smoldering anger like orange embers burning within her, threatening at any moment to burst into flames licking and consuming anything in its way. Suddenly she saw an image of the orange embers bloom into a bright orange flower and the flame became a vibrant green leaf off to one side. The leaf was attached to a sturdy green stem surrounded by smaller leaves. At the top of the stem was a bright yellow center to the blossom bursting around it. Glancing down she noticed that her right hand was resting on the table in the same shape she’d just seen in her mind, minus the flower. Her middle finger, tallman from the finger games Hosea liked to play, was the stem, her thumb the protruding leaf, the other fingers curled into the shapes of the smaller leaves. Tallman was curved slightly and pointing right at her father. F-you. She felt at peace as she adeptly picked up a paintbrush in her left hand. She surreptitiously stole glances at her still hand and, centered boldly in the middle of the paddle, she painted the flower that flipped off her father.
The next revelation came almost a year after that when she was alone in her room being punished. Her standard punishment was reading from the Bible and staying in her room until she could recite the passage. Hanna was a strong reader, but had always had difficulty with memorizing. The second the words left her sight, any recall of them vanished as well. She’d tried to explain this, once, but been called stubborn, lazy, insolent. She knew if she spent too much time holed up in her room, she’d get in even more trouble for “fooling around up there.” She licked her lips as the words started to swim in front of her eyes. Her heart thumped in her chest.
Suddenly in the quiet stillness she heard a voice. Just say what it says. It scared her. All at once the passage appeared before her eyes, even though she wasn’t looking at the book, not as words, but as thought. Say what it means, tell what is.
After that, it was as though reading or hearing the passages simply reminded her of what she already had known all along. The words flowed easily from her lips. She was careful to only reveal a little of what she knew. She’d wait a long while before her recital to make it seem like a real punishment.
The biblical stories were the easiest to memorize. The scene, the characters, their thoughts, and emotions all flooded at once into her brain. The images were so vivid that not only could she recite the story, but her fingers itched to recreate it.
Her punishment that day was to recite a section about Daniel and the Lion’s Den.
Reading the story made Hanna shiver with cold and her nose twitch at the smell of dank earth and human waste. It brought to mind one cold winter night when she had huddled with the family dog for warmth. They’d lost power right before bedtime. Hanna begged to sleep with her mom or brothers, but her mom said she was being silly as she piled layers of blankets on top of her, placed a flashlight on her night stand, and kissed her forehead. It was only a little cold under the blankets, but Hanna’s thoughts settled on Cookie, their blonde cocker spaniel who lived leashed to the back door and slept in a dog bed in the hallway. Had her mom piled blankets on the little dog? The thought of Cookie shivering in the cold dark hallway preyed on her mind and kept her from drifting into sleep.
Hanna felt in the dark for the flashlight, clicked it on, and, draping a blanket draped around her shoulders, slipped out of bed. The hardwood floor felt cool through her thin socks. She worked her way downstairs, careful to avoid the places that creaked, and scanned the hallway with her light. Cookie was curled in a tight ball, shivering without complaint. She looked up with her eyes, shifting skyward first one eyebrow, then the other, and wiggled her stub of a tail. Hanna knew not to unsnap the leash. Instead, she curled herself around the silky golden ball and wrapped the blanket over them both.
Somehow Hanna knew that not only was the lion’s den dark and dank, but it was cold, too. Cold not only on the bare skin of the man who’d been roughly shoved into the cell, but also for the lion who’d been shivering in there for days. There was no place and no way to get warm in the large pit. And as hungry as he was, the beast even more so was cold, tired, and forlorn. Daniel approached him without fear, resigned, ready to die, and knelt before him. The animal hung his massive head, and the man instinctually reached out and cradled it in his arms.
