It was the time for young Amish men and women to go beyond the gate and taste the Outside world. I’d been daydreaming about Outside for so long. Someday that’s going to be us out there, Elijah said, gesturing with his chin toward the road.

It was as far away from our everyday world as we could envision. Once, we spied a sleek black limousine and fancied that it contained men in tuxedos and women in evening dresses. We imagined that they were driving to the movies or going to parties. Since the time we were children, Elijah and I had made up stories about the people in the cars. But during the summer, with the windows down, we could sometimes hear snippets of their laughter. We were too far away to see their expressions. Other times the drivers would be people around our age, talking on their phones or chatting with friends in the passenger seat. Often they would be couples with children strapped into harnesses in the back seat. Sometimes men or women drove boxy sedans in pressed suits and blouses. At this distance, we could barely make out the drivers. They drove their shiny cars down the two-lane highway, intent on going home or to work or school. At the black ribbon of road just beyond the corn that carried the English to and from their business Outside. I knew what he was looking at, the same thing I was. He leaned against the fence beside me, staring out at the field. I wasn’t sure what I thought about that yet. Tall and lanky and sunburned from working outdoors, he cut a handsome figure: dark hair and hazel eyes that crinkled when he smiled. He was a year older than me, but he would do anything I asked. It’s mean.Įlijah looked at the stone, shrugged, put it down. This was a remote part of our little settlement of Plain people, but it made a good place to get away from chores and parents.īeside me, Elijah had picked up a rock to scare the birds away.ĭon’t throw that, I said, automatically. The wire fence was pierced here by a wooden gate, to move farm equipment and cattle.

I leaned on the wooden fence post, watching the birds scratch and listening to them caw to one another in their inscrutable hoarse language. The ravens had begun picking at the corn that was drying in the fields, black specks in the gold. My first inkling was on a day in late September under a cloudless blue sky. The signs accumulated, and then there was no denying the dark stain spreading over the pale ceiling of our world. That knowledge trickled in slowly, like a leak in a roof. We knew that something was wrong, of course.

After the end of the Outside world, the Plain folk survived.Īt the time, I didn’t know that the end of Outside had happened.

The hallowed ones by laura bickle