The Sadist's Bible

by Nicole Cushing

  No busy signal. No static. No disembodied voice telling her the phone had been

  temporarily disconnected.

  Nothing.

  She double-checked her reception, fearing the mountains had cut her off, but the

  phone had three bars. Desperate, she tried the land line (an ancient, avocado-colored

  device with gray buttons and faded white numbers).

  Nothing.

  Minutes ago, her brain had demanded sleep. Now, her brain demanded answers. Was

  Lori blocking her calls? Could that really be happening, after all those late night heart to hearts?

  She felt like a fool. That must be exactly what was happening. In her head, the

  jigsaw pieces started to come together to form an ugly picture. No wonder Lori (if that

  was even her real name) would never tell Ellie that she loved her. It was a subtle signal, but a signal Ellie should have picked up on nonetheless. A hint that, despite all

  indications to the contrary, the Internet play was just play. A hint that all of this talk about sex and death was just talk. Just empty fantasizing.

  Ellie imagined a future confrontation: someday, a month or two from now, Lori

  would show up again. Lori would message her, flirt with her, maybe even try to start

  some cybersex...all as though none of this had ever happened. And Ellie would unload

  her anger about having been stood up, and Lori would affect astonishment at the very

  notion that Ellie had taken any of this seriously. Would explain that even her insistence it had been real had been part of the fantasy. How dense could she be?

  It had been like that, before, online. Three years ago, Ellie had engaged in another

  dalliance on the social network – someone who’d told her she was an eighteen year old

  girl from Alabama (“...just had my birthday yesterday...”), but who turned out to be a

  fifty year old man. He only admitted his deception when she pressed for more contact.

  After a flurry of intense cybersex chat sessions, she felt herself falling in love. Asked for a phone number.

  She slipped down to the basement, late at night, to make the call. Oh how her heart

  pounded when she entered the number in her cell phone! Oh, how disappointed she was

  to hear a mincing, gravelly falsetto on the other end. She dry heaved. Started shaking and crying. Then, as quietly as she could, she cussed him out.

  She’d let her guard down in those chats. Confessed desires she couldn’t confess

  anywhere else. There had been something like intimacy shared. When she called the man

  a perv for impersonating a woman online, he dropped the falsetto and called her a perv

  back. Said he might like to pretend to be a woman online but that she had a fantasy about sleeping with a “barely legal” girl. “Who’s the bigger perv, sweetheart?” he said in a

  Southern, smokers voice. “The way I see it, you’re basically a child molester!” Then he

  hung up.

  She’d felt like a fool and felt her soul scourged by deep and abiding shame. She’d

  asked herself the question, over and over: am I a child molester? She’d come to find out she hadn’t really been talking to a “barely legal” girl, but she’d thought she’d talked to one. She’d fantasized about having sex with her, and the girl’s youth (only one day

  removed from seventeen!) was undeniably part of the appeal.

  And the transvestite had seemed so damned convincing, online. Had acted so lost, so

  hungry for a strong hand to guide her. Maybe Ellie had been attracted to her because she was one of the few people (online or in real life) who seemed more fragile and clueless

  than she was. Learning the truth had been a disappointment. And that was something

  Ellie had to reckon with, she’d been disappointed she hadn’t had cybersex with a barely

  legal girl.

  She wondered again now: Am I a child molester?

  A voice, scratchy and Southern – the voice of God, or the voice of the transvestite, or

  both mixed together – answered her: “Thou art an abomination.”

  She had to pee. Before she squatted on the toilet, she looked in the huge mirror over

  the sink. She was too pale and too thin. She was glassy-eyed and straw-haired. She didn’t look like a human being. She looked like a cheap, dollar store doll. Not a Barbie, but an imitation Barbie. An inferior knock-off. A copy of a copy.

  She washed up and went to dry off on a hand towel. But the maid had “neglected” to

  supply her room with towels. Her wet hands dripped over her shirt and jeans as she made

  her way to a small utility closet next to the bathroom. Therein, she found an iron, a small ironing board, a coat rack, and hangers. On a shelf over the coat rack, she discovered six towels of various sizes and – to her great surprise – a pack of Marlboro Light 100s and a Bic lighter adorned with the logo of the Cincinnati Reds. Maybe the maid had taken a

  smoking break and had forgotten about the Marlboros. Maybe the last occupant had been

  trying to quit smoking and placed the pack there as a way to hinder easy access. However they got there didn’t matter. Now the pack was in her hands and, moreover, it wasn’t

  empty. Four smokes remained. She immediately pulled one out, lit it up, and sucked in a

  lungful of calm.

  She tapped ashes into a glass ashtray, then brought it over to the nightstand. She felt

  better. She wasn’t yet beginning to rest, but the gears in her mind sufficiently slowed so that she was now eligible for rest.