Hanna knew the man had been stripped. No use having perfectly usable clothing stinking of the great beast, and eventually, shredded and bloody. And he’d been beaten. That is how she drew the outline of his body, naked and bruised, behind the outline of the awesome creature. She wanted to make sure the parts that could be seen--the man’s draped arm, his hip, his ankle and foot-- would be positioned in the right way. After the man’s nude silhouette was completed, she filled in the rusty tangle mane of the animal with Daniels head and own tangled mane resting on it. She covered Daniel’s nakedness with the golden tan body of the lion and drew a dirt smeared bruise forearm, chiseled with muscles like the velvety tawny shoulder over which it was draped.
On that day, her father was in his den working and forgot about Hanna and her punishment. Hours later, when he finally remembered, he stomped up the stairs. He found that she’d memorized the scripture and painted a picture to go with it. Rather than being mad that she was fooling around, he was proud. So proud of her. He took a poster from the garage out of its frame and replaced it with her painting. He hung the framed picture of Daniel and the lion right in the living room. Like the F-you flower on the paddle that was flipping him off he saw without seeing that behind the lion lay a naked Daniel.
The visions continued to enter her mind and be released onto paper as hidden pictures within pictures. Adam and Eve were the subjects of her next drawing. This picture had the standard 20-something-year-old couple complacently walking from the fruit tree, hand-in-hand, well-clad in a modest dressing of fig leaves. Worked into the wrinkles of the tree bark behind them were a much younger Adam and Eve, 13 maybe, not a fig leaf in sight, fervently embracing. The two youngsters clung to each other in that moment of recognition, looking up, both focused on the same sight with a great terror shown in their eyes.
Crack. Crack.
Tears welled in Hanna’s eyes. She flexed and stretched her trembling jaw. She searched her mind for something other than the pain to focus on. She knew if she screamed out or started sobbing too soon, before she was properly punished, her father would become even angrier.
Hanna contemplated her crime. The leather thong tied to the paddle had broken, so the paddle, rather than hanging on the wall, was resting horizontally on the mantel. And somehow with this new perspective, her father had been able to see the image inside the flower. As he stood before the mantle and stared at the paddle for a long time, Hanna knew that he knew. Then he moved around the room examining each of her other pictures. She wanted to run, but was frozen in her spot on the couch. Even though her father had not yet turned to look at her, she was certain that his eyes burned like two hot coals. She looked around desperately for her mom. Her heart sank. It was the first Saturday of the month. The four boys were due for their every-other-month trip to the barber shop for a crew cut hair clipping, and they’d left about an hour ago.
“You will destroy each and every one of these pictures …this porn…” Crack. Crack. Crack.
Hanna waited for the familiar revulsion to settle upon her. Yes, yes, she would, she wanted to, wanted them to be gone, to never have existed, for things to go back to how they were. To hear her father say matter-of-factly, “Hanna is a good girl.” She longed to cling to her father, to beg for forgiveness.
“And you will never…” Crack… “pick up a pencil…” Crack… “to draw again”…Crack.
Hanna swallowed back the scream forming in her throat. In that moment, she wanted more than she’d ever wanted anything for the images to stop and for the compulsion to capture what she saw to cease. She tried. She tried to feel revulsion, tried to add the pencil, the paint brush, pastel, marker, even just a crayon to the “off limits” list. Even as she tried, an image popped into her mind. A raging rapid, a torrent of water, dangerous, in a
ll shades of brilliant purples, blues, greens. And she knew the moment she was able that the image would come forth from her and be replicated exactly as she now saw it. She desperately wanted to cling to her father and to promise him she’d never draw again.
If someone doesn’t want to hear what you have to say, don’t say anything at all. She remained silent, hoping that would appease her father.
“Say it.”
She knew with these words that silence was not good enough. Far from it. Each second of her silence seemed only to deepen his rage.
“Say. It.”
But that was a lie. And she was unable to lie.
Crack.
Where was Mommy to rush in and grab her up? To shout in mock anger and toss her safely into her room? There was no one to save her, no one to stop him.
Hanna heard the crack of the wood as the blows continue to fall one right after the other. Now falling over the entirety of her body. The pain was now unbearable, worse even than a double ear infection or a broken wrist. She
In God's Name: A Short Story Page 2
