I sit down at the table and sip my morning coffee. The house is still as space, except for that ever-present hum of the refrigerator and the wandering movements of the dust through sunlight. I’m thinking about rapid-cycling madness this morning and how it has transformed my life. It’s nothing serious, mind you, it comes and goes. It’s akin to turning the light switch on and off. One day I could be standing in the grocery store staring at bananas for hours, and the next I’m driving through a town I’ve never been to in an entirely different state. Geographically and in the mind.
I work an at-home job doing customer service for a travel agency. Imagine a bright white call center with hordes of people in cubicles wearing headsets and all talking at the same time. Then picture me doing the same thing but in a small upstairs room of the same bright white. All by myself. I chose the upstairs room because it has a large window. I don’t enjoy feeling like a caged corporate piece of machinery or human capital. But now there are rumblings of dismantling the remote worker program. That’s too much freedom. They can’t beat us down as well. They need physical meat to mistreat.
For now, I’m able to look out onto the large park across the road. There’s worn down tennis courts, but people still swing and sweat. There’s a playground, ancient picnic tables, and tubular trash cans that resemble R2-D2. In the center of the park there is a huge bowl with steep green sides all around. It’s a place used for high school graduations, and it’s where people of the township go sledding and tubing after a good winter snow. I used to go down on a plastic disc with a smooth underside. It may have been green. I sailed untethered. There used to be a small zoo over there, too. But it’s all gone. I imagine the animals were fed to underprivileged schoolchildren. That would be more cost-effective. Humanity will fail to save itself because it just wouldn’t be cost effective. I shake my head at this big, cracked blue marble. Is this the hell spoken of?
I’m off today because it’s a Sunday Funday. I hate the job, but don’t we all. I’m so tired of dealing with absolute morons every day. How did people get so stupid? Brains rotted by technological magma, the commune commercialism, the overdramatic melancholy of the truth-altering media. It’s a nation of idiots. A nation void of meaningful thoughts, decency, justice, honesty, empathy, unselfishness, hope. Pass along the fakeness with thoughts and prayers. Pro-life my ass. Childhood cancer? They don’t care. School shootings? They don’t care. Homelessness, poverty, hunger, sickness, school lunches? They don’t care. Health care CEO gets shot dead. The outrage! A new multi-million-dollar football stadium built over people sleeping on the streets? Absolutely! How can anyone be proud of swimming in this aquarium of hollow hearts and backward minds?
I want to move to Finland or maybe Namibia; to peer down upon the indigo sea from atop a rusty-orange sand dune. Or even Armenia. Half the country couldn’t find these places on a map. Ding dong dumb. A nun at Catholic school used to call us “Dumb bunnies.” All of us. I was offended. I’m pretty sure she’s dead now. She would have to be. She was old back then. She taught art. How dare she judge us! What about freedom of expression! Perhaps I should have duct taped a banana to a wall. Mediocrity is praised. Soulless, hateful men and women are placed on pillars. We need to untangle this oppressive social system. But then again, just look to the heavens for all the answers. Some multi-tasking god looking back down at us fucking and dying.
The men returned to the house early the next morning, cold and unrested. Sarrah was in the kitchen brewing a pot of coffee and cooking eggs and bacon. The house was filled with the smell of it, like a greasy café on a busy Sunday morning in a lost western town in Idaho.
Sarrah turned her head and looked at her husband and the reverend when they came to the table, roughshod, expecting to be served. Serena came in through the back door and went to wash her hands at the sink with tomato vine scented soap. She reeked of cigarettes.
The reverend spoke up. “You’re going to stunt your growth if you keep smoking those,” he said to the girl.
She was visibly upset when she turned. “It doesn’t matter,” Serena snapped. “I’m unlovable.” She glanced at her mother, threw down the towel she was drying her hands with, and charged off.
“What the hell was that about?” Josiah asked his wife as she came to the table with three cups and the coffee.
“She’s getting to that age when she starts hating everything, even herself,” Sarrah said. She brought over a platter of eggs and bacon, cold toast, plates and silverware. She plopped down a butter dish and a jar of huckleberry jam. “I suppose it won’t do any good to fix her a place.”
Josiah studied his wife as she moved around the kitchen and talked. He knew something was different, wrong. “What’s going on with you?” he finally asked.
Sarrah looked at him with frustration plastered to her face. He was bothering her. She hated when he bothered her. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
She sat down at the table with displeasure, purposely banging the legs of her chair on the floor of green-speckled linoleum. She bowed her head and silently prayed. She reached for the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. She was there, but also somewhere else. Her mind was split in two. Her heart and soul were split in two. Her whole life was split in two but still connected by sinewy threads. She needed something very sharp to complete the division and escape. Sarrah began to ferociously eat her breakfast. Like a wild animal tearing at a fresh kill.
Josiah and Reverend Savior watched with disbelief as Sarrah shoveled the food into her mouth and mashed at it with her teeth. She started to choke, coughing out bits of food. She wiped at her mouth with her sleeve and then kept eating.
