She’s Only a Child
Fourth-century Egypt
Rachel did not complain about looking after Myra, but the abbess thanked her repeatedly.
“That dear girl must pose a burden to your contemplation,” Abbess Naomi said today. “But what would the Lord have us do? Toss her into the desert?”
“Surely not, Abbess,” Rachel replied.
And Sister Clementina—forever at Abbess Naomi’s right elbow—said, “Let’s keep that in mind as an alternative.” Sister Clementina explained how fending for oneself in the desert proved good for people, especially foolish ones. Even after six months, Rachel felt new to monastery life and unsure of her bounds. Was it disobedient to question Sister Clementina? Though she intimidated Rachel, she wasn’t the abbess. When nervous, Rachel wedged her thumb into the gap left by her missing canine—nothing had ever grown there to replace her baby tooth. She scraped her bottom teeth against her thumbnail.
“Myra is only a child, Sister Clementina,” she whispered.
“Maybe we should buy her an Arabian pony, then,” Sister Clementina said, throwing her arms around. “Maybe I should suffer agony in my body and squeeze the last drops of milk from these aging breasts to nurse her!” She pounded her chest. Even if Rachel dared, she knew the futility of pointing out Sister Clementina had never, as she had lived in the monastery since youth and never borne children, been able to nurse anyone.
“By my ninth year,” Sister Clementina continued, “I’d started fasting fifteen days at a time. My entire wardrobe consisted of two scratchy camel-hair tunics I wore to learn from the pain.” She grabbed Rachel’s sleeve to disapprove of its soft cotton—previously she would have asked first, but Sister Clementina’s disdain for Rachel had compounded in the two months since Myra’s arrival.
“But Myra is different,” Abbess Naomi cut in. She said the last word as though it belonged to another language. She smiled goodbye at Rachel and walked toward her weekly inspection of the grounds, the cooking fires, the chapel. And Rachel relaxed into her regular posture, relieved that Sister Clementina followed the abbess away.
The two older women spoke accurately about Myra. She behaved less like a female monk and more like an energetic little girl of the World. She never listened when Rachel stammer-told scripture stories to her, a chore Rachel desperately wanted to improve at despite how nervous she felt speaking, relaying important truths meant to enlighten minds. She wished Myra would sit quietly to make it easier, but last week while Rachel had leaned against the monastery’s courtyard wall struggling through the one about Jesus providing a crowd with fish, Myra had taken a cactus flower and ripped its petals into a face, which she gave a man’s voice and a village accent. “I love you, Rachel,” the flower said. “More than sunshine, more than fertile desert soil. Leave your monastic ways for me, and we will live passionately.”
“Let’s pay attention,” Rachel chided, but Myra removed her left sandal and made it dance across the ground with the flower. She hummed a tune, and as the music swelled, the figures danced too near each other for propriety. Rachel looked away.
Myra smooched kissing noises. “Oh worldly sandal, how I desire your flesh,” the flower breathed. Rachel glanced around to check if anyone heard what she allowed Myra to say. Sister Clementina would label Rachel weak for not scolding “unchaste jokes that make the devil cackle,” but Rachel could never bring herself to discipline Myra. Myra would toss wooden bowls into the air or stand still a whole day beneath an arch of the covered walkway while pretending to be a wheat stalk, and Rachel tried to command her toward sobriety, but she wasn’t good at it. Rachel had been born with a small voice. A monk must fear levity, but how angry could you grow at someone who befriended everything she saw, who introduced herself to an apricot or a palm tree’s shadow?
Where had Myra learned such coarse jokes? Probably from her older brothers. Experience told Rachel Myra’s two months here weren’t enough to shake old habits away.
Not that a desire for new habits had brought Myra to the monastery’s wooden door that first night. Because the door’s thickness muffled the urgent pounding, only Rachel, the one sister lying awake, heard. She raced to the emergency. Myra’s parents told Rachel they were poor and exhausted—they said only those words as if hoping they were explanation enough. The two climbed onto their mule’s back before Rachel could ring the bell to wake Abbess Naomi. And once they left, there was no What do I do? to ask the abbess. Rachel stripped off her robe to drape it around the shivering girl. She said, “Let me fix you a hot drink.”
