Keeping the Faith

By Iris Forester

When eighteen-year-old Marianne is left alone during a vulnerable time, with the man she’s loved since childhood, Sebastian, far away and dedicated to a future that doesn’t include her, she finds herself completely won over by the focused warmth of people she doesn’t recognize as cult recruiters. But a chance meeting with Marianne and a bombshell piece of news changes the course of Sebastian’s life. Now he has to figure out how to extract the woman he loves from the clutches of someone she believes has divine powers. Is one man’s love enough to pull Marianne from the cult that has embraced her?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Shorts
• Release date: Jun 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781094410944

Iris Forester

Iris Forester is never happier than when she’s tossed everything aside to follow one of the story threads that cross her path. She shares her home place with eagles, ravens and owls — but also makes time every year to spend in New York City. When she’s not writing, Iris works with paint, clay, and various difficult creatures.

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Chapter One

Marianne dawdled on her way to school. The spring sun was warm on her new blue sweater, but there were still lots of puddles left from a long rainy spell. She wanted to go down to the creek and play there, make boats, build a dam so a pond would form, and catch frogs. There were so many more important things than school when you were nine years old and in love with the world.

Ahead of her, Marianne saw a boy bend over a puddle, and then pick something up. The way he was holding the thing made her think it was an animal of some kind, and she hurried over. The boy’s name was Sebastian. She had seen him on the playground, but he was in the other fourth-grade classroom, so she didn’t know him well.

When she came up to him, he held out his hand to show her what he had.

Look! he said. He had a small green turtle, and Marianne was utterly smitten.

Oh my god! she said. Can I hold him?

Sebastian hesitated. You’re not supposed to say ‘god,’ he told her. Marianne was irritated by this unwarranted piety in someone her own age, and she was impatient to hold the turtle.

I just said ‘my god.’ Like he’s mine. There’s nothing wrong with that, she informed Sebastian in a tone of certainty. He should be your god, too. Sebastian turned this new and unfamiliar approach over in his mind, and then smiled at Marianne.

You’re smart, he said. And handed her the turtle to hold, in all its tiny perfection.

Taking turns with the turtle, dipping it periodically in the puddle so it wouldn’t dry out, the two children agreed that school was the worst possible way to spend a beautiful turtle-y day.

We could write notes pretending to be our moms, and say we were home sick today, Marianne said. Sebastian was thrilled and horrified by her badness.

We can’t do that, he protested, in awe at the sinfulness of the mere idea.

Yes we can, she insisted. I know what my mother’s handwriting looks like. Do you?

They’ll phone our houses, Sebastian pointed out. It was 1989, and schools still called parents on landline home phones.

My mother’s out. She’s driving around making deliveries for my dad, said Marianne. She won’t get home till almost dinnertime. I know how to erase our answering machine.

Sebastian’s face lit up. My mom is out, too. This is her grandma day, her day that she goes to visit my grandma. She’ll be back late. We don’t even have an answering machine.

And that was that. The two spent as perfect a day together as two wayward fourth-graders could devise. They played in the rain-swollen creek for ecstatic muddy hours, making small rafts and ponds and rides and villages for the turtle. When they got hungry, they shared their lunches. And the day after, when they each painstakingly forged parental notes for their respective teachers, they absolutely got away with it.

The mutual thrill of their successful transgression bound Marianne and Sebastian in a fast friendship. They pursued this friendship so openly, and were so undeterred by teasing about being in love, that their classmates eventually accepted the partnership as a boring fact of life and lost interest. This happy state of affairs lasted for the rest of that school year. Then, a week into what had promised to be a joyous summer vacation, Sebastian’s family abruptly moved to another state. In those pre-FaceTime, pre-Zoom days, long-distance friendships were tricky, even for adults. Two nine-year-olds had little chance of staying friends over impossible distances. Sebastian and Marianne wrote letters to each other a few times, but by the time they were in fifth grade, in different states, their contact had dwindled to a fragrant ache. Life went on.

Chapter Two

It was a

Reviews for Keeping the Faith

[BonnieWhite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Like all Iris Forester's stories, this one is well written and keeps you engaged.