Signs

The first time I saw her at the bay window I thought she was an angel.  She didn’t move, dressed in layers, face blank.

Standing at my sink before church, hot and guilty for witnessing her, she gazed across the gardens in the gap between our houses.  I recognised her from the laundrette, her and another woman carrying sacks of laundry in silence. I once tried to tell them of Our Lord.

I’d never seen her at the window before.  I waved, embarrassed. They kept themselves to themselves.  Women at church said they were a political sect.  I thought it was gossip.  I waved every day.

One day she held up a piece of brown cardboard, looking right at me.  ‘We’re working for all mothers of the world’, it said. She looked over her shoulder then was gone.

A week later, another sign: ‘In hiding, we work to win the world a great deal of everything.’  I didn’t trust my eyes.

After a month, a third: ‘We will overcome this world. Perfect human life. Conquer death.’

‘We’ve failed. Help me.’  This time she was crying.  

I knocked at their door for months.

I never saw her again.