“What the hell are you doing!?” Josiah yelled, slapping his hand down on the table. “You’re acting like a pig, Sarrah. Now stop it!”
She let the huge wad of half-chewed food in her mouth plop out back onto her plate. It was a sloppy mess, disgusting. She grinned at him with her crazy face. “Fuck off, Josiah,” she said, bits of food shooting out of her mouth. “I’m trying to eat my breakfast.”
Josiah’s entire face widened and flared.
Sarrah watched as Josiah rose from the table just like the underrated Super Friends team member Apache Chief. And as if in slow, ferocious motion, he became large like some diligent monster. His hand held high in the air, his teeth tight together and grinding, his face red as a poisonous mushroom. She saw it coming down at her; that big, vicious paw. The reverend leaped up to stop him, but it was too late. Josiah’s hand struck her face so hard that she was knocked from her chair. Food and teeth shot out of her mouth as she fell to the floor. Sarrah didn’t move much after that. She just moaned and cried as Josiah stomped on her with his soiled boot.
The ambulance raced up the long dirt drive that ran between the golden and green farmstead and the old highway. The siren pierced the air like a war warning. Josiah was sitting on the worn couch in the living room with his head in his hands, sobbing, as the deputy questioned him. He was eventually led to the car and placed in the back seat, handcuffed. The deputy told Josiah he was being arrested for domestic assault. He looked out the window as Sarrah was taken from the house on a stretcher and loaded into the back of the ambulance. Josiah put his face against the warm spring glass. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “What have I done?” He turned his attention to the deputy climbing into the front seat. The door slammed with damnation. “But that wasn’t me,” Josiah pleaded, his face horribly pained, warm tears streaming down the rough skin. “I’m not that kind of a person.” The deputy glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. A pathetic creature, he thought. The tires ground into the gravel as the car lurched off. Josiah watched as his homestead slowly became smaller and smaller until it all disappeared completely, and the long, aching drive commenced.
Reverend Savior and Serena sat on chairs in the dim hospital room. Serena only glanced at her mother briefly. The face was too much for her. The damage, the swelling, the unnatural color of the skin. She was resting. Eyes closed, and mouth with a busted lip slightly parted.
Serena turned her attention to the square window. She looked out at the trees and the grass and the flowers. Cars were pulling into parking places. People were moving on walkways. Doctors and nurses and pharmacy technicians were coming to and going from work. Life was still growing and active, she thought. Life goes on despite how many people die. She wondered if anyone would miss her when she left this Earth. Serena got up and walked toward the open doorway.
The reverend’s eyes followed her. “Where are you going?” he asked in an authoritarian tone, as if he was now her sole guardian and in charge of her existence.
“None of your beeswax,” she said, and Serena walked out. She went outside to smoke a cigarette and thought about all the things rotating through her mind. She felt the browning sun on her unmuddied white skin and tasted the soiled air left behind after the corrupt government of Immoral New America auctioned off the environment to the highest corporate bidder with unbridled polluting on their wish list.
She felt alone and wanted to cry, but she was a tough girl, and she didn’t. She longed for a future of hope, but in Immoral New America, hope was dissipating by the day. She longed to sail off to Scandinavia for a better life. She had read about those places in books and how all the people who resided there had much better lives. Serena looked up at the sky and watched an airliner sputter across the bluish-brown background specked with a few listless clouds. She wondered where they were flying off to. Omaha or Okinawa? What if the plane crashed and everyone died? she thought, and she felt morbid. What if some survived, but then ended up eating each other?
She watched the cigarette smoke slowly swirl around in front of her, directionless and unsure. Serena suddenly realized how much she missed Paul. Her soul was basking in pure sunlight thinking about him taking her away from this horrible country and all that sordid life she was drowning in.
And strangely enough, like in a fever dream, when she went back inside the hospital and was walking down a long sterile hallway that smelled like clean death, she saw him.
Was this even real? Serena thought. She squeezed her eyelids tightly shut, then opened them again. How could it be? she wondered. Serena suddenly ran to him. He was wearing a white doctor’s coat and holding a computerized tablet and tapping on it with a straight finger as he stood by a window. He would momentarily look up and out the polished glass and then back down to his… work?
“Paul!” Serena called out as she got closer. He quickly turned and saw her. He smiled as she pressed herself against him and hugged his waist. “Paul. What are you doing here?”
He pried her off, but not rudely. He wasn’t sure what to say at first, but then he knew. “I’ve come to check on your mother,” he said. “I heard she had been violently attacked.”
“It was my horrible father,” she said. “He’s in jail now. But how did you find out?”
He looked up at the bright hospital lights in the hallway. “I just knew,” he said. “I have a very, very strong intuition about things in this world.”
“And you’re a doctor?” Serena asked.
He turned toward the window again. “Yes, I suppose I am.”
“You work here, or are you just pretending?”
“Both,” he answered with a strange smile. “Are you hungry, Serena? Would you like to go to the cafeteria with me and get something to eat?”