The door was heavy and wooden. The sisters were forbidden to touch it their first year because they were learning to stay inside the walls. Rachel closed it.
Myra’s latest game threw Sister Clementina into a frenzy, so she and Abbess Naomi cornered Rachel a second time that day. “What in the world is a lefalant?” Sister Clementina demanded, then sighed as if dropping a sack of heavy rocks. “Where does that girl dream up this nonsense? We don’t live in some magical kingdom of dancing camels.”
“I think she pronounces it elephant, sister,” Abbess Naomi said. She smiled softly at Rachel. “And I’ve never heard her mention a dancing camel.”
“The Lord frowns on dancing camels,” Sister Clementina answered. “If she hasn’t cooked them up yet, she will. First, we let her get away with these lefalant lies, then who knows what? Musical ceilings? Weddings for the furniture? Extra portions at dinner? She’ll be tumbling drunk in the chapel aisles quicker than you can recite Psalm 117!”
“She doesn’t drink,” Rachel whispered, hoping only Abbess Naomi would hear. “And her games are innocent.” Rachel didn’t mention the sandal or the cactus flower.
“See,” Sister Clementina said as if Rachel weren’t there, “Rachel is an enabler.” Whenever Sister Clementina spoke, her whole upper body leapt around because—despite her talk about self-control—her bobbing torso had a fidgety will of its own. From the waist up, she was like a jerboa rodent jumping through sand. But her legs didn’t move, so she was a jerboa with its feet nailed onto fence posts. When she criticized Rachel, Rachel comforted herself with that description.
Sister Clementina said, “Imagination leads to discontent.”
“But what about the parables of Jesus?” Rachel asked Abbess Naomi as if asking a favor. “Weren’t they imagined stories with truth inside? Don’t his daydreams teach us?”
“Jesus knew what was real and not.” Abbess Naomi spoke with her lecturing voice. “Sister Clementina is right. Myra needs you to teach her to live in this real life.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Rachel ducked her head because the abbess’s tone made her a child. “I won’t disappoint you.”
Abbess Naomi added, “We must cut any type of lie from our minds.”
“No deception or secrets,” Sister Clementina said, volume rising.
“I’m glad we could talk before I leave,” said Abbess Naomi, who tomorrow would visit the hermits in the caves a day’s journey away. No one had to remind Rachel she would be gone, that she would leave Sister Clementina in charge for five days. Five whole days of power Rachel dreaded.
The abbess steered Sister Clementina away before she could begin again, and with a squint of her left eye as encouragement, the abbess nodded Rachel toward Myra’s door. Rachel walked to it as Sister Clementina watched over her shoulder.
“That foolish girl needs some severity,” Sister Clementina called.
What made Sister Clementina an expert on forthrightness and avoiding deception? Everyone knew she only helped Abbess Naomi in hope of being named her successor. Then all the sisters would have to obey her forever.
Her first week in the nunnery, Myra had sat on the edge of her cot rubbing a bit of straw across her mouth. It had seemed like the girl was playing an instrument, and the song must have echoed in Myra’s mind because she never heard Rachel’s prodding. “Eat a bit more,” Rachel said. “You’d sleep better lying down rather than sitting up.” Abbess Naomi worried Myra would never talk, but in the second week, she spoke to Rachel. Only to her. So, Abbess Naomi appointed Rachel caretaker, to the obvious irritation of Sister Clementina, who didn’t like someone else being in charge of anything.
Myra began each conversation in the middle as if she and Rachel had just returned from an interruption. “But we can lift that boulder if we stare hard enough, Rachel,” she would say and point at a rock Rachel hadn’t noticed. Soon Rachel realized their relationship, too, had started in the middle, and she had to remind herself Myra had lived next door only a couple weeks, then a month, then two. And when Myra spoke of village games she and her siblings had played, as though Rachel had stood alongside them tossing balls made of palm leaves, Rachel sometimes forgot she had been far away at the monastery.
