dangling out the window.

  I saw other things too.

  A sunset glimmering over a lightning-split tree, two gray clouds like watchful eyes in the distant sky.

  A blank gravestone, fireflies floating around it glowing holy in the nighttime.

  A red cloud of hummingbirds flitting wild over a field, a whirlwind of color and fire.

  A woman who looked like Mom but older, gray-haired with eyes that sparkled like the stars.

  An owl, wings spread wide like a crucifix, perched on top of a barn.

  Horace’s Trans Am in the garage. My sister, Murphy, sad in a black dress searching the trunk as if some kind of secret hid inside.

  When I came to, I was screaming.

  I flicked my lamp on, and the room was empty. No man was at my window, no hummingbirds anywhere.

  I know what you’re thinking. I’d just finally fallen asleep and had some kind of nightmare. But I told you already: It wasn’t a dream, not some random assemblage of the day’s events thrown together haphazardly in the back of my mind, not a weird brain film collage that meant absolutely fucking zilch.

  It was a vision.

  A warning, a premonition.

  I had to hurry. I scrambled out of my bedroom and onto the stairs to find my stepdad, Horace, screaming at Mom in the foyer below.

  I saw Mom look back at him, her eyes fierce and burning. She wore jeans and a plaid button-down and combat boots, and her long blond hair was wild and tangled, like she’d been fighting in her sleep.

  “Just you goddamn wait a minute,” he hollered.

  I hated Horace. I hated Horace more than I’d ever hated anyone in my life.

  “This ends now,” said Mom. “I’m going, and don’t you fucking try and stop me.”

  Mom left, slamming the door shut. I ran down the stairs and outside, but she was already in her car, swerving out of the driveway. I chased her down the street in the hot starlit summer night, waving at her, screaming, begging her not to leave, until her headlights disappeared around a corner.

  My sister, Murphy, came walking outside, half awake and worried.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  I yanked her out of the way as Horace’s Trans Am came roaring past us, cutting over the neighbor’s lawn, laying black tread marks all over our street.

  Please, I prayed, please let this one be a false vision. A lie, like so many of the others. Even though I knew it wasn’t. I could feel in my bones that this one was real.

  “They’re just fighting, Lee,” said Murphy. “It’s okay. She’ll come home in a few hours, same as usual. Right?”

  But I couldn’t answer her. Because I knew that wasn’t true. I knew exactly what was going to happen.

  I knew Mom was never coming back.

  Things had been weird with Mom the last few months. She just hadn’t been herself.

  Like the time two weeks before when I went downstairs for a midnight snack and found Mom peeking out the windows and then snapping the blinds shut, like she was watching for someone. Before I could ask what she was doing, Horace swooped in and threw his arm around her, trying to coax her back into bed, them whisper-fighting the whole way.

  Or the time when Mom opened our front door one afternoon and screamed. Murphy and I came running up behind her.

  “What is it?” I said. Mom only pointed, her hand trembling, her eyes all bleary with tears.

  It was a hummingbird, its throat ripped open, its guts splayed across our welcome mat.

  “A stray cat probably did it, Mom,” said Murphy. “It’s just nature.”

  But Mom turned and ran to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. I knew hummingbirds were Mom’s favorites, but this wasn’t like her, not at all. I mean, Mom was the toughest woman I’d ever known. I’d seen her take a machete and chop the head off a cottonmouth that had wandered up the gutters to our house without a second thought. She was never one to be mortified by gore.

  Or strangest of all, the morning when I woke up early and foun
d Mom staring up at the living room wall, the furniture moved away and all the photos taken down. A picture was painted on the prim white, a kind of mural, wild slashes of colors like blossoms blooming, all light and energy. It covered the whole wall, maybe six feet tall and four across—a painting of a tree, little flames hovering all around it like birds, a giant gash down the middle of it like a cave you could crawl into. It wasn’t exactly a realistic painting, but it felt real, if that makes any sense. It felt real in the way my visions feel real, like you could slip into them and live forever. Realer than real—that’s how Mom described her dreams sometimes, and that’s what this painting felt like too.

  “Mom,” I said, “who did this?”

