by Brett Lott
We kids had seen the emergence of Glass Jesus. Stunned when the smoke cleared, only then did we so fervently wish he had broken, or melted and dripped into the rain gutters. I know I did. In a moment like that, why did I continue to wish suffering upon the Bainers? Why even after their instances of unfounded generosity and the preservation of my life by Allaray? Why, after the example of the firemen whose civic love overlooked grudges? What did the Bainers ever possess that made me so jealous?
As soon as the Bainers and the firemen had left on the day of the fire, we had stood around with knowing looks, asking ourselves who would be the first to attempt it. We children, pirates till death, wanted to loot Jesus for his eyes. Those precious gems would wipe clean under faucet water. But who would dare? We all argued about it and did rock paper scissors a hundred times or more, and who won it I don't remember because in the end we knew we were still afraid to do it. For the risk of playing in a danger zone full of splinters, nails, and glass? Maybe. For the punishment we would receive if caught? Possibly. For fears unstated? Most likely. The idea of casting lots for Jesus' very eyes gave us pause. Especially in view of the miracle we had all been witness to. The glass baby survived an all-consuming fire, suspended for everyone to see like a supernatural exclamation point atop the heap of burnt-out home.
But now I gritted my teeth and burned inside and cursed Allaray when I saw her positioning the ladder. Mine! Mine! It should be mine! I wanted to scream. But the decision was no longer mine to make, nor the rest of the neighborhood kids'. She would lay claim to the prize, the image of her final victory over us. We could only hope those jewels were burnt-up black coals after all.
Up Allaray went, and I seethed. She pulled on the ropes. Still strong. Still tight. She spit on her jacket and rubbed Jesus' face. The visage of the baby emerged from the soot, and the two little shining jewel eyes came alive. Curse words! The eyes had survived the fire intact, brighter than ever. The Bainers would have the last laugh. Allaray reached around Jesus and fumbled for the flashlight that had occupied the hole in his back. "Still here!" she yelled down to the others. Allaray turned the flashlight on. She admired the display while descending the ladder, and then from the ground. And the Bainer kids ran around in the ash until their legs were black from it, and they looked like legless floating ghosts against the dark mound of their former home. Beneath the lit face and eyes of Jesus, eerily affixed above them, they floated like transparent spirits. And then they piled in their RV and drove away, leaving the charred, but illuminated face of Jesus behind them.
DAVID DRURY is a writer and editor in Seattle, Washington. He earned a Master of Christian Studies degree from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English/Creative Writing from California State University East Bay. He and his wife, Stephanie, have two children: son Judah Crutial and daughter Rilian Flannery. David has also released two albums with his indie-rock band, Tennis Pro.
THE RESULTS
OF A DOG
GOING BLIND
REBECCA SCHMUCK
STORIES COME IN ALL FORMS, FROM ALLEGORY TO DOCUMENtary, from epistle to fairy tale. "The Results of a Dog Going Blind" carries with it no overt Christian references, and reads very much like a Middle-Eastern fable, but the soul of this story—its spirit and heart—reveals the deepest of truths about the Christian faith: that even when our attempts to make straight our way for ourselves and our loved ones fails miserably, there is available to us, once we confess the sin of our self-centered lives, redemption, and the means by which, in our blindness, to begin to see.
—BRET LOTT
It was a great disappointment to Jusuf, his son's sudden descent into blindness. One moment Shan was running across the cracked-tile kitchen floor of the Empress Hotel in Medan, Sumatra, his nine-year-old form weaving around their familiar sweating figures: Farid, whose very skin reeked of coriander and mustard seed, whose chest hairs held the spices of a thousand exotic countries; and Jusuf, his father, the cook with the talent for birds.
The next moment the saucepan had dropped. The world clattered to a halt, his son dropped to the floor, and Jusuf thought at once of a dog.
Shan had found the dog—came home with it, even—years ago, after it had made an unfortunate appearance in the middle of the road. Jusuf knew the moment it opened its eyes that the dog was blind. It explained, actually, quite a lot—how else does one end up in the middle of Jalan Surakarta, after all—and it put to rest his suspicions, concerns. When the eyelids had slid apart, there could be no mistaking. It was the first bad sign, the blindness of the dog.
