The Gabriel Mansion, the place I’ve spent the last few weeks working as a maid and hiding from the obsessed cult leader who wanted me as his wife, is quiet. The front gate is wide open.
God punishes you in the afterlife. But on earth, while you still live and breathe and have a body that can be hurt, his vessels act for him. That’s what Jeremiah likes to say in his sermons.
And there is no punishment greater than the sweatbox.
The windowless cage, a wooden box in the wicked heat of the New Mexico desert, is a stifling space with no room to stand. No person to talk to. Nothing but an eerie silence, a deep pitch-black blackness, and the sting of your sweat dripping from your brow and into your eye.
After I lost Jeremiah’s baby, and he wanted to punish me, I spent one night in the sweatbox. I was in too much shock back then to be as terrified as I should have been.
I get my first taste of claustrophobia when Jeremiah’s acolyte throws me into the trunk of a black truck just outside the Gabriel Mansion’s iron gates; the lid slamming down so hard the vehicle shakes.
I break all my fingernails and scream myself hoarse in the hours I sit trapped inside.
It took six hours by bus to get from New Mexico to Massey, Arizona. My pounding head makes me feel like I’ve been living in darkness for days. I recoil from the intense New Mexico sun when the truck stops and the lid creaks as it swings open.
An acolyte yanks me out of the trunk he shoved me into hours before. With a painful grip of my hair, he drags me through the red dirt, away from the small cabins in the compound where everyone lives.
Toward a solitary cabin that stands alone.
I start fighting. Weak from not enough water and exhausted from hours without sleep, I have no strength to fight him with.
A door squeaks as it swings open.
I groan, and my head rings as it bounces off the wall when he shoves me inside.
The door slams shut as I collapse to the ground.
My world is black.
And hot.
Too hot.
There is no greater punishment than the sweatbox, and until Jeremiah decides what he wants to do to his runaway wife, this is where I will stay.
“Get up,” a harsh male voice orders.
“But I—” I blink, stunned by the too-bright light and the two men who drag me out of the sweatbox and leave me on the red, dusty ground.
I don’t know how long I was in the sweatbox for, but it doesn’t feel nearly as long as the drive from Arizona back to New Mexico.
They wait in a silence so heavy and oppressive that it presses me down to the ground even as I try to get to my feet. Ifeeltheir disgust as they watch me, waiting for me to pick myself up.
My sweat stinks, and it drips from every part of me. Time loses meaning when you don’t have the sun or a clock as a frame of reference. I don’t know how long I was in the box for, but I feel sick, dizzy and confused.
What memories I have are muggy, as crooked and warped as my sense of time.
I remember a small tin of water being pushed toward me, bread so stale I had to dip it into the water to soften it, and a corner of the sweatbox I crawled to and squatted to pee.
Using both hands, I push myself up from the ground. Shaking my hair out of my face makes my world tip. No one helps me when I stumble. Not even when I fall.
They just watch.
The camp is quiet.
It’s getting dark. Maybe it’s late afternoon? Someone spiked lanterns into the red dirt, along the path that winds through the small cabins. I know what lies at the heart of the compound, and it’s no place I want to be. My eyes skate left, settling on a raised patch of reddish dirt.
They buried my mom there.
