Prologue — Two Jesuses, One Tornado
 
 
Kindness applied: Catechism of Hope
Cost: Vow That Becomes a Trap
 
The sky that day had the color of tin cooled too fast. Wheat stood like a congregation holding its breath; the wind pressed their heads into a single bow. Inside the farmhouse, Dorothy sat on a trunk while her mother laced a Sunday dress nobody could afford to stain.
 
“There are two Jesuses,” her mother said, half-smiling at the blasphemy and half too tired to care. “One who walks dusty roads and sits with the sick. And one who builds great halls with velvet ropes and says, ‘What is seen is what is fair.’”
 
“Which one are we supposed to love?” Dorothy asked.
 
“Depends which one feeds you,” her mother answered softly. “The first leaves you hungry and healed. The second leaves you dressed and empty. People are clever; they pick the one that looks like winning.” She touched Dorothy’s cheek. “If you must choose, choose the one who brings true relief. Not the one that photographs well.”
 
The siren came like a violin string pulled too far. The sky lowered. The house turned into a drum.
 
Dorothy saw it then—the lunging thing of wind and grit, the tornado stitching its black seam across the prairie. The floorboards rose as the world unlatched. Her mother’s mouth formed a prayer; the window turned into a mouth; the roof became a hand letting go.
 
“Hold on,” her mother said, which is what the dying always tell the living.
 
The house lifted, bones coming loose. China danced out of cupboards. The wheat bowed and disappeared. Dorothy crawled to the pantry and hugged the flour bin that had the weight of a living thing. The last she saw of her mother was an apron string bright as a comet, and then the room unthreaded into sky and she was thrown into a dark that smelled like pennies and rain.
 
When the house landed, it did not land on Kansas.
 
It landed on a road the color of polished corn, laid through a countryside too careful to be real. Trees bore leaves in orderly hatches; a brook poured itself out in measured silver. Far off, past a quilt of green, a city shone like a promise made by someone rich.
 
Dorothy crawled from the wreckage with her hair full of plaster and her throat full of dust. The air tasted like sugar and law.
 
A sign stood at the road’s mouth, letters engraved in mother-of-pearl:
 
WELCOME TRAVELER
WHAT IS SEEN IS WHAT IS FAIR
 
Beneath it, smaller script: The kindest thing is what appears kind.
 
Dorothy wiped grit from her nose and squinted up the yellow road toward the emerald gleam. Somewhere, somehow, there would be a way to wind the world backward. She would find the spell or the machine, the lever or the prayer, and make kindness into something that truly relieved.
 
She picked up a shard of window glass, polished one edge with her sleeve until it flashed, and tucked it into her pocket like a vow.
 
“Time,” she said to no one at all, “I’m coming to fix you.”
 
The wheat here did not bow. It stood at an approved angle, humming faintly like a choir well paid. The road unrolled itself with a courtly flourish.
 
Dorothy set her jaw and began to walk.