CW: War, violence, death.
The day before the blind missionaries first arrived in our village, we had been raided by one of Jurgen Blanco’s enforcement squads. Blanco’s people were all the same—gaunt, lupine-visaged mockeries of men and women with broken, half-formed grins that perpetually played about their mouths. When they drove into the village, we all knew what they’d come for, what they always came for: food, clean water, alcohol, sex, a place to sleep, and, above all else, loyalty. For over a decade, Blanco and his people had used our village as a waystation along their patrol routes, a layover between the capital and points south. The official military and most of the other rebel factions had absolutely no interest in our tiny mountain enclave, so it was the perfect refuge for a warlord like Blanco and his cohorts when the heat of their bloody trade rose too high. We had no say in the matter. Either we gave Blanco’s enforcers what they wanted and received a margin of stability or they burned our houses and executed our families. They’d already wiped clean off the map other villages who’d tried to resist them and we were not foolish enough to follow their examples.
That day, the day before the blind missionaries arrived, Blanco’s enforcers rolled in and did their usual: a little drinking, a little eating, some assault, and theft. We anticipated they would simply take their spoils and go, but what they really wanted this day was something they’d never asked for before. They wanted recruits.
They told us to meet in the town square and bring our young just out of school, our boys with barely a shadow of age upon their chins, our girls with a bounce still in their step. We hesitated at the order, but we did as they asked. And still it wasn’t enough. They went house to house, searching every room, breaking our meager possessions as they looked for hiders, for anyone who dared defy them. Once they were satisfied with their harvest, they lined up our children single-file and pointed rifles at them. They explained that everyone in our village had two choices: Either the young men and women they’d gathered could go with them and work as part of Blanco’s operations or they could kill them all right there, on the spot.
We screamed and cursed and tried to reason with the enforcers, but they only bowed to power, of which it was obvious we had practically none.
Gio Novich tried to bribe them with the extra money his family made from selling off a dead relative’s hovel in some far-flung town, but they laughed at the offer, shot Gio once in each leg, and took his youngest son and daughter anyway. No one else tried to bargain.
In all, Blanco’s men drove off with forty-nine of our children, stolen from us to become monsters and meat. We assumed we would never see them again—or, if we did, that they would be unrecognizable. We wept through the night, into the next day, and our sorrows could have cut a new river across the land.
It was into this haze of loss and degradation that the blind missionaries appeared.
Around noon the day after Blanco took our children, a pair of individuals wandered into the town square and set up a dark red canopy. Dressed in once-elegant evening wear that had been worn ragged and dirty, their eyes covered by thick strips of red cloth they wore like blindfolds, the pair looked like no visitors we’d received before. Beneath the crimson canopy, they laid out wide swathes of thick cloth, black as a moonless midnight sky. Then they sat down and they began to read out loud. The books they recited from were tattered, cloth-bound tomes with sparkling red symbols embossed on their front covers and spines; the words they contained were strange, on the verge of nonsense, like well-crafted riddles.
A strange magnetism coursed through our village. The duo’s alternating narration seemed a majestic dance, with each phrase both complementing the next and building upon the previous while also standing perfectly independent in its own right. The effect of the reading wasn’t quite poetry or rap or even a chant, but rather an otherworldly music built around rhythms and intonations of meaning. We halted our work, our travel, our mourning, and, though we didn’t quite know why, we shuffled to the town square and stood outside the missionaries’ canopy, listening to their words.
We tried to discern the message this odd pair brought us, but it came wrapped in metaphor and cryptic symbols. The missionaries spoke of “the hidden weave into which we are sewn” and “the gossamer layers of the world, violence stitched through them all.” They repeated a phrase—“onyx scissors within, onyx scissors without”—at the end of many of their recited passages, as though it was an invocation of some higher power, and crossed their fingers in odd ways. Whatever their faith, they seemed to be obsessed with textiles, with cloth and thread and needles and the practice of sewing.
Had it been any time other than the day after our children had been taken, we would have had little patience for what seemed like nonsense. Many proselytizers hawking poorly written holy books and disposable wisdom had wandered through our town before, and we’d ignored every last one. But perhaps the blind missionaries somehow chose their arrival carefully; perhaps they knew we were searching for a way forward, and they wanted to provide us with something of use; perhaps they knew we were vulnerable.