Now he sat in the hospital, waiting. The doctors were suspicious—concerned—so it was against Jusuf's wishes that a scant two hours later Shan awoke.
"I am here, Shan. It is evening," Jusuf said quickly—an attempt to explain any darkness. "Do you know what happened to you?"
"I was hit in the head."
"Yes. You are in the hospital right now. The doctors here are very good. They will have you better in no time, you will see. Listen," he rushed, "I was just thinking of your job. You must improve quickly so that you can continue with the chickens."
Shan nodded and they sat in awkward silence. The last vestiges of sunlight outside slipped away, and Jusuf felt his pupils widening, straining to see his son in the bed. Finally Shan said to him, "Papi, do you know, whatever happened to my dog?"
"The results of a dog going blind are these," said Jusuf. "He will stumble over objects, become hesitant to go places where he cannot see. Namely, he will not at first realize that he is blind."
"Papi, I cannot see you," Shan said, questioning.
"I know," Jusuf said softly. "You are blind."
A bruising of the cortical region of the brain, the doctors told Jusuf the second day. So sorry. Perhaps his sight will return. Perhaps not. You must emphasize the not, they said the third day, so as not to get his hopes in a whirl. By the fourth day Shan was home.
"I will put you to work feeding the chickens," Jusuf said, to not acknowledge the blindness. But by the second week, when the chickens were getting lean from Shan's scattering the feed to the winds, when Jusuf sensed the disturbance of the flock, he told Shan that perhaps simply to water them was best. He would take care of the rest.
Jusuf had worked at the Empress Hotel since the age of seven. It was then, when he was in the lobby one day, that a woman phoned from upstairs, desperate. "Go to the lift, boy," the desk operator had ordered him. "There is a woman frantic about chickens."
Young Jusuf walked quickly to the lift area and saw, as the metal box slowly emerged from above and ground to a halt before him, that the floor of the lift was covered with chickens. They were alive, clucking and pecking at their reflections in the burnished metal walls.
Quickly Jusuf slid open the grate. He dropped to his knees at the edge of the lift and placed his hands, thumb-to-thumb, on the lift next to the first group of chickens. Then, experimentally, he lowered his face on level with the birds. One hen, distracted from her reflection by his closeness, cocked her head and edged his direction. Others also quieted and followed suit. Seeing their attention, Jusuf rose to his feet and walked to the kitchen, thirty-four chickens falling into step behind him. He knew then that he had a way with chickens, that his talent for birds was in winning confidences from them. Only later would he discover his talent for cooking them too.
It was this talent that caused him to fear the dog Shan had brought home, the dog that now looked out at him through his son's sightless eyes. It, from the beginning, had shown an alarming liking for birds. He had said to his son, "A dog with a taste for chicken, quite simply, cannot be tolerated."
Birds were his livelihood, his calling—one Shan had not inherited. Jusuf had feared this since the moment he had looked at his infant son's hands and could not picture them thumb-to-thumb on the floor of the lift. He could not see in Shan's eyes the look of trusting birds. His fear had worsened with the coming of the dog.
"What
is the relationship between a bird and a dog?" he had exclaimed to his wife angrily. "To put it plainly, Prava, the two cannot exist happily together." He had been relieved, actually, when the dog had gone missing in the night. Its blindness was an aberration in itself and, all in all, the dog was better off gone.
But Shan had missed the dog, had trusted it in a way that Jusuf only trusted his birds. They were reliably expendable. He could tell them things with the comforting certainty that they would be dead within the week, part of the never-ending stream of requests for satay and soto ayam, for rice served with his fried confidantes.
Mr. Andika, the hotel owner, spotted the new problem right off. "Jusuf, my friend, I hate to say this to you, but really you must find other work for Shan. With the chickens he is so public. The hotel guests see him, and the sight makes them uncomfortable. It is a purposefully sightless society we live in today," he sighed. "That is as it is; I cannot change people." He shrugged. "But Shan must work inside. Perhaps in the kitchen?"
"Perhaps," Jusuf allowed, and Mr. Andika went away pleased.
But Shan had no place in the kitchen. Even Farid said to him, "I have this thought in my head, Jusuf, that Shan is not meant for this place."
