That made me hesitate. “A cult?”
Tay got a little twitchy. “We were like, making pancakes? This morning?”
Shawna said, “We always make pancakes on Sundays. And right when we were turning off the stove, somebody knocked on the front door.”
“Like, really gentle, you know?” Tay said. He added, “We barely heard it.”
Holy shit, I thought. A declarative sentence.
“Honestly, we ignored the knock at first because we thought it was just more Amazon packages getting dropped off,” Shawna said. “But then they kept knocking.”
She hesitated again. I didn’t rush her.
“It was two people on our porch,” Shawna finally said. “And there was a third one, down in the car on the curb. The ones at our door—it was a Black lady and an older white guy. She was kinda old, like in her thirties? And he was even older. Like forty. Maybe more.”
“Wow,” I said. “Old.”
“On God.” Tay nodded, seemingly without an ounce of irony.
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I held back a grimace. These kids were starting to make me feel keenly Millennial. (Which is to say, a thousand years old.) “What did they look like? Any sort of distinguishing features?”
“Oh for sure,” Shawna said. “The Black lady was just sort of short and plain, but the white dude looked hella weird. He was tall, and he only had the one good eye. His other one was all white and cloudy you know? Like, astigmatism?”
I didn’t think that was how astigmatism worked, but I just said, “What did they—”
“Oh. Sorry. I forgot the iguana,” Shawna said.
“The what?”
“The white guy with the white eye,” Shawna said. “He had—I swear I’m not making this up—he had an iguana on his shoulder.”
“Like a toy?” I said.
Shawna shook her head. “No. Like an actual iguana.”
Tay said, “I saw the lizard from the kitchen. It was big.”
“A spotted iguana,” Shawna said. “I looked it up after. It had this, like, orangey-yellow skin with a lot of white spots. The thing just sat on the dude’s shoulder, staring at me the whole time. I know I shouldn’t be like, judgmental or whatever—it’s probably not his fault he’s only got the one good eye—but everything about that dude’s vibe weirded me the fuck out.”
“The clothes?” Tay said. “The clothes might have been part of the problem, you know?”
Shawna nodded. “That didn’t help, yeah. Both of them, the Black lady and the white dude, they were wearing the same exact thing. They had on a white linen tunic-thing that went down almost to their feet and this leather belt and leather sandals.”
“Like, crazy-looking?” Tay said.
Shawna nodded. “It was giving big cult energy. I thought they might be cosplaying as Jesus or something.”
I sipped my water. In spite of Tay and Shawna’s general air of hapless innocence, their predicament was starting to get me both nervous and curious (and that curiosity was making me even more nervous, because I knew exactly the sort of trouble it could get me into.) “And what did these cosplayers say?”
“They were really direct, which I guess was nice.” Shawna sipped her water. “They didn’t introduce themselves or anything. They just smiled and the man with the iguana said, ‘Is Francisco here?’”
“Francisco,” I said. “Like the name on all the Amazon packages.”
Shawna nodded. “Exactly. I honestly got kind of mad for a second. I told them we didn’t know a Francisco and we didn’t appreciate that he was getting all his packages sent to our house. I even asked the guy in the tunic if he knew Francisco Cullinan. I asked, would he mind taking all this shit and just go give it to the guy?”
“And?”
“And . . . the cult people didn’t care. They really didn’t say anything else. Which surprised me a little. Like, I have sort of a temper—it’s my attachment style, from my mom—and anyway I was pretty heated, but the people on the porch just kept smiling at me like I was the sweetest little thing. And when I finally stopped talking, the guy with the eye said, ‘If Francisco visits you, please tell him to come home. We’re ready for him.’”
I felt a sudden craving for the blunt I’d left in my living room. I couldn’t say exactly why, but those words put me on edge. “‘We’re ready for him?’”
“Exactly,” Shawna said. “I was like, ‘Ready for what? Who the hell are you people?’ All the shit you normally say, I guess. But they wouldn’t tell me. The Black lady, she just said, ‘Night draws near. The brethren shiver. As do we.’”
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