But among her other desert sisters, Rachel felt always at a beginning. No matter how many evenings they recited prayers in the chapel, Rachel stumbled over the longer words, and the more experienced nuns—especially Sister Clementina, who knew how to read and liked to show off with her papyrus—cringed. Rachel asked the wrong questions: why they didn’t eat lunch on Fridays, who Cain and Abel were, if the sisters ever thought about their former lives. Once, trying to imply more than clothes, she said, “Abbess, I may be too short for my robes. I keep tripping over them.” But Abbess Naomi didn’t understand and said brusquely, “So hem them,” and kept walking.
Each time someone knocked on her door, Rachel imagined it was an angel of light who would say, “I bear glad tidings. In six more months, you’ll feel normal here.”
Myra was no angel, and Rachel didn’t speculate the Lord had sent her. But in Myra, Rachel found a task she could do, a task she might even become good at. And Myra, bewildered and kind, needed help learning how to belong to this place, too. One evening, as Rachel brushed away sand from Myra’s face and made Myra chapel ready, Rachel said, “Stop worrying. Soon we’ll get the hang of all this.”
But the opposite was also true. Though she liked Myra tremendously, Rachel—God forgive her—resented Myra. Myra’s antics shoved Rachel under the monastery’s gaze, letting everyone see Rachel had no idea what she was doing here. When the abbess noted Myra’s foibles, wasn’t she calling Rachel a failure? Sometimes Rachel thought if she handed Myra over to Sister Clementina, people would stop picking on Rachel, expecting her to do more than she could.
When Abbess Naomi and Sister Clementina finally turned the corner, Rachel knocked on Myra’s door.
Myra moaned. Rachel swung the door open and found Myra flat on her stomach. “Have mercy,” Rachel whisper-prayed, rushing to the girl. “Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not an allright, I’m an elephant.” Myra moaned again, and placed her wrists against her dirty forehead, and wriggled ten fingers. “Hush, I’m stalking donkeys for my dinner. I’ll creep up to them and pop my lips like I want a kiss, and when they lean close, I’ll strangle them!”
“Let’s talk about these elephants, honey.” Rachel ran fingers through Myra’s hair. She told herself, Be firm. If you laugh or smile, she won’t believe you.
“Myra, you should forget this game. If Sister Clementina catches you, I can’t protect—” But Myra sprang up.
“What’s that you say, Mr. Donkey?” she winked flirtatiously. “You like my purple stripes? You like my three hands? If you kiss me, I’ll wrap them comfortingly around your neck.”
“That’s not how kissing works.”
By age fifteen, most village girls were betrothed, and Rachel, at sixteen, grew exasperated waiting for Paulus. Instead of saying, “I finally worked up the courage to ask your father’s permission,” he said, “We’ll move to Hermopolis and stay up all night dancing down the big city streets,” or “It only takes two sheep to start a flock. I’ll steal a pair and we can move to the countryside away from everyone.”
Rachel knew by everyone he meant her father.
“He might say yes if you ask him.”
“Or he might say”—Paulus cleared his throat and threw his head at an angle so the perfect circles of his hair jolted back—“ ‘You are a worthless daydreamer who could never care for my daughter. Wha-ha-ha.’ ”
He was wrong about her father’s laugh but right about his opinion of Paulus. Her father seemed like a stone and Paulus a cloud. How could she expect them to understand each other?
“But if he knew how much . . .” she trailed off, and he looked up from the anvil and his metalwork. The words she left out were: we mean to each other, then he’d have to say yes. She nestled her thumb into the missing-tooth crevice and chewed her nail. Paulus stared back with flat black eyes a minute, until the minute filled up with what neither said.
He returned to his anvil.
And a year later, this was what Rachel thought of during those sleepless nights when she guessed the hours till dawn, telling herself she would feel better in daylight: of how easily he picked up the hammer and swung it, the way his body paralleled the anvil, how he struck the metal in the exact same rhythm as before, as if nothing of consequence had interrupted him.
And in those nights, or mornings, or afternoons when she suspected she had committed a horrible mistake by choosing the monastery—But how many options did a woman have?—she thought of all she had lost, and wondered how her life might have happened differently if she had talked to her father herself.