She couldn’t refuse. “Yes. I would love that.”
Josiah sat in a solitary cell because he had blurted out that he wanted to kill himself when they first dragged him into the Chandelier County Jail on the desolate outskirts of Chandelier, Idaho.
The walls inside the cell were a dingy tan and soft so he couldn’t smash his head open. His bed was a simple shelf-like platform that stuck out from one of the walls. Smooth. No edges or sharp corners. He wasn’t allowed to have a blanket or a pillow. He wore a white smock, something akin to a hospital gown even though he wasn’t in a hospital. A grated, nasty opening on the floor served as a toilet. There was one black security camera high up in a corner of the cell. A light flashed. They were watching. The door to the cell was big and heavy, like the door to a commercial freezer in a restaurant. There was one window in the door. It was a small portal of thick, cloudy glass where the face of a guard would occasionally show itself. Josiah would watch with a sense of fear and sometimes even hope as a pair of eyes snapped quickly back and forth then disappeared.
Josiah would stand by the portal and look out. It was his only connection to the other side of the cell. He only saw bright lights and a barred door. But the noises were the worst. The screams and howls of other inmates. They never seemed to shut up. They were the sounds of torture releasing from the guts of very wounded men, Josiah thought. Animals in cages were coming out of their skins. Josiah felt hopeless as he slid down the wall to the floor. He could not stand what he felt. Freedom had never been taken from him like this. For the first time in his life, he felt that there was absolutely nothing he could do to ease his uncomfortable situation. He was truly trapped in a nuthouse.
They wouldn’t turn the lights all the way off at night, just dim them. Josiah figured it was a way to keep insane people from going more insane. He couldn’t stand the thought of being in complete darkness, not in there. It would be exactly like death. He wanted to throw up as he tried to sleep on the protruding shelf. It was miserable. He was cold.
After a long while of just staring at the ceiling, there came a light knocking on the solid door. There was a voice coming from the other side. “Hello?”
Josiah shot straight up and went to the window and looked out. “Yes. I’m here. Can you help me get out? I’ve got to get out!”
“Stand back,” the voice ordered.
There was a clinking, clunking sound and the door slowly opened. A guard made his way into the cell forcing Josiah to move back to his sleeping platform and sit down. Then the door closed and locked without force.
“I know you,” Josiah said.
The guard looked around at Josiah’s situation and grinned. “How’s it been going for you,” he said. “Maybe not too well?” He prodded at him with a nightstick, gesturing for him to slide over. “Mind if I sit with you for a bit?”
“You’re that Paul fellow. You were at my house, and you did magic.”
“Right, right, Josiah.”
“What are you doing here? Do you really work as a guard, or are you just pretending?”
Paul smiled. “Everyone keeps asking me that.”
“Can you help me?” Josiah pleaded. “I can’t stand being locked up like this anymore!”
Paul chuckled. “That’s what they all say. I suppose you are innocent, too?”
“Of course I am!” Josiah snapped. “It was an accident. She slipped and fell, hit her head.”
“I saw her earlier today, Josiah, at the hospital. Your wife was pretty badly beaten up. Like a farm-fresh egg. Cracked open with all her magma spilling out.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
“You mean truthfully?”
Josiah turned away. “I never put a hand on her.”
“The reverend was there. He saw everything. And you didn’t know it at the time, but I was there, lurking in the crevices. And I saw everything, too.”
Josiah looked terrified and he went to the door and started pounding on it. “Help!” he screamed. “Someone, help me!”
“It won’t do you any good,” Paul said. “No one will hear you. Everyone is asleep, even the other guards. I made that happen because I can.”
Josiah turned to face him. “What the hell are you?”
Paul shrugged the question off. “I’m a person just like you.”
Josiah moved closer. “No, you’re not. You’re a demon who fooled my innocent, God-fearing daughter out in the woods. You came into our home and infected us with evil trickery.”
Paul laughed out loud. “A demon? Oh, please. You’re reading too much of that Bible of yours. And even if demons were real, I would never be a demon. I despise the lore of demons. They’re just so horrid and gross and hateful. Just like your people.”
“You’re not going to help me, are you,” Josiah said.
Paul shook his head. “No.”
“Then why did you come?”
“I just wanted to let you know that I’m in love with your wife.”
“What!?”
“That’s right, and she loves me, too, passionately.”
“Impossible. She does not.”
“Yes, she does.”
“But she’s my wife!”
Paul grew angry. “And you beat her! You nearly killed her today and you sit in here acting like you did nothing wrong and whining like a little schoolgirl to get out. But here’s a news flash, holy diver. No one will ever believe you. People around here know your temperament and your history. You’ll never get a fair trial, on Earth or in heaven. You will be found guilty because you are guilty! You are doomed to rot in prison.”
Josiah slid to the floor and started to weep in his hands. “Why did you have to tell me?” Josiah groaned. “Why?”
