Flap heel heel. Spank heel, toe heel. 

Agnes taps across the dirt path, her audience a stone wall laced with bougainvillea, magenta kisses puckering through thorny vines. She keeps her back to the statues of saints, their hands clasped in prayer, shoulders hunched forward as if pulled towards the headstones lined in neat rows across the lawn. She has spent weeks practicing her tap routine for next month’s recital, moving through each step like fingers proceeding along the rosary. 

Agnes clicks her heels and taps her right toe once more before bowing to her audience. The crepe petals of the bougainvillea flutter in applause. It is quiet at the mission; even more so here in the cemetery where even the birds settle into a reverent whisper. 

Agnes glances at the side door of the rectory, closed but not locked. She could go inside if she wanted, escape the bright afternoon sun that stabs her scalp. But she promised her mother she wouldn’t; that she would be patient for once in her ten years of life and wait. So, despite her boredom, she will obey, which is not to say that she is good, but that she is trying. 

A gopher snake slithers across the dirt and into the knotted vines of the bougainvillea. Even though the snake is reed thin and nonpoisonous, Agnes steps back and shudders. Once the snake disappears, Agnes is alone again on the path. She inspects her sneakers, the white canvas caked with dirt. Jesus walked along a dirt path like this one, Father Michel told her, only he was sandaled and brave. But Agnes does not want to be like Jesus. She is too afraid of death and pain; would rather remain crownless if it means thornless and free of scars.

Agnes starts at the top of her routine, moving down the dirt path, away from the door. Along with death, along with pain, along with thorns, she is afraid of forgetting a step, of freezing on stage or moving left when everyone else moves right, and, like Judas, only remembered for her mistake. Agnes is afraid of a lot of things. Not like her sister, Bernadette, her headstone one of the many she refuses to face.

God always has a plan, Father Michel told Agnes’ mother last summer.

Flap heel heel. Spank heel, toe heel. 

He shouldn’t have taken Bernadette, her mother insisted. Bernadette was good and selfless and holy and—

Step, shuffle, ball change. 

Agnes reaches the end of the path and curtsies.The courtyard is empty, but she is not alone. Bernadette is here, just a few feet away. Bernadette is at home, too, existing in the quiet moments between her mother’s sobs late at night. And Bernadette is behind the rectory door, the focus of their mother’s conversation with Father Michel. 

A miracle, her mother swears. Since praying to Bernadette two weeks ago, she stopped drinking—every drop of wine emptied down the drain, the bottles that usually lined the kitchen counter now replaced with pillar candles resembling glasses of milk.

Bernadette, her mother chants at home. Bernadette. Agnes has not heard her own name spoken in so long, she has forgotten the sound of it in her mother’s mouth.

Your sister is going to be a saint, her mother told Agnes this morning as they drove to the mission. 

Beatified. Venerable. Canonized. Words with too many vowels for Agnes not to trip over. They roll in her mouth like a bitter cough drop, unnatural and lingering on her tongue. 

Agnes scans the courtyard. Beside her, sunlight filters through an olive tree and dapples the path, the shadows shifting like waves breaching the sand. She has not been back to the lake since last summer; not since she slipped off the craggy edges of the hill, reaching for something to save her, grabbing Bernadette’s leg, both of them crashing down through brush and onto the damp earth of the beach, but only Bernadette into the rocks, her head haloed in blood, thorns dappling her palms and feet. 

Agnes misses the lake, though she can’t admit this to her mother. She is supposed to make sacrifices; to prove there is a reason she survived and not Bernadette; to be good, even if that was always Bernadette’s title and never Agnes’. Bernadette, the saint; Agnes, the tap dancer.

Flap heel heel. Spank heel, toe heel. 

Agnes doesn’t like thinking about Bernadette—doesn’t like how, sometimes, she misses her so much she can’t breathe, while other times, like now, hates her so much she wishes she never existed—but when she does, she can only think about that last day at the lake, those final steps along the cliff, the way Agnes screamed when she slipped, not for her mother or God, but for Bernadette, who would know what to do to keep Agnes safe; who knew how to fix everything Agnes ever broke; who understood that it wasn’t that Agnes didn’t want to be good, like her mother claimed, but that she knew there was no point in trying so long as Bernadette was there. And yet Bernadette is still here, suffocating the silence of the courtyard.

 Step, shuffle, ball change.

Agnes reaches the door and presses her hand against the wood, two pilgrims’ palms in prayer. She listens for the sharp cry of her mother, the gentle meditations of Father Michel, knowing that she will not hear her name—no prayers for Agnes, no miracles to document, no goodness to frame in a halo of light—all reverence reserved for the good, and not the trying. 

A wind interrupts the quiet, and the bougainvillea whispers. Agnes turns to see the gopher snake reappear, curling its tail and flattening its head. It hisses, and when Agnes closes her eyes, she can almost hear the chanting of her name in the low hum of the universe.

+++

Melissa Darcey Hall is a writer and high school English teacher in Southern California. Her work has appeared in Gulf Coast Journal, Baltimore Review, no tokens, Nimrod, and elsewhere.