Sister Clementina’s voice grew in the hours following Abbess Naomi’s departure. “I tell you, Rachel,” she nearly shouted, “these lefalants have gone too far. Myra told me she’d grown flippers so she could swim after donkeys.”
Myra did seem to be quickly getting worse, more physical and loud. “I admit she’s focused on it more than her other games,” Rachel conceded.
“Not games. Lies.”
“Maybe to her they’re true.”
Sister Clementina thrust her arms against either side of the archway to brace herself. “Lord, preserve us! What are you suggesting? That there are sixteen different truths out there, and each person picks her own like a desert flower?”
“No, I . . .” Good sense told Rachel two opposing statements couldn’t both be true. She knew no purple-striped, three-handed animal swam after donkeys for food or love. “I only mean she doesn’t intend any harm,” Rachel mumbled.
“In that case I should allow her to juggle knives? If she doesn’t ‘intend any harm?’ ” Sister Clementina’s torso wriggled up and down. “When we’re all suffocated by the ashes of the monastery or dying from smoke inhalation, in our final breath will we say, ‘Oh, the little girl meant no harm playing with that kitchen fire?’ ” She doubled over and wheezed, demonstrating. She fell to the floor and waved smoke away from her face. “It all started with those lefalant stories Rachel let her tell,” she choked.
Sister Clementina stood. “Drink the poison of one lie and it will spread throughout the whole body.” She wagged her finger. “The truth boldly spoken—that is the antidote.”
Then trouble: Rachel glimpsed a strand of curls and a dirty hand behind the column at Sister Clementina’s back. Rachel nodded as though listening but watched Myra peer around the bricks, her teeth bared as fangs. No, not now! Rachel thought. She glared a warning at Myra, but Myra’s eyes fixated on Sister Clementina’s neck.
Sister Clementina said, “We must take strict measures for everyone’s benefit—including Myra’s.” Myra crept behind Sister Clementina. Rachel waved an urgent hand at Myra as though the girl were the one about to be attacked. Stop! she yelled in her mind.
Myra made a grand gesture of extending her arms up.
Sister Clementina continued, “As head of this monastery, I say—” Myra pounced her hands around Sister Clementina’s neck.
“You’re not my boyfriend, you’re my dinner, donkey!” Myra shrilled, rocking her prey left and right. Sister Clementina struggled, jabbing her elbows in Myra’s direction and darting her eyes at Rachel, who only stood frozen, hand over her mouth. Myra dodged the elbows and mooed.
As Sister Clementina’s face reddened, Rachel leapt forward. “Stop it, young lady!” She pried the dirty hands loose. She seized Myra, still mooing, and lugged her to the column. She pinned Myra against it with her forearm. “Settle down before you bring yourself any more trouble. Don’t you know what Sister Clementina can do?”
Sister Clementina doubled over and gasped for air, this time not for theatrics but necessity. Rachel called to her—was she all right? For a moment everyone waited for what Rachel feared. And when Sister Clementina regained her breath, she marched to the column, threw back Rachel’s arm, and snatched Myra’s wrist.
Myra yelped, a human girl again.
“This is why you mind your elders,” Sister Clementina shouted at them both, spitting. Myra tried to become deadweight, but Sister Clementina began scraping her along the walkway toward the monastery’s northern wall. Myra cried out Rachel’s name.
“Where are you taking her?”
“I told you this girl needs severity to straighten her out.”
“But—” Rachel half-said.
Rachel reached for Myra’s feet. Sister Clementina tried to smack Rachel away like a stray dog, but Rachel was not a stray, and still Sister Clementina smacked her like a dog, but Rachel grabbed Myra’s feet and tugged. Sister Clementina’s mouth flared wild teeth, and the two women snarled as if over a pork bone, but the bone was Myra, whom Rachel loved, so she yanked those feet away from Sister Clementina. But though Sister Clementina was weaker in body, she was stronger in anger, stronger in authority, stronger in believing she was good, and she ripped Myra from Rachel, and tossed Myra, screaming, over her back and ran. And all Rachel could do was chase them.