As the afternoon wore into evening, our whole town gathered around the red tent. We sat on the ground and quietly shared food and drink with one another, never speaking, never interrupting the missionaries’ flow. Even our infants dropped into silence at the sound of the missionaries’ sermon. We felt prickles along the bases of our skulls—not painful, but not exactly pleasant, either—like the sensation of a sleeping limb returning to life, while on and on the missionaries read, their scripture rebounding into the darkening sky, bringing stars to bloom above us. That these devotees of an unknown god spoke for so long without pause, without even a drop of water to soothe their throats, amazed us. We wanted to applaud, to join in their worship—if worship it was—if for no other reason than that we believed they deserved recognition for their endurance, but we remained silent, as silence befitted the ache in our souls.
Through the entire night and into the next morning the missionaries kept reading. We laid down in the square and drifted off to fitful sleep, our dreams haunted by images of wailing infants and a long, shining, deadly something lurking just beyond our field of vision. When we woke, the sun was struggling over the horizon and the missionaries had ended their lesson; they knelt within their tent, heads bowed, unmoving, barely even breathing.
We waited for them to say something more, to enlighten us or command us, but they remained settled in their fresh catatonia, so we brushed ourselves off and went about our mornings. We worked. We tended to the children that we still had in our care. We cooked meals and ran errands. We did all these things, but we did them poorly, with little result and little pleasure. Our thoughts swirled around our stolen children; our hearts pumped anger with one beat, sorrow with the next. We knew we could not live in this world the same way we had before Blanco robbed us of our future. We needed justice or revenge or, at very least, a distraction.
As the day wore on, our grief mellowed and another sensation took hold of us—a sharp tug deep within our chests, an overwhelming sense that we needed to move. It pulled us like fish hooked on a line, causing us to drop whatever we’d been doing and follow its lead. We lurched where it wanted us to go, where it provided the least resistance and pain: back to the town square and the missionaries’ tent.
There, the blind missionaries waited. They’d risen from their rest and once again held their frayed books open in front of them. The strain in our chests dissipated when we sat near them and waited for a new reading to begin. Soon our entire village had arrived, summoned to the missionaries’ service through means unknown.
We expected more convoluted scripture to pour from the missionaries’ mouths, but, when they finally spoke again, their words were from no language we could recognize. Not even the headmaster of our school, who was fluent in six different languages, understood a single utterance they made. The strange tongue slipped and slid from the missionaries, its sound all snaking sibilants that put us in mind of secrets and silk. It sent shivers down our spines, into our groins.
We listened, riveted, as the missionaries spoke, louder and faster, and faster still, beyond the point where their words could have been discerned by even one with knowledge of the foreign language. The air in the town square grew thin and tense; it left us breathing hard and set our hearts racing. Some of our elderly dropped to their knees. Some of our children yelped in excitement and fear. We began to feel lightheaded, unsteady on our feet, and the missionaries began to quiver.
At first, we thought it must be a hallucination or a trick of shadow, but no, the missionaries were quaking, rapidly, as though the very atoms of their beings were struggling to fly free. Tiny bits of the pair seemed to disappear and reappear—their hands whole one moment and gone the next, their chests solid and real then suddenly ephemeral, ghostly. Just as quickly as a part of them became intangible, it snapped back to safe, stable normalcy.
As we gazed at the spectacle, our eyes itched, watered, grew inflamed, and the missionaries’ blindfolds took on a brighter shade of red. Blood streamed from beneath those strips of cloth; it flowed down the missionaries’ cheeks and dripped off their chins.
A few of us stifled gasps, but no one ran away.
The missionaries untied the blindfolds and let them drift to the ground. As a mass, we fell back a step.
Beneath the cloths, partially erupted from each torn eye socket, was a pair of gleaming black scissors, blades pointing toward us, set open and ready to cut.
In another world, we would have gathered our guns, knives, and sickles and chased the missionaries from our town; we would have hated them for their violation of basic reality, their abject strangeness. In this world, though, we stared at those dark, shining scissors and wished for even greater revelations.
“Do you yearn for change?” the missionaries cried out. “Do you desire alteration?”