  She seemed startled by me and even more so by the mural that had sprung up on our living room wall. Mom looked at her fingers, her clothes, all speckled with paint.

  “Why,” she said, “I suppose I did.”

  That tree loomed over us. There was something so familiar and strange about it, like maybe it had fallen out of an old memory that I didn’t remember having. I realized Mom was shaking.

  “We have to cover it up,” she said. “Quick, before Horace and Murphy wake up.”

  “But this is amazing, Mom,” I said. “I didn’t know you could paint.”

  “I can’t paint,” she said. “Not anymore. Now help me.”

  We took what was left of the white and covered over everything as best we could.

  I told Murphy about it later, and she could hardly believe me.

  “That’s insane,” she said. “I’ve never seen her so much as doodle on a napkin before.”

  “I know,” I said. “And Murphy, it was good. I mean really good.”

  “Why does all this worry me so much?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but it worries me too.”

  See, none of this made any sense if you knew our mother.

  Mom was a badass, a chain-smoker who had never attended school a day in her life but could fix a flat and clean a gun with equal precision. She was gruff and rude and a total genius. Mom had homeschooled us since we were kids. She taught us basic self-defense as toddlers, and she trained Murphy in Brazilian jiujitsu until Murphy accidentally broke Mom’s arm in the sixth grade while performing a particularly vicious reversal. I have never seen our mother prouder. She even had Murphy sign the cast first in her shaky looping scrawl.

  I guess maybe all the weirdness started when Mom married our stepdad, Horace, about a year back. Yeah, that was definitely the first time I started to worry about her.

  Because Horace was a hard man. Six-foot-seven, 250 pounds of unsmiling cruelty. I would watch him smoke cigarettes while he did dumbbell lifts in the garage, his mostly bald head shimmering, his one last lock of hair dangling down his forehead in a swoosh. We called it “the unicorn” when he wasn’t around. That was because if we had mocked his desperate hairstyle in front of him, he would have thrown us down the stairs. Not that Horace ever actually laid a hand on us. He never needed to.

  For example, one night three months before he married Mom, Murphy stayed out well into the night doing god knows what with god knows who, and she did not return until three A.M., exactly six hours after her curfew.

  Did Horace scream at her? No.

  Did Horace whip her? No.

  Did Horace ground her? No.

  Did Horace take Murphy’s 1967 Fender Telecaster and hurl it through her window, shattering glass onto the driveway, the two-story drop snapping the neck of the twelve-hundred-dollar vintage instrument into pieces?

  Yes, that’s exactly what Horace did. As our mother watched on, curiously silent.

  As if in awe.

  So marrying Horace was Mom’s first out-of-character act. We never thought she would get married, never even considered it. At first—for six months or so—she was happier than I’d ever seen her before. I mean, Mom positively giggled walking around arm in arm with the asshole, and that was a welcome sight. I don’t know if you can understand this, but when you’ve seen your mom bounce from guy to guy your whole life, always disappointed, always somehow let down that yet another fellow couldn’t measure up, it’s a real joy to see her with someone she actually likes, someone she seems to respect. And he was good to her—he really was, at first. Things seemed like they were going to be okay. We even sold our janky old bungalow and bought a newer, nicer (but way more boring) two-story borderline McMansion, because that’s what Horace wanted, and we all moved in together. But each day, as Mom became less and less recognizable as the strong, brilliant, estimable single mother who had raised us, Murphy and I became more and more worried. Mom blew us off, saying she wasn’t feeling well and she had a headache and could we please leave her alone. We pleaded our case to Horace, who told us—and I quote—to “mind your own fucking goddamn business.”

  “She’s our mother,” Murphy said, “so it is our own fucking goddamn business.”

  At which point Horace merely pointed his finger at her and held it there, one inch from Murphy’s face.

  I waited for her to bite it. I hoped she would snap it clean off at the knuckle.

  But such was Horace’s power—the fierce, unblinking stare, the menace of his outstretched pointer finger, the lit cigarette smoking (indoors, a thing that would have been inconceivable in our house before)—that it cowed even Murphy. She shrank from him, trembling.

