Sarah walks past the yellowed church banner proclaiming 'My hope is in you' three mornings and four evenings before she stops shying away. Fear turns to anger, turns to brittle paper and splinters under her fingernails. Turns to tattered pieces of Psalms, lying in the gutter.
She breathes quickly and feels strong for the first time since she came to this little town, with a child growing in her and a name that wasn't her own.
When she walks to the diner in the gray dawn of morning, the last strips of torn up paper have gone; when she walks back in the evening a new sign tells the world it's time to get a faith lift.
She smiles crookedly; the pun is painful in a way she is more than able to handle. Besides, faith she can find and lose and find again. Hope is the nightmare, the evil that didn't escape into the world where it could be fought.
Hope stayed locked tight inside the heart of man.
Where it could do the most damage.
Sarah can fight the nightmares outside the tiny little room she rents by the week, and what she can't fight she can run from, but she can't fight or run from that sickly sense of hope, and what she can't fight she hates the most.
Fears the most, if she's honest.
Pandora did this world no favors, she thinks. On the other hand, Sarah's carrying the hope of humanity inside her; she'll let it into the world and maybe never know if that does more good than harm.
She remembers the stage mothers she's served; their children with perfect teeth, perfect skin, perfect hair, barely living at all. Wonders if maybe everything has its time and theirs has come.
"I saw that smile, I'm glad the message met with your approval today."
The voice comes from behind her and she starts, flinches towards her gun and then forces her hand away. She turns awkward and wary. An elderly man stands at the top of the cracked steps up to the church door.
His black suit is dusty and rumpled, shoes scuffed and white dog collar stained. Listing a little to the side, broken down and old, nicotine stains on his fingers. He looks about as good as his church.
"What do you want?" She asks, as he seems to be waiting for something.
"Nothing." His shoulders rise and fall. "It's just you were so distressed by the last banner, I was waiting to see if this one made up for it. Although I'm a little concerned that you did smile - it's a pretty bad joke as jokes go."
She looks down, flushes and frowns, and damned if she's going to apologise. Damned anyway. "I wasn't distressed," she says mulishly. Scowls, because if she's not fooling herself, she's sure as hell not fooling him.
The old priest nods easily enough. "As you say. Of course, hope is a terrible thing," he continues almost offhandedly. "Terrible thing: just enough relief to keep you dangling, but never enough to give you comfort. Still, they say hope sustains us."
"Sustains us?" She snarls, more harshly than she intends. "Hope they live, hope the house isn't taken, hope to roll a six or pull an ace. Hope's just waiting for luck and luck isn't coming, Father. Only darkness and death and blood."
The man studies her for a moment, and she swears to herself, if he smiles, she's leaving. He doesn't smile, but he nods. "Well, there's hope and then of course there's grace - the gift of mercy."
"You mean, we deserve every bad thing coming to us, but because of some merciful beard in the sky, sometimes we don't get it?" Sarah smirks, hard. "Sorry, Father. I didn't buy it in Sunday school and I'm sure as hell not buying it now."
"No, I imagine you aren't." Now he does smile, but it doesn't sting as much as she thought it would. He shuffles down the steps, moving slowly. Hesitantly.
She reaches out to steady him without thinking about it, and he nods his thanks. "I think you'd prefer Shri Madhvacharya's philosophy," he says, when he's caught his breath. "Madhva said grace must be earned. Mercy is earned. Hope is earned.
"You fight for it," he finishes simply. "Just like you'll fight for that boy of yours, like you'll fight for his future a long time after you've stopped fighting for your own."
She presses a hand to her stomach and then lets it fall. "No hope but what we make for ourselves," she says, and almost laughs; winces at the unfamiliar sound.
"I suppose so." The priest nods and then smiles again. "Yes, I suppose so."
"I'm sorry about the board," Sarah rushes out, while she still remembers these things sometimes matter.
The man waves a hand. "Oh, it was time for a change anyway, and it's not often we have such a passionate critique."
This time her laugh is less of an alien thing; she keeps it short anyway. "You make any other jokes like that, you may get more."
She helps him back up the steps; murmurs another apology and means thank you, murmurs she'll see him again and means goodbye.
She leaves that night; she's learned quickly to trust her instincts, but she doesn't need instincts to tell her the priest had no way to know she was pregnant, not at eight weeks.
No way to know that her child was a boy.
When she passes through the city again, John is six and the church has been boarded up for years. Its last message is gone pale and old, and what the graffiti doesn't obscure, polluted dust does.
She runs a hand over the worst of it, absently brushes the grime away on her pants. "There is surely a future hope for you," the Proverb says. "And your hope will not be cut off."
She smiles; she gets the joke.