We didn’t know how to answer. So much of our lives was lived in a bubble of anxiety and anger. Of course we yearned for change. Only the powerful, the wealthy, and the dead would refuse a new world. All this we understood, but were afraid to voice.
Finally, from the back of the crowd, Lisette Okun, who’d lost two daughters to Blanco’s harvest, shouted “I want my girls. I want to be rid of Blanco and men like him.”
Murmurs of assent floated through the square.
One of the missionaries, the woman, stepped out of the tent from which she and her companion preached. She walked into the gathered crowd and we parted to let her pass. Her dress swished and swirled with every step. She saw with no eyes other than blades, yet she moved with complete assuredness.
She strode to the center of the town square, where a bronze statue of a military commander none of us could name stood upon a tall, granite plinth. She cocked her head to the side and the midnight scissors in her eyes cut the air, just once.
At the same time, the statue disappeared from off its base, blinked out of existence.
We pushed toward the empty plinth, looking for signs of trickery. We ran our hands along the top of the stone support, but discovered no wires or mirrors or other hints of cheap stage magic.
“How?” we whispered. “Where did it go?”
The woman only smiled and said, “Anything can be cut to size. Anything.”
“Do you wish to learn?” her counterpart boomed from inside the tent.
We could have said no. We could have abandoned the missionaries to their search for new adherents. We could have driven them away.
Instead, we said yes, first as a breath, then as a wave of pure rage that broke over the entire gathered village.
The woman rejoined the man, and the scissors in their eyes opened wide. Together, in perfect unison, they said, “Then we will teach you.”
And so, with vengeance leading us on, we entered a brand new faith.
• • • •
The day we took back our children came exactly nine months after they’d been stolen. The weather had turned cold and snow spun in the air. We rode to Blanco’s compound in old school buses the missionaries provided. How they acquired them we didn’t ask. We probably didn’t want to know.
As we drove, we kept readjusting the crimson blindfolds we all now wore—more a nervous tic than a reaction to any real discomfort. The discomfort had come before and it was not something we wanted to dwell upon.
We traveled for many hours, refusing to stop and be sidetracked in our quest. We passed through the mountains until they became hills and then through the hills until they leveled out into flat marshlands dotted with lakes. It was here, in the inhospitable swamps of the southern reach, that Blanco built his war fortress. Gradually, the guard turrets of the compound rose into view on the horizon, a hundred feet high or more and topped with bulletproof glass spheres where snipers waited.
Our palms sweated. Our intestines clenched. It was time.
We did as the missionaries instructed; we let the words of the Great Fabricator roll off our tongues and let ourselves be lost to their sound. We removed our blindfolds and felt the onyx scissors take shape within our skulls. Gripping our seats tight, we welcomed the pain as the scissors materialized, their handles firmly lodged in the space between gray matter and dreams, their blades tearing through scar tissues where our eyes had once shined. Some of us grimaced, some of us cursed, two or three of us vomited. Blood wetted our cheeks—warpaint for the upcoming battle.
“Focus on the towers,” someone yelled.
Though we could not use our eyes as we used to, we saw the weave into which all reality is sewn, and within that weave we spotted the towers with their guards.
“Focus. Focus on the seam. Then cut!” We heard the missionaries’ instruction from a distant place, a vibration through the threads of the universe, and we obeyed.
The towers and the snipers within vanished. Our buses kept rolling along, toward the entrance to Blanco’s base.
“Ready yourselves for combat,” came the order. “You must snip faster than bullets.”
The compound’s iron gates approached. We focused on them, cut together, and they were no more.
Our buses rolled through the entrance and were met with confused shouts and wild spurts of gunfire. A few windows exploded and a handful of us fell back into our seats, wounded. Those of us who remained upright targeted Blanco’s minions. We cut quickly, taking off heads or torsos, arms or legs or both. We didn’t have time to remove entire bodies from reality with precision, so our attack left a strange, bloodless collage of disfigured corpses in its wake.
We exited the buses and marched further into the compound.
Blanco’s soldiers fought on and we continued slicing bits and pieces of them from existence. When we spotted our children among them, guns drawn and firing, we made sure to call out their names, to force their glazed eyes into recognition. Mostly, it worked. Mauricio Duvetti did cut his son’s left arm out of this universe by accident and Jae Bahiri did shoot her father in the stomach before she realized who was running at her, but these were exceptions. Our children, once they realized what was happening and who was tearing apart Blanco’s enforcers, dropped their guns and stared at us with wide eyes and open mouths. They shivered when we rushed to them and embraced them. Trauma had clawed them mercilessly and its wounds were ragged and deep.