  For the life of me, I could not understand what Mom saw in the guy. And I guessed now I’d never know.

  The day of the funeral was gray, threatening rain, the sky all rumbles and groans. No one came to the service except a few kindhearted busybodies and some old lady named Shondra that nobody knew. None of Murphy’s cool friends showed, and I didn’t have any friends. I figured at least a few of Mom’s exes would be there—Mom had more than enough to pack the place—but turns out jilted ex-boyfriends don’t show up to funerals. Not even our grandmother came—our mother’s own mother. It would have been nice to have met her for the first time. After all, this was the woman who had paid for everything in our lives—even down to our old house, the one we had before we moved in with Horace—through this bank trust she had set up for us. I had always wondered about her, begged Mom to let us know her, to go and see her sometime. But Mom just went grim and refused, same as always. I wondered if Grandma even knew that Mom had died.

  Horace kept his distance from us. He hadn’t said a word to us all day—not when we ate breakfast together (stale Cheerios in skim milk), not when he drove us to the funeral, not even at the visitation as we stood next to our mother’s mannequin-looking body in the casket. I mean, what they had done to her was shameful. She looked fake, like some kind of human Barbie doll, her cheeks caked with this awful makeup, a contented smile on her lips, the sort of placid look I never saw on Mom’s face when she was alive.

  At the service nobody spoke except the preacher, and he didn’t have a clue who Mom was. It was insulting, him droning on about being in a better place, about God forgiving, about all of us meeting again in the hereafter. What fucking hereafter? Mom had never believed in God or the afterlife or anything except the moment, the right now of everything. And right now Mom was dead—a corpse, emptied-out and embalmed, a husk. There was nothing left of my mom in that casket or maybe anywhere else. The whole thing felt like a mockery.

  I was so grateful for Murphy, that I didn’t have to do all this alone. I sat there bawling my eyes out, watching Murphy try not to cry, her back unnaturally straight in that black dress of hers, gripping the pew all white-knuckled, holding everything in. I wished I could get her to just let go for a minute, but that wasn’t the kind of thing Murphy did. I was the weepy sibling, something Murphy managed to never give me any hell about. Murphy was good like that.

  I couldn’t figure out why Horace was acting so weird. I mean, he wasn’t ever a warm person, but you could at least expect fury or anger from him, some bit of rage under the surface. But that day he just seemed preoccupied, like something else w
as on his mind. It was strange, you know?

  At the gravesite, which was unbearable, by the way—a gray-grassed plot of nothing, little tombstones with their humped backs slouching around us, Mom’s coffin up on this mechanical lowering device, a little blue tarp slung up to keep out the rain—Horace kept looking over his shoulder, scanning the trees for somebody, like he was afraid of being watched. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing or what he was looking for.

  The time came for us to sprinkle soil on the casket. Horace was supposed to go first, but he wasn’t paying attention, and the preacher had to give him a nudge. Then he just walked up to the casket, tossed some dirt on it, and stormed off like he had something better to do.

  We found him sitting in the Trans Am, honking at us. Our mother was dead, and the asshole was honking at us. He rolled the window down and stuck his head out of the car.

  “Move your asses,” he said.

  They were the first words he had spoken to us all day.

  After the funeral, Murphy and I hung out in the garage, still in our nice black clothes, while Murphy smoked. I was shell-shocked and numb, all cried out. I kept trying to write a funeral poem for Mom the way Auden had written one for Yeats. “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry” and all that, but nothing was coming, nothing seemed right. I couldn’t stop thinking about my vision: Mom’s car sliding wheelless over the pavement at a hundred miles per hour. The police told us she hadn’t felt anything, that she’d died instantly. I sure hoped so. And what an awful thing to hope, you know? It made no sense that the best thing you could ask for in life was an instant, painless death. I mean, what did that say about the world, about living in it? How easily, how quickly an entire life—the whole universe of a person—could just vanish forever. What was to become of us, the ones left behind? Who was going to take care of us? Horace? Are you kidding me?

  Murphy stomped out her cigarette, walked inside the house for a minute, and came back with a pair of keys.