Paul stood over him like a Greek god with that hair the color of burnt rust flowing. “I told you because I want you to feel the pain of knowing another man is fucking your wife and there’s not a single thing you can do about it. You’re going to be locked in a box for a very long time. And now every day you will think about her and me together. I’ll live in your house. I’ll eat your food. I’ll work on your farm. I’ll use your favorite toilet and sleep in your bed beside your naked wife.” Paul kicked at him. “Think about it! Not only the horrible guilt over what you did to her, but now the added pain and misery that will invade your head, heart, and soul when you think about how deeply I will taste her and how deeply I will penetrate her. You’ll ache far down in your guts when you realize what a failure at love you are. You’ll ache knowing that I will love her far better and will never hurt her like you did. This is all the price of your sins, not mine.”
“Stop!” Josiah screamed. “Please, stop.”
Paul stepped away and went to the door.
“Wait!” Josiah begged him.
“What is it?”
“Will you please just kill me. Murder me now. I won’t be able to live like this.”
Paul turned and looked at him without pity. “I already did.”
Sarrah remained at the window as the others madly ran about looking for Paul in other places of the house. They didn’t know all the things she knew. They couldn’t feel it deep in their guts and loins. How could they? There was no connection there. Not like her and Paul had. Again, she questioned herself. “What is happening?” She wanted to know, but at the same time she didn’t. Sarrah wanted to be carried away by this feeling. Carried away on Paul’s back to another place and time, away from her life of domestic servitude, away from Josiah and his violent hands.
Sarrah gazed longingly across the landscape, and to the edge of the forest. She followed each step Paul had taken, swallowed them whole, slowly down her moist throat. She had a sudden urge to follow him. The love hunt would be glorious, she imagined. But then the others burst into the room and derailed her thoughts.
“He’s not anywhere!” Josiah cried out. “He really disappeared.”
“Get a hold of yourself, Josiah,” Reverend Savior broke in. “I’ve been telling you he did exactly what I said he would do. The little vagrant snuck off with a free meal. Magician my ass. What a con artist.”
“He is not,” Serena growled. “He’s a real magician, and my friend.”
Sarrah scratched at the glass of the window and purred. “He’s more than a magician, and more than a friend,” she said in a momentary lapse of reality.
Josiah’s ears pricked up and he went to her and grabbed her by the shoulder. He jerked her around to face him. “What do you mean more than a friend?” He raised a fist. “Is there something going on that shouldn’t be going on? Do not lie to me, woman.”
“Stop it! Stop it!” the reverend cried out. He pulled Josiah away from his wife. “Let’s go look for the little bastard. It will do you no good to lash out at Sarrah… And, I wouldn’t want to have to report you.”
Josiah grimaced at the thought of being reported. The embarrassment. The shame. Maybe even the thrill of it. He took an over-exaggerated deep breath and released it to calm himself. He looked at Sarrah. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to.”
Her face resembled polished statue stone and then she turned back to the window. She didn’t want her husband’s apology. She didn’t want to see or smell him. Sarrah just wanted him to go away.
The padre grabbed Josiah by the arm and forced him out of the room. The two went downstairs and out the front door. Footfalls annoyingly loud. Sarrah watched through the window as they squirted forth like dark creatures into the all-consuming landscape. Josiah had snatched the rifle he always left propped by the door. They were after Paul for real, Sarrah thought, and she was scared.
“Momma?” Serena said.
Sarrah was unaware her daughter was still in the room and turned wildly around.
“What is it?”
“What’s going on around here?”
Sarrah sat at the edge of the bed and motioned for Serena to come to her.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The atmosphere around here is strange. Is time shifting? Are we all going insane?”
She hugged her daughter and kissed her gently on the top of her head. Her hair smelled like strawberry shampoo. “No, my dear girl. You’re letting that mystical mind of yours get in front of yourself. Catch it and pull it back.”
Serena looked up at her and managed a half-hearted smile. “Momma. Can I ask you something else?”
“What is it you’d like to know?”
“Do you think Paul would like me as a woman? Maybe even love me some day?”
Sarrah leaned back and intensely studied the girl’s face with narrow, smoldering eyes. Something suddenly hurt her deep inside. She was ferociously jealous. Her heart began to thump like a rabid knock on a door.
Serena patiently waited for an answer.
“No. Not ever,” her mother finally said.
Both stunned, they sat there. And there was a great chasm of silence before the canned rabbit suddenly smashed through the window and landed at their feet. They both shrieked and held their arms across their faces. A puddle of broken glass covered the floor. Sarrah reached and picked up the can. It felt warm as if it had just come out of the oven not that long ago. She looked at the label. Easter-colored. The rabbit there was smiling at her. It had never smiled before. And it wasn’t a gentle and happy smile. She went to the broken window and threw the can back outside with as much force as she could muster. “Go away from here!” she screamed. Sarrah and Serena watched as it hovered in the air for a moment before dropping back to the ground and rolling under the house. Now it was hiding. Whatever was inside that can was hiding. Watching. Serena mechanically churned the moment in her brain. What does it want? What will it eventually do to us? She shivered at the thought. The girl glanced at her mother and didn’t say a word. Her young heart was bruised. She left the room and went outside to smoke a cigarette. Sarrah watched her daughter through the busted glass, and didn’t know what to do about her.