They reached the wooden door.
Rachel had touched the door only the night Myra’s parents pounded on it. Sister Clementina thrust it open as if she did so every day. She tossed Myra from her shoulder. When Myra landed on the sand, Rachel shot forward, toward the threshold new sisters were forbidden to cross. But Sister Clementina blocked it with her arm. “She’ll stay out there until the desert teaches her.”
Rachel stared open-mouthed at the desolate landscape framing Myra. Already the girl looked thirsty. “For how long?” Rachel asked.
Sister Clementina spoke to Myra: “Until your lies give way to truth. Until you see these lefalants as they actually are.” She dropped her voice to a pitch that reminded Rachel of the Lord speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai. Myra reached for Rachel, Rachel reached back, but Sister Clementina slammed the wooden door and locked it with a key Rachel hadn’t known she had.
The whole afternoon and evening passed with the wooden door locked and Sister Clementina visiting every half hour to shout, “Ready to tell the truth, Myra?” She rampaged up and down walkways. She cornered Rachel and threatened, “If I catch you talking to that girl, I’ll barricade you in the grain pantry.”
When Sister Clementina seemed to be gone, Rachel paced with the wooden door in eyeshot, counting down hours till nightfall. She saw a knothole low on the door.
When she knew Sister Clementina was in bed, Rachel slipped off her sandals and barefooted quietly to the kitchen. She eased a loaf from the bread box and debated how big of a missing hunk could go unnoticed. Half a loaf called more attention to itself than an absent whole one. She glanced behind her and tucked the loaf into her robe.
Afraid of her own footsteps, Rachel snuck to the door where she heard Myra’s crying—the kind that happens after someone has cried so long it becomes a pattern of breathing. Rachel lay on the ground and through the knothole spied Myra’s ankle. “You should sit down to conserve your energy,” she whispered, but Myra’s ankle remained in place. Myra mooed.
“I brought you bread.” Rachel pinched some crust and crumbled pieces to slip through the knothole. “Take it. Abbess Naomi won’t be back for four days, and you have to eat.”
“I eat only donkeys.”
“Myra, it is cold out in the wind with no blankets or fire. Don’t you remember?”
“Elephants don’t need blankets. Or food.”
Rachel poked a scolding forefinger through the knothole. “Listen, Myra. You are a human being, and you have to get bread in your stomach before you get sick out there.”
“No, Rachel, I’m—”
“Pick up that bread, dust it off, and put it into your human mouth.”
Myra took the bread. Rachel made a chewing motion as if that would force Myra to eat.
“Don’t you want back in?” Rachel asked the only sister who had not chosen to be here.
“Moo.”
“I know,” Rachel said. “But this is our only place.” Myra’s parents had forced her inside these walls, and Rachel would too if the door weren’t locked. Myra asked for more bread until the loaf was half gone.
Footsteps jarred Rachel upright. Sister Clementina should be asleep. But Rachel heard her coughing. Myra must have heard too because she begged, “Help me, Rachel.”
And Rachel—who knew Myra would find other ways not to fit in, other ways to push Rachel’s weakness into the public eye, other ways to infuriate Sister Clementina—promised she would help and did not mean only now.
More footsteps and coughing. Sister Clementina was near. If she saw Rachel and the bread, she could break Rachel’s arm, trap her far from Myra. Rachel needed to dive into a dark corner.
But no. This time, Rachel did not hide. She stood up from the floor and let herself be visible in the approaching candlelight. Sister Clementina spotted Rachel and stopped coughing as if by choice. “You know new sisters are forbidden to touch that door, Rachel.”
Rachel said something braver than she felt: “The only one who can discipline us is the person in charge. Abbess Naomi.”
Sister Clementina rocked back, then sped five steps to Rachel, as if she were a soldier hurtling a spear. Or hurtling a candle? Rachel ducked, but Sister Clementina did not throw the candle. She held the flame toward Rachel’s face, maybe to burn her.