Still, we could not stop in the middle of the battle. If we let Blanco get away, if we let his enforcers roam free, they would regroup and return to our village with bigger, stronger weapons. If they could not use us, they would find a way to destroy us. So we had only one option: extermination.
Gaining confidence as Blanco’s grunts began to surrender, we snipped and slashed at every living thing in the fortress. The enforcers who shot at us, we bisected. Those who turned tail and fled, we beheaded. Even from those who raised their hands and dropped to their knees, we removed all limbs. Blanco—known for ridiculous extravagances—released a trio of angry tigers wearing armor and we cut those from reality, too.
We could not stop altering the cosmic fabric. We cut apart the walls, the floors. We turned cars and trucks and Blanco’s handful of tanks to nothingness. The compound began to resemble one of those odd old paintings in ancient museums—the kind that was all random shapes and lines jumbled together; it satisfied us, somehow.
Soon we heard the beat of helicopter blades against the air and knew Blanco was attempting escape. We hurried outside to ensure a clear line for our alteration and, as the black, ex-military chopper ascended, desperate to distance itself from our deconstruction, we made our final cuts—first the nose, then the tail, then, as metal hunk corkscrewed toward the ground, the rest of the damned thing, occupants included.
When every gun had fallen silent, when no other noise but the wailing of the mangled echoed through Blanco’s base, we let the onyx scissors dissolve and refitted our blindfolds.
We didn’t need to live in fear anymore.
Our children could not stop trembling.
• • • •
It’s been almost a year since we rescued our children and we no longer hear love in their voices.
A certain fondness still pools beneath their words, yes, a contented familiarity, but it commingles with fear and disgust, adding a sour bite to every question, every answer, every thought that escapes their mouths. We ask them, “What’s wrong? Why are you unhappy?” but their responses are clearly lies.
“Just tired,” they say. “Just bored.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
We try to hug them, to kiss them, but they shrink away ever so slightly—a retreat so minuscule that only someone who loves them would be able to tell.
They speak in much lower tones now than they did before and they constantly rub at their eyes, as if holding back tears. We can see their forms in the cosmic weave, pulling against the fabric, and we worry that they’re trying to undo their own stitching.
We constantly show them the many useful ways the onyx scissors can be used to alter the world, but they respond with no interest. We eliminate other, even more violent warlords’ entire camps in a flash and they run away from the battles; we clear-cut miles of forest in seconds and they lower their heads, refusing to look at the fields we create for development; we remove whole mountains that stand in the way of an easier life for our town, ourselves, and for them, but all they do is sulk.
They refuse to join our faith, too, though the missionaries continue to hold services in the town square for three hours every day. Our younger children—those who were with us when the missionaries arrived—can’t wait to join the divine tailorship upon their sixteenth birthdays. We will welcome them with open arms and, all the while, continue to try to understand why our rescued children, who should be happiest and most free, are so morose, so withdrawn.
Hans Valo thinks he has the answer, straight from his rescued daughter’s mouth. He told us that during an argument with her over attending the missionaries’ meetings, she said, under her breath, that “You’re all monsters. But none of us can say it because you’re always being monstrous for the ‘right’ reasons.”
We patted Hans on the back and assured him that she was young, and the young lacked wisdom and perspective. Surely her outburst was just normal rebellion, we said, misplaced anger. Surely it didn’t mean anything. Hans didn’t seem convinced.
As for the missionaries, they say they soon have to move on.
“There are other towns that need the faith,” they say, “other people who need to use the onyx scissors.”
They ensure us our children will eventually come around to our way of thinking and, if not, that “microalterations are always possible and sometimes necessary.” We ask what they mean by microalterations, but they simply tap their foreheads and smile.
“You are tailors now,” they tell us. “You will never be able to stop until you have the perfect fit.”
The scissors within our eyes yet not within our eyes seem to flex in anticipation.
We want to be happy. We want our children to be happy. We suppose we’ll have to keep cutting until we get the shape of happiness just right.