Josiah and Reverend Savior were running beneath a bruise-blue and metallic-orange Idaho sky of blossoming dusk toward the forest to find Paul. Full speed. The reverend looked down at his legs rushing through the air like the Six-Million-Dollar Man from his youth. He was too chubby for this, too out of shape, he thought. But nonetheless, there he was doing it. Then the reverend laughed out loud in the warm yet cooling air, remembering how absurd Colonel Steve Austin looked when running across the screen back in 1976. He recalled wearing his funky plaid shirt and brown corduroy pants as he sat on the floor with a glass of grape Kool-Aid watching his favorite show. His older sister and her boyfriend were on the couch behind him. He turned around to look at them because of the noises. They were heavily making out. They had no shame. He watched with a hint of disgust, a hint of fascination. They were too entangled to even notice him.
The reverend recalls standing up and yelling at them, “I’m going to tell dad. You’re fornicating!”
His sister scowled at him. “Shut up you little twerp!” She took her boyfriend’s hand and led him to her bedroom. Reverend Savior of the future, his youthful name being Bert, snuck up the stairs a few minutes later. He sat outside his sister’s room and gently put his ear to the door and listened. She was moaning. The boyfriend was grunting. Young Bert thought he was doing something bad to her. He had heard of rape and became scared. He got up and jiggled the knob and forced the door open. It was surprisingly unlocked.
What he saw was his naked sister and her naked boyfriend on top of her in the bed. He had never seen real naked people before, only when he examined his own body in the mirror after a hot bath. His skin was sensitive back then, and he always ended up looking like a boiled lobster. His reflection was crustaceous, solitaire, lost on a beach somewhere or in a pot. Young Bert Savior always made the water as hot as he could stand it. He wanted to wash away his sins, to sanitize his soul completely and painfully.
His naked sister screamed. “Get out of here!”
Bert rushed into the hall and slammed the door behind him. The entire incident was never spoken of after that. In fact, his sister stopped talking to him altogether. She didn’t spend a lot of time at home anymore. Then she went off to college. She got pregnant by a loser and dropped out. Her pastor father disowned her, and her mother just cried. Bert Savior has no idea where she is or if she’s even alive.
Reverend Savior came out of his memory and slowed himself within a sea of sadness and guilt. He stopped, bent over, and put his hands on his thighs. He was looking down at the ground, breathing so hard, spittle falling into the earth.
Josiah stopped beside him and did the exact same thing.
When the two got their lungs back, they straightened themselves up and groaned like old men.
Josiah scanned the landscape, hand to his forehead. “What are we doing out here?” he said. He sounded panicked and unsure of himself. He almost began to cry.
The reverend took a moment of silence, and then with not even knowing why, suddenly blurted out, “I may be a pervert after all.”
Paul was sitting on a large rock deep in the forest. End-of-day sunlight trickled down; trapezoidal rays split by the treetops. He had his knees up and held them together with his arms. He was deep in thought within a veil of mystery. He knew he had to go to the other side, but he did not want to leave Sarrah behind, or alone with that madman Josiah. He’d end up killing her, he worried. “I have to go back,” he said aloud. He turned to look at the portal gate, only visible to him. Was he merely imagining things? “No,” he whispered to the forest all around him. “This is all real.”
Darkness had fallen when he woke from his dream. Paul sat up. He was sore from sleeping on the rock. His burnt-yellow eyes glowed. And then those same sharp eyes caught sight of something in the distance. Paul scrambled off the rock and went down the slight ravine he came up through. He was able to see it in the dark. He stopped and smelled the air. Smoke caressing the moon. Fire giving secrets away.
Josiah and the reverend sat around a campfire near the edge of the woods. Josiah looked back across his land. The house stood on a slight hill far away beneath a gaping moon. A geometric shape in the night, a few lights in the windows. He wondered what Sarrah was up to in there and surprised she hadn’t come calling for him.
He grunted and shook his head. “Women,” he simply said.
Reverend Bert Savior had been staring at the fire. Now he looked up, not completely sure what to say to the man across from him. So, he answered his question with another question. “What about women?”
Josiah poked at the fire with a stick. Granular embers scattered to the darkness. “I’ve never known if she’s truly loved me,” he said. “And somehow, these past few strange weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that she never has.”
The reverend looked at him. He was used to this kind of emotional talk. He was a spiritual counselor, after all. “I think that’s quite a leap of thought, Josiah. Don’t let it weigh down your head and heart to the point of insanity.”
Josiah nodded. Then he asked the question he was burning to ask. “What was that you were saying about being a pervert? Threw me off a bit.”
The reverend tried to avoid his judgmental gaze from across the flames. “Aren’t we all in some way or another?”
“Have you done something you shouldn’t have done, reverend?”