No, to study her. Rachel raised up, and Sister Clementina kept the candle near Rachel’s cheek. Rachel stared back. Myra may have been too short, but Rachel was tall enough to look directly into Sister Clementina’s eyes, left then right. A fat minute tempted Rachel to look away, but she did not. She paid close attention to the parallel lines of Sister Clementina’s mouth and eyebrows. Even now, Sister Clementina’s upper body bounced a bit—not like a jerboa, but like a kid who couldn’t sit still in itchy adult clothes.
“She’s only a child,” Rachel whispered.
“She needs to be stronger,” Sister Clementina said. “You’re getting in her way.”
Myra slapped the door and called for Rachel. If Sister Clementina held the candle in her right hand, was the key in her left? Myra pounded the door with both fists. Rachel’s thumb had migrated to her teeth—she whipped it from her mouth to grab Sister Clementina’s left hand. Rachel forced that hand open with both of hers. Snatched the key. Sister Clementina banged Rachel’s shoulder with her one free hand and clutched the candle she couldn’t set down. Rachel turned to the keyhole. Inserted the key. Yanked open the door. She threw herself out to Myra. Covered her from Sister Clementina. She looked behind her, prepared for Sister Clementina to race out and strike.
But Sister Clementina nodded twice and kicked the door shut. Rachel had left the key in the hole. The lock turned.
“No, please!” Rachel jiggled the handle.
“You made your choice,” Sister Clementina called, her voice muffled through the thick door.
Rachel threw her body against the door, again and again and again, and when she saw she was scaring Myra, she quit. “That’s right, I did choose.”
Rachel lay beside the knothole and watched Sister Clementina’s feet leave them. Rachel bent to brush sand from Myra’s face. Myra’s face was always getting sandy, even her eyelashes. Rachel said, “We’re just outside for tonight.” She tugged the hem of her robe and started to remove it for Myra, but Myra stopped her.
“You’ll need it, Rachel.”
“Somewhere behind the monastery is a livestock shed,” Rachel said. “We’ll find it and curl up with the cows.” Myra breathed onto her own knuckles and did not ask—nor did Rachel ask—“If we’ve never seen the cows, how do we know they exist? Or don’t exist?”
Everything would look clearer in the morning. Someone would come to milk the cows and find the sisters sleeping on two piles of hay. Though that someone may think, What are the weird newcomers up to now? Do they belong with real monks or with senseless animals? all three people would walk through the wooden door for breakfast. In daylight, Sister Clementina would relent, would say, “What have I done?” and heat broth or porridge for them.
“Tonight will end soon, and we’ll go back home.” Rachel led Myra around the first corner, listening for livestock. “Just six more hours. Seven at most.”
When Myra didn’t answer, Rachel rubbed Myra’s chilly palms between hers. “These look like elephant’s hands,” Rachel said and forced a laugh. “Good for strangling donkeys.”
“Yes, but on the ends of their arms, some elephants have wings.” Myra fluttered her fingers.
Rachel fluttered too. “Like this?”
“Bigger.” The two flapped their wings, and the motion spread to their stomachs, their ankles. Myra and Rachel joggled as if their bodies were made of the wind.
Wherever the livestock shed was, they must be getting closer. Myra mooed as low as her register allowed.
Rachel mooed too, matching her.
Myra said, “Louder. No, louder.”
Rachel’s next moo echoed on a nearby dune. She cupped her purple-striped wing-hands to her mouth and mooed again, reaching a farther dune. She sucked in desert air, counting to twelve. She snapped at the gut, launching the noise out. She mooed louder than her voice box had ever tried.
“Yes!” Myra clapped. “That’s how elephants find each other in the desert.”
Brad Aaron Modlin’s internationally viral poetry has been experienced nearly two million times. His book, Everyone at This Party Has Two Names, is available from Black Lawrence Press. His poetry also appears in orchestral scores, art galleries, and with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and his prose appears with Brevity, The Cupboard Pamphlet, Denver Quarterly, and the Pushcart Anthology 2025. An associate professor/the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing, he teaches (under)grads at University of Nebraska at Kearney. He often writes about hope or embarrassment because he believes in humans’ goodness and is very clumsy at the gym.