  She clicked on the TV, looking for the same talk show that was playing down in the

  lounge area. Looking for that same sexy celebrity with the short, spiky boyish purple hair and the lovely breasts and the delicious legs. She caught a glimpse of her, but only a

  glimpse, before the hotel’s satellite reception started fading in and out. She took a deep drag off her cigarette. Turned off the TV. Tapped more ashes into the ashtray.

  The quiet wasn’t good for her. The road had been exhausting, but the necessity of

  paying attention to traffic had offered at least some mild distraction from negative

  thoughts that crawled around her brain like ants through spilled sugar. Now the thoughts were fully unrestrained, and held dominion over her. Lustful, shameful thoughts followed by thoughts of self-disgust. Then came the cheerleading thoughts – attempts to fight off the shame by reminding herself that, outside this corner of the world, a woman wanting

  to be with a woman was okay. At least, more okay.

  Maybe she didn’t have to kill herself. Maybe she would go east on I-64, but instead

  of stopping at the Hillbriar she would continue on to the coast. To some big city out

  there. That’s exactly what she’d do. She had five days worth of professional clothes. She would start over. True, she wasn’t a kid anymore. She wouldn’t have any local

  references, either. But she wasn’t too old to start over. She had her laptop with her. She would start looking for jobs on the coast. Someplace with lots of other lesbians.

  Someplace where being a lesbian wasn’t at all frowned on. She’d research which city on

  the coast was the most tolerant toward that kind of thing. Surely, on the coast there would be employment for a lesbian with experience selling barges.

  But at some point she’d have to tell Jesse. And he would be shocked, at first. Then

  he’d get mad. Maybe she wouldn’t have to tell him the gay part – at least not right away.

  She could just say that she needed to get away. That it wasn’t him, it was her. That she wasn’t really the marrying kind, despite their nineteen years of marriage. He would make assumptions that there was another man. He would probably run after her. He’d be

  relentless. Find her.

  He’d find her and get
the Bible out and start to tell her why she was committing a

  terrible sin. He’d tell her that the entire church was praying for their marriage. That since God had joined them, no one except God could sever their tie.

  And, he’d be right. Or would he?

  Was there such a thing as God?

  It was a crazy question to ask. God was the foundation of everything – had been the

  foundation of everything since she was a little girl. It was like asking if there was such a thing as America. Such a thing as Indiana. Such a thing as parents.

  And that train of thought triggered another, unwanted, question. What would her

  parents say about all this? She stubbed the cigarette butt out in the ashtray. Let out a chuckle and couldn’t help but be surprised by the weakness and raspiness of the sound

  that escaped her throat. She was okay with being a shitty wife, because – if she was really honest with herself – she’d never aspired to be a good one. But now she realized that she was a shitty daughter, too, and that epiphany stung.

  But there was no way to deny it. After all, this was the first time she’d given any

  thought to how her plans impacted her mother and father. She’d contemplated suicide

  long and hard for many months and only found herself considering the impact on them at

  this late stage. If that didn’t provide evidence of her carelessness, her disregard for them, then what would? She was a bad daughter, and now it was too late for her to transform

  into a good one. She’d made too many decisions that ran counter to the way she was

  raised to be a good daughter. Besides, her parents had grown too senile to participate in any sort of game-changing heart-to-heart.

  She hadn’t been close to them since middle school. Conversations between her and

  her parents were superficially pleasant, when she visited twice a year and phoned twice a month. They were old now and had moved to Florida, so they could be closer to Destin.

  They’d been much older-than-usual when they’d had her. They’d struggled a long time

  with infertility, and called Ellie their “blessing”. She was their only child.

  They were closer, in age, to grandparents than parents. This made them more

  conservative than most parents. They’d wanted her to marry a godly man, bear godly

  children, dote on godly grandchildren, then fall into a godly grave.

  And why not? Maybe they weren’t being closed-minded or repressive. Maybe they

  were simply relying on a way of life that had proven its worth over the course of

  centuries. Maybe traditions weren’t such bad things. Maybe self-denial wasn’t such a bad thing. For example, if she’d practiced self-denial and not looked for online sex chat

  sessions with other women, she would have never had the experience with the fake

  teenager.

  By seeking to engage in acts of abomination, she’d put herself in a position to be

  hurt. Perhaps, if there was a God, the incident with the transvestite was His way of

  punishing her for violating nature’s order.

  God was perfect, therefore His universe was perfect. Nothing happened by mistake.

  Even the fact that she was suicidal was part of the divine plan. But what purpose could

  her misery (and possible self-destruction) serve?

  Her hands shook as she lit another cigarette. Maybe God wanted her to die so that

  her sin could not contaminate any other woman. That could be it. Yes, that made sense.

  Suicide as a sort of self-imposed quarantine.

  But the emotional pain en route to suicide: what was the purpose of that? Why could she not simply kill herself joyfully and be done with it? Why did she suffer a constant, ugly gray ache in her head?