The lump was large in his throat. “No. Not really. But that’s between God and me.”
Josiah chuckled. “It’s okay, reverend. I’m not going to say anything to anyone. I’ve got my own fish to fry.”
“This will be a secret meeting of the minds, right?” Reverend Savior asked, hoping to kill the subject soon.
“Sure, secret,” Josiah said with a sly smile. “Have you ever been married, reverend?”
“No. My commitment is to God and my congregation. It has been since I was very young.”
“So, you just felt something move inside you and that was it?”
“That something was the Lord of Heaven and the glories of all He created.”
“You know I’m a believer,” Josiah noted. “I read the Bible, but I never got a calling like that. There were times I may have looked for it, tried to feel it, but it never stuck. I stopped pursuing and just settled with what I had. What else can a man do?”
Reverend Savior nodded in agreement. “It’s not for everyone. It’s not always so easy to be dedicated to something so ethereal and mysterious, but it is a lifetime commitment.”
“Do you ever regret that, padre? Turning your entire life over like that.”
He sighed and looked up at the stars. “If I’m honest with myself and the Lord, and He understands this… Yes, I do have regrets. Mostly when it comes to the loneliness I encounter.”
Josiah cleared his throat. “So, you’ve never been with a woman?”
The reverend turned away and considered the question for a moment. “Not a real one,” he answered.
By
Aaron Echoes August
Keep watch for another episode. You can subscribe for free below to receive notifications of new posts.
If you need to refresh, read part one HERE and part two HERE.
Serena sat on a grassy knoll overlooking a meandering stream of cool water. She smoked a cigarette and thought about life. “Ignorant dullards the lot of them,” she said aloud to herself. She tossed the burning butt into the stream and watched it bob and weave its way to another place and time.
“That’s polluting,” said an odd voice from behind her.
Serena whipped her head around. She was scared. There stood a young man in strange clothes.
“Who are you?” Serena wanted to know.
“My name is Paul. I’m an apostle of magic. Do you mind if I sit with you for a spell?”
Serena looked at him up and down. He was charmingly well-built, yet resembled a down-on-his-luck scarecrow who had wandered off from his field. “I suppose it would be all right,” she said. “But just so you know, my daddy’s farm isn’t far off, and he has guns, and a mean streak.”
“Don’t worry young lady, I’m not a violent person or a scam artist or anything like that. I’m just a traveling magician. I mean you no harm.”
“You don’t look much like a magician. Where’s your fancy suit and your top hat with the rabbit inside?”
Paul saddened a bit and looked around at the beautiful, natural world for an answer. “Right. Well, I guess you could say I’m not very successful at being a magician. And truth be told, I’m not really that kind of a magician. I’m not a birthday party magician. I’m a real practitioner of old-world magic.”
Serena burst out laughing. “Bullshit!”
Paul took grave offense. “But I am.”
“All right then, prove it.”
Paul got to his feet. “Okay. But you must close your eyes.”
“What kind of a magician makes people close their eyes?”
“Just do it, please.”
Serena did as he said and closed her eyes. “So, what sort of a trick are you going to do?”
“Hush now, girl. I need to concentrate. But if you must know, I’m going to make myself disappear. Keep your eyes closed and count to 10. Once you reach 10, you can open them, and if everything goes right, I will magically vanish.”
She heard him scuttle away as she counted. “Ten!”
Serena opened her eyes and looked around. Paul was nowhere to be seen. She got up and scanned the landscape. The area was thick with trees. “Hello!?” she cried out.
Someone suddenly tapped her on the shoulder. Serena spun around.
“Looking for me?” Paul said with a grin.
“Where did you come from so suddenly?”
“That’s my secret. Let’s just say it’s magic.”
“I don’t believe you,” Serena said. “You were just hiding behind that stump or something.” She pointed listlessly.
Paul looked up to the sky and smiled. “Believe what you will… What shall we do now?”
“I don’t know. But I want to know more about you. You said you were an apostle of magic. Who’s your spiritual leader?”
He gazed into her cyanic-colored eyes that mirrored the sky. He turned as he spoke, arms stretched upward. “The entirety of the universe, dear girl. Many stars, many planets, many creators, many motherships, many dimensions.”
“That encompasses most everything, which in turn leads me to believe you constructed that statement to derail my question,” she said.
Paul sensed that this one was much more perceptive than he expected. It was something the dreams failed to reveal to him. “Nonsense,” he professed. “Absolute nonsense.”
She studied his gentle oddness as she thought. “Do you go to church where you come from?”
Paul scoffed and slapped the air with his hand. “Puffing wishes to some imaginary old fairy man out by the moons is an exercise in utter futility.”
“That’s blasphemy!” Serena objected. “And you better not let my father hear you say something like that. He’ll have your hide.”
“And I’ll turn him into a three-legged mothman if he tries to lay a finger on me. And besides, who said anything about me meeting your father?” He smiled at her. “Unless. Are you sweet on me? Do you want to get married?”
