THE LAST PARADISE

CAP 1

ALICE

It was always the same nightmare: a place in flames, and suddenly I was falling into the void, fire everywhere, and a silhouette appearing in the window where I had fallen from. When I tried to make out its face, it disappeared.... Since I was very young, I had experienced prophetic dreams, but I never took them seriously. I convinced myself they were only coincidences or meaningless déjà vu. Besides, predicting the future through dreams is considered a grave sin according to my parents, so I preferred to keep those thoughts to myself. My sisters and I were taught from the moment we were born how good girls must behave in order to become good wives.

1 Samuel 15:23 declares that rebellion is as sinful as divination, and stubbornness as evil as idolatry.

Not long ago, I turned eighteen, which meant that in just a few days I would be marrying the son of one of my father's friends-a boy two years older than me who had recently returned from the army. I had seen Logan a couple of times at church years ago, when our parents were still negotiating which of my sisters he would marry. He was a relatively handsome boy, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, and slightly tanned skin. He was a little taller than me, around 1.80cm. He was supposed to marry my older sister, Jane. But on the day of their engagement, she ran away with a young American man she had met at a university gathering. He was an atheist, and my father despised him. To cover up the scandal, my parents claimed that Jane had gone to a boarding school in France to keep up appearances.
As a consolation prize for his military service, my father offered me to become the future Mrs. Blake.
I was quite nervous about being chosen to marry when I had never even been taught how to be a proper wife. I barely knew how to cook or even wash my own clothes, since we had always had housemaids who helped my mother with the household chores. So what was I supposed to do?

In the days leading up to my wedding, I kept myself busy gathering things to take with me to my new home in Manchester, including a stuffed rabbit that had been given to me for my First Communion. My father told me to throw it away, saying that I was no longer a child but a wife, and that I should begin thinking about how many children I would give my husband.

The idea of pregnancy unsettled me deeply. When my mother was pregnant with my younger sister, Amelia, she nearly had a miscarriage. I remember seeing her clothes stained with blood as she screamed in pain. I was only four years old, and in my childish reasoning, I believed Amelia was a vampire trying to devour my mother from the inside.
Perhaps that is why we never got along very well. Until we were about five, my sisters and I were convinced that Amelia was the Antichrist because she never stopped crying and had a terrible temper.
She still does. But she also experienced the karma of being the older sister, because only a few months after she was born, my mother became pregnant again-this time with Lily.