  All pain had a purpose. When she was a child, she’d had an intense pain in her

  stomach. And the purpose of that pain was to send the message that her appendix was

  about to burst. The doctors took it out, just in the nick of time. Pain had done its job. It had sounded the red alert.

  Maybe the emotional pain was there to bring her – literally – to her knees. To knock

  her down a few pegs, so that she wouldn’t die before first acknowledging the superiority of the tried and true path that had been passed down one generation after another.

  The path of the Bible.

  She was, at this moment, on the verge of tears. She took another deep drag off her

  smoke, then opened the nightstand drawer. Picked up the faded, worn, and tattered

  Gideons’ New Testament.

  She started to flip through the book and pick a passage at random. But as her thumb

  worked its way through the pages, she discovered a gospel tract tucked inside – a hidden leaflet. Under the title ( He Wants Us Broken), there was a pen-and-ink drawing of a bald man with a sparse beard whose contorted face was the flag of agony. He only had healed

  stubs where his arms and legs should’ve been. His eyes looked all fucked up – like a

  goat’s. He drooled and bawled, and even the sputum and tears looked – in their own way

  – malformed; oozing down his face in weird globs rather than straight trails.

  The drawing was repellent, but the title...there was something about the title that rang true. She flipped over the cover and read the text on the first page.

  GOD WANTS US BROKEN!

  He wants us broken and freakish. And insane. Addicted to drugs

  and addicted to sexual abomination!

  Yes, this is what God WANTS. What He DEMANDS. Because if we

  didn’t suffer such afflictions we wouldn’t need Him. The more

  afflictions we have, the more we need Him. And God DEMANDS that

  we both need Him AND acknowledge our need of Him.

  The more we need Him, the more we pray to Him. First

  Thessalonians, chapter five verse seventeen commands us: “Pray

  without ceasing”. And the only way to pray without ceasing is to be in

  agony without ceasing; to be unceasingly broken and unceasingly

  freakish.

  At the bottom of this page, there was another pen and ink drawing – this one of a

  Catholic priest performing last rites on a gnarled, emaciated old woman. A family

  surrounded the bedside, kneeling with their heads bowed and hands clasped tightly

  together (as though cuffed in that position).

  The text sounded outrageous. Blasphemous. It countered everything she’d ever been

  taught. Yet, it did quote scripture. And it provided some reassurance to her at an hour when she desperately needed it. All of those aspects of herself that she thought were bad, that God disapproved of, might actually be the very aspects of her that He loved.

  The tract hadn’t yet convinced her. But, in a sense, it did something more important

  than convincing her. It comforted her. She flipped to the next page.

  MORE PROOF – TO CONVINCE THE SKEPTICAL!

  1. More Scriptural Proof:

  • Jesus compared Himself to a mighty boulder. “Whoever shal fall

  upon that stone shal be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will

  grind him to powder.” – Luke 20:18

  • “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” –

  Matthew 5:5

  • “...if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee:

  for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish...And

  if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is

  profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish...” –

  Matthew 5: 29-30

  2. Scientific Proof

  Science is yet another demonstration of God’s plan for us. The arc

  of history is long, but bends towards degene
racy! We now know

  that the universe started as perfection: a single block of matter, united

  and whole. But then it broke into billions of inferior pieces. From the

  moment we come into existence, we are already broken – a shard

  of a shard of a shard. God’s plan breaks us down even more. If we live

  long enough, our body will break down. As we grow very old, our

  mind breaks down. Then, after we die, we break down even further.

  Time breaks us down, flies break us down, worms break us down until

  we are merely a tight leather shroud around a frame of bone. Until we

  are just bone. Until we are just powder – pulverized when our graves,

  themselves, betray us and shift with the tectonic forces of a spastic

  Earth.

  Ellie didn’t know how long her hand had been trembling. She didn’t know how long

  she’d been taking puffs on her cigarette without tapping off the ash. All she knew is that her thigh was burning. She’d been shaking so violently that she’d flung ashes and cinders onto her jeans. They’d burned a tiny hole through the cotton, and caused a smudge mark

  when she rubbed the ashes off.

  The arc of history is long, but bends towards degeneracy!

  She’d seen that sentence earlier that evening. In the restaurant. At least, she’d

  thought she’d seen it. But here it was again. She stubbed the cigarette out into the ashtray and put both of her hands on the tract. She ran her fingers over it, to make certain it was real. She placed it right under the nightstand lamp, to verify the print said what she

  thought it said.

  It did.

  She moved on to the next page.

  3. Evidence From Your Own Heart’s Yearning

  Look deep into your heart. You want to be little and yielding and

  sick, because this removes you from life’s burdens. (And did not

  Christ, Himself, say “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy

  laden, and I will give you rest.” – Matthew 11:28.)

  God delivers those of us who are heavy laden with the yolk of

  existence. He does this through the blessings of decay.

  HE SEEKS A MILLION NEW MARYS

  This is the age of the New Gospel. A clarification of the True