“Eww, no!” Serena protested. “I’m not of marrying age yet. Don’t be stupid. And even if I was, I wouldn’t marry someone who has no belief in God. I don’t want my children going straight to hell the second they pop out of my belly.”
Paul chuckled out loud. He put his hands on his hips like an over dramatic Robin Hood and cast his gaze toward somewhere else. “You are an interesting and curious girl, and I would like to go to where you come from. I could meet your family, and I may even show them a few of my tricks.”
She pondered his request for a moment. He was strange, yes, but seemed harmless otherwise. “I suppose that will be all right,” she agreed. “But no bad mouthing the Lord. Do you understand?”
Paul rolled his eyes out of her view. “Yes, yes. All right. I’ll do my very best to be my very best.”
When they arrived at the house, Sarrah, Josiah, and Reverend Savior were sitting in the front room in a solemn silence staring up at the can of rabbit that just hovered there in the air, a mystifying soft glow surrounding it.
What is this!?” Serena cried out when she entered the room with Paul following.
The canned rabbit suddenly dropped to the floor with a thud as if suddenly let go by some unseen entity.
The room gasped. Paul went over and picked it up. He studied it for a moment and then looked around the room at the people there. “Who’s the master of levitation?” he grinned as he looked the can over before setting it on a table. “That’s quite a trick.” He nodded his head in the reverend’s direction. “Was it you, padre?”
“Serena?” Josiah said. “Who is this you’ve brought into our house?”
“This is my friend, Paul. I met him in the woods. He’s a magician.”
“And just what was it you were doing out in our woods?” Josiah wanted to know, casting an untrusting eye upon the suspicious young man. “Mixing up potions and conjuring evil, huh?”
Paul steadied himself before the pressing eyes of the room. “Nothing like that, sir. I just like to walk outside and think about things. I suppose I may have inadvertently wandered onto your property, and for that my sincerest apologies. However, I did have the good luck of happening upon your daughter. A lovely soul she is.”
Josiah grunted his disapproval over that remark.
The reverend cleared his throat. “Where are you from, boy? I’ve never seen the likes of you around these parts, and I know pretty much everyone.”
“You’re right, reverend. I’m not local to the area. I’m from up north near Livingston.”
“Livingston?” the reverend said. “That’s a bit of a distance away to just wander off from.”
Paul bowed his head. He wanted sympathy. “It’s where I’m from but I don’t have a home there anymore. My family ran me off. I suppose I’m something like a hobo or whatever you call someone without a proper place to lay his head at night.” He looked at Josiah to make a point. “I’m not evil, though.”
Sarrah shot up from her chair and went to him. Something she couldn’t control drew her to the odd young man named Paul. Sarrah felt an unfamiliar spiritual jolt inside her. She went to him and put her hands on his shoulders and looked directly into his bewildering eyes. Sarrah made sure he saw the words spill from her mouth as she slowly pronounced them. “Welcome to our home, Paul. Would you like to stay for supper?”
“Now hold on a minute,” Josiah protested. “I’m not sure I want a stranger joining us at our dinner table. Especially a trespassing self-proclaimed magician.”
“Are you not a self-proclaimed Christian!?” Sarrah shot back.
“Of course I am!” Josiah answered.
“Then act like one! He’s in need and we should welcome him, not just judge,” Sarrah scolded her husband. She returned her attention to Paul. Sarrah suddenly hugged him, and she enjoyed the feeling of his firm body. “You’re staying for supper, Paul. End of story.” Some great passionate force worked inside her. She almost kissed him, but then made herself stop before she did.
“Yes, mam,” Paul said with a knowing smile. His heart pounded from being so close to her like that. The name Sarrah ignited and chimed in his head and heart. He glanced at the canned rabbit on the table and pointed. “Is that what we’re having to eat tonight?”
Everyone in the room burst into a fit of hysterical laughter.
They gathered around the table among a plethora of dishes and bowls and cups and platters: Bubbling, succulent pork chops on the bone, a potato casserole, a tossed salad, green beans with bacon, creamed corn, deep red beets, radishes, olives, cheese and crackers, a plop of sauerkraut, and a basket of the remaining Easter eggs.
Paul looked it all over with wide eyes as if he had never eaten a thing in his entire life. “Good golly Miss Molly,” he said out loud. “I haven’t seen a spread like this in what seems like an eternity.”
Josiah snapped his napkin and laid it out upon his lap and eyed the young man. “An eternity is an awful long time.”
“Yes, sir. I know it is.”
“Why don’t you say grace?” Josiah said to Paul.
“Grace?”
“A prayer,” Sarrah said. “We always say a prayer before we eat.”
“I really don’t know much about praying,” Paul stumbled.
“Pray!” Josiah bellowed.
“Now, now, Josiah,” Reverend Savior injected. “There’s no need to yell at the boy. If he’s never prayed, how’s he going to know?”
“The food is getting cold,” Serena said.
“I’d be more than happy to do the prayer,” the reverend said. “It is my job, after all.”
