“I can make anything happen. There are no restraints,” I said aloud to myself as I drove my car down to Chillicothe. I talk to myself a lot. All those inner notes and thoughts just leaking out all the time. I go to Chillicothe because there’s an old bookstore downtown. I like to go in to smell the paper smeared with coffee and to have the thoughts of thousands upon thousands of other writers impressed upon me. In my whole life, I remember the smells best. Smells ignite my greatest memories.

There’s a pipe and tobacco shop next door from the bookstore. I don’t smoke a pipe, but I like to go in there because of the smell. That smell. Pipe tobacco. Pipe smoke. Grandfathers puffing away in an old easy chair while watching the Green Bay Packers on an olden day’s wooden television in the 1900s. My wife once bought me a bar of pipe smoke scented soap for one of those Christmases we once had. Now she’s gone and I don’t know where she is. Her name was Ladeline. LAD-A-LINE. (I always appreciate it when other people boldly announce their words as they speak. They enunciate). I believe she left because I’m crazy. She didn’t want to do the whole in sickness and health thing after all. That’s okay. I don’t care anymore. Everyone in my life could leave me and I would be fine with it. I’m a lone dog on the road. Madness makes me howl.

My phone alerted me as I stood outside in downtown Chillicothe and stared at things. It was my Realtor, Regina.

“I have another house to show you,” she said.

“It’s all okay,” I answered. “I’ve decided on the big old house right there in Circleville. I want it.”

“That’s great.”

“We can discuss the details later. But I wanted to ask you something.”

“What is it?”

“I was wondering if you’d mind some company when you go to the next Orange Mass.”

There was a brief pause, then an excited, “Yes.”

“I’m not exactly sure why I want to go,” I said. “Let’s just say it’s a feeling.”

“I completely understand. What you are experiencing is a calling. It happened to me, too.”

“I’m not going crazy?” I wondered.

“Not at all. This is the beginning of your fulfillment,” she assured me.

We met at what was once the First Baptist Church of Circleville. The marquis sign outside had been stripped of its black letters and was spray painted over with a large orange X on both sides, signaling that it was now an Orange Mass Worship Center. It was a sloppy job. Everything had to be done so quickly, and the organizers of all this were unorganized.

There was a gathering of people outside the church. Many of them were wearing red Make America Hate Again hats. They were talking and laughing, but as we passed by they stopped and stared at us as if we were part of the Unwanted. The resistance. To them, the scum of the Earth.

The inside of the building looked similar to what it must have resembled when it was still a Baptist church. As I looked around I noticed the obvious changes. Any reference to the woke Jesus Christ had been removed. The large cross at the front of the sanctuary had been taken down, burned, and they pissed on the ashes while declaring their new faith and allegiance to the Orange King. In its place was a very large portrait of the Orange King himself, when he was much younger, though. They used the young image as a way to portray his perceived eternity, his perfection. An everlasting morbid stain, I thought.

On the sides of the sanctuary, small versions of the very same portrait were hung. His grimacing eyes ever watching. We made our way into a pew and sat down. I noticed the holders on the back of the pew in front of us were void of any Bibles or old hymnals. In their place was hardly anything. Reading about and singing to some other god was now frowned upon. In its place was a pamphlet, an encouragement to get plastic surgery. And as I looked around as the crowd filed in, I noticed all the fake people, men and women alike. The fake cheeks, the fake lips, the fake eyes, the fake brows, the fake hair, the fake breasts, the fake tans. The fake laughs, the fake voices, the fake sentiments. Fake. Fake. Fake. All of it, fake.

I looked over at Regina. She seemed to admire these people for some reason. She gently felt her own face with her fingertips and sighed as she watched them. I could tell she was thinking about it. “You’re beautiful just the way you are,” I let slip out.

She turned to look at me with a shocked expression on her face. “Beautiful?” she replied, as if such a notion never registered within her.

It was then that there were three quick buzzing bursts of an alarm. Everyone in the sanctuary suddenly hushed their voices and turned forward. It was eerily silent except for the minuscule cracking of all that plastic.

A man wearing a long orange robe entered the sanctuary from the left. He glided to a podium, turned on the microphone and began to speak. “Please be seated.” There was a rush of human bones and skin bending. He opened the sacred book. “I will now read to you from the Orange Guide… And the Unwanted shall litter the earth and spread untrue vows of love, acceptance, and peace. They will fornicate with the same and call it freedom. They will alter their gender, fill our prisons, steal our food and jobs.”

Someone in the crowd suddenly shouted out, “America!”

The man at the podium raised his hand to quell the outburst, despite the fact it was allowed if kept at a minimum. He continued with his reading. “Beware the female versions of the Unwanted as they will desire equality and positions of power. And this they shall receive, only as long as the shell is not flawed, and they are giving of themselves.”

“Stay in the kitchen!” someone else shouted.

Again, the man at the podium raised his hand, then continued. “The female shall lie back, take the man’s seed, and then cleanse him and herself as well as the ceremonial bed.”

The man at the podium stopped reading and closed the book. “As well as the ceremonial bed,” he repeated. “What does that really mean?” He gripped the sides of the podium with his hands. “It’s not just the bed, my friends. It is everything in the household. The kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, the garage, the patio, the garden, the yard.” He paused to clear his throat. “But it goes much deeper than the surface dirt. It goes into the heart and mind of the woman herself. Rebellious thoughts are also unclean.” He stepped away from the podium and started walking back and forth on the carpeted area of the raised altar. “Thoughts of autonomy, this so-called independence they hunger for,” he continued. “That kind of rot must be cleaned as well. And as the book tells us… Spit it forth from your thin lips and never think on it again… I look out on the women here today, built up, artificial, mechanical, unintelligent, beautiful, and obedient. You all radiate, and the Orange King would be proud.”

He stepped down from the altar and began to walk up the main aisle of the sanctuary very slowly. He stopped beside our pew and looked at us. His eyes were especially fixed on Regina. She bowed her head to avoid his gaze. He continued to walk. “Even among us today,” he said. “I can sense the roots of rot.”

He paused at another pew and looked at the plastic woman standing there. He suddenly leaned in and kissed her on that inflated mouth and touched her between the legs. The crowd looked on in wonder and happiness. After he broke away from the kiss, he exclaimed, “That is what a woman should feel and taste like! Like glue. Adherence to the new way!”

“Yes, yes, yes!” the men chanted.

“The old is new, the old is new, the old is new,” the women chanted back with less enthusiasm.

I looked at Regina. I knew she wanted to resist. Her lips moved but no words were spilling out.

By

Aaron Echoes August