Josiah ignored him and pointed his fork toward Paul. “You just talk to God,” he said. “You tell him how you feel and how thankful you are for all the blessings he’s bestowed upon us.”
Paul looked at Sarrah and smiled. “But it’s your dear wife who prepared the meal, not a man in the clouds.”
Sarrah squirmed. She feared the worst for Paul over what he had said. She sensed Josiah’s blood boiling deep inside his body. There would be an outburst at any moment, she thought. A terrible outburst that would send dishes and food flying. Sarrah knew she would end up getting beat for pushing the young man to stay, but she just couldn’t help it. There was something moving her within the hope of desire. Sarrah also knew she would be willing to take a beating for Paul. With each strike of Josiah’s hand or belt, she would think of Paul and what would surely come. But how? Why? What was going on?
Josiah was trembling. He took a deep breath. For some reason he could not fathom, he was trying to calm himself. He was trying to take Paul’s side in the matter of religion. “I can’t blame you for not understanding the true depth of what God really is,” Josiah said. His own ears were in disbelief. “If you haven’t grown up with it, if you haven’t been taught the true way, then it’s not right of me to take offense. Instead,” he said. “I should help you learn the truth.”
Josiah pushed his chair back and went into another room. When he returned, he was holding a small Bible. He handed it to Paul. “Here, I want you to have this. I have others.”
Paul took the Bible and looked around the table. Everyone was gently smiling at him.
“That there is the mind of God,” Josiah said. “Explore it. Believe me, there is no greater gift.” He sat back down at the table. “That’s prayer enough,” he said, and they all began to eat.
After they had finished the bountiful meal and enjoyed a delicious dessert of strawberry Schaum Torte, Paul suggested that he would like to perform a magic trick for them.
“Now, I want you all to close your eyes and count to 43 very slowly,” he instructed. “When you’re done counting, you may open your eyes, and I will have vanished. I assure you all, you will be amazed.”
“I say, it doesn’t sound like much of a magic trick when you make your audience close their eyes,” the reverend complained. “Why, he could just slip out the back door and we’d never see him again, his belly full of a free meal.”
“Calm down, padre,” Josiah said in defense of the young man whom he has quickly taken a liking to. “Let him do his little magic trick. I want some entertainment around here.”
Sarrah suddenly shot up from her chair and started applauding enthusiastically. “Do it, Paul!” she exclaimed. “Show me your magic wand!”
Paul glanced at her and smiled. His warm soul reveled in the sight of her shapely yet meaty body, the sparkling of her bewildering amethyst eyes, the fullness of her intelligent breasts, the sensual beckoning of her mouth, her domestic simplicity. He wanted to take her like an animal right then and there on the table. He had no concerns over the cooling scraps of food or the sharp knives and other implements. He didn’t even care if the others stayed there and watched. Paul wanted to plow her like an autumn field beneath the grace of the universe.
Sarrah, Josiah, Serena, and the reverend closed their eyes and began to count. Paul quickly slipped away from the dining table and made for the staircase to the second floor of the old farmhouse. He stepped slowly and gently for fear of a creaking board under his weight giving him away.
When he reached the upper hallway, he slithered along in search of Sarrah and Josiah’s bedroom. He assumed they slept together. It was a grand room in one corner of the house with large windows looking out upon the pastoral surroundings in which they lived. He paused for a moment and relished the grandeur of the mountains and the sky above them before sitting down at a vanity table and looking at himself in a mirror.
“I think I’m going mad,” Paul said to himself as he slowed time. He cocked his head to one side. He studied his long, coiled hair. It was the color of polished rust. He looked at his geometric, chiseled face. He gazed into his own darkened yellow eyes. Burnt hazel is what they call it, he thought. “Am I truly the reason for all the disarray in this world?” His reflection became serious. “I can’t be. No one should take on a burden like that. Not even me.”
He got up from the vanity and went to what he knew was Sarrah’s dresser. He pulled the drawers open until he found her underwear. Paul removed a pair and held it before his face before crushing it into his nose and mouth and breathing in deeply. He went through them all, pair after pair, and did the same thing with each, placing them back into the drawer when finished. Except one. It was pink with a white waistband, and he stuffed it down his pants. They were drawing closer now, he thought. Imaginary touching slowly materializing into reality. This he knew with certainty. He and Sarrah in some obscure and divine loving embrace.
He suddenly stopped his thoughts, and his own mind opened his eyes wide and showed him. “It’s happening again,” Paul said aloud.
He restarted time and soon heard footsteps scrambling up the stairs. He made for the closest window and opened it. He peered out and it was a long way down it seemed. He gritted his teeth and stepped out, shutting the window behind him. He closed his eyes and let his body relax completely while in a transitory state. He just let go and tumbled down into the arms of someone who wasn’t even there. He embraced the ghost and ran from the house, through the tall fields of a spring day. He looked back only once and saw her in the very same window he had escaped through. His heart rushed for Sarrah as he fled into the forest.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 