Jusuf looked at him and then said slowly, "He is not like us, Prava and myself. Shan is like—do you remember the dog he once had? The one that was blind?"
"Perhaps," Farid said, choosing words carefully, "he should go to University. He is intelligent, likable . . ."
"He is blind."
"Yes, but I have heard that there are things to be done. A guest at the hotel saw Shan with the chickens."
Shame burned through Jusuf. "You should not have listened to him."
"He says that there are animals that can be trained to limit Shan's blindness."
"And these animals are?"
"They are dogs," Farid admitted.
"Ah, there, you see? I have said it already. There is nothing to be done."
Farid shrugged, admitting defeat, and the two spoke of it no more. But after the evening meal, when Jusuf was transferring the remains of the night's chickens into the scrap heap, he was stopped by a man with a cane.
"Excuse me," the man said, "but I wanted to tell you, the chicken tonight was really quite good."
"Thank you," Jusuf murmured.
"Yes, and also, I wished to speak to you about the boy. Your son." As if sensing Jusuf's uneasiness, the man continued rapidly. "You see, I know some people south of here who are training dogs to lead the blind. It is their life's work, carrying guide dogs to countries around the world."
Jusuf laughed suddenly. "It must disappoint them greatly to carry this work here."
The man stared at him.
"Here," Jusuf explained, "dogs are eaten, run over by buses. Here dogs themselves are blind."
The man murmured in negation, but Jusuf continued. "Do you know what I did with the dog my son had? Sent it away! Wished it away. It was blind, you see."
He laughed helplessly, imagining Shan, blind Shan, led by that sightless dog through the streets of Medan, followed by thirty-four chickens.
The guest, embarrassed, bowed slightly and left, and Jusuf collapsed onto the tiles. He looked up at the saucepans hooked onto the ceiling and laughed at the absurdity that one of them should have so perfectly fallen onto the head of his son. How utterly absurd that just like that, neatly even, his son had become like the dog with an affinity for chicken—how odd that only in their blind affinity were the three of them alike. He laughed until there was no more sound, until his diaphragm simply convulsed and convulsed and his wracking attempts to draw breath sounded more akin to sobs.
The next day he and Shan boarded the bus.
REBECCA SCHMUCK'S short story "The Results of a Dog Going Blind" won the 2004 WORLDview Fiction Contest sponsored by WORLD Magazine and WestBow Press. A native of Pensacola, Florida, she formed a love of travel from early family trips crisscrossing the U.S. and its borders. That, coupled with a love for learning languages, inspires her stories, many of which are set primarily in other countries.
LANDSLIDE
DAVID McGLYNN
"LANDSLIDE" IS AN ELEGANTLY TOLD STORY OF A PASTOR'S life weighed against a single moment out of his youth, when the prospect of a life in the ministry—and his first opportunity to preach—seems just within reach, and forever far away. Oftentimes in literature we see pastors rendered as stereotypes—either hypocrites or Bible thumpers or both—but in this story we have a pastor who seems perhaps as real as we will find: a man after God's heart, but fully and humbly aware of the missteps in his own life, and the loss that haunts him, no matter how "successful" he may seem.
—BRET LOTT
The earth moved on a narrow bend in the Pacific Coast Highway, about a half hour north of Cayucos State Beach—the kind of place I had seen only in coffee-table books on AMERICA'S GREAT SCENIC DRIVES. Cypress trees leaned sideways over the cliffs' edges, which alone amazed me, and dark bushes of chaparral speckled with yellow and purple carpeted the hills. Driving that way had been Greg's idea, and when the traffic backed up, I had no idea what we were in for. It was an El Niño year, and a deluge of rain had saturated the soil and overfilled the run-off channels. Down in Los Angeles, the concrete riverbeds ran full for the first time that I could remember. A small earthquake, maybe 2.5 on the Richter, too small to feel, was all it took to send who-knows-how-many tons of mud and rocks tumbling down the gulley. It blew through the guardrail, wiped out the road, and poured over the side of the cliff to the little rocky beach a hundred feet below. I have said, in the countless times I've told this story, that the road was higher than that, more like a thousand feet, but it was a hundred. I'm trying to stay true to the facts. Debris piled up on the highway, sloping toward the edge of the road in line with the hillside. A blond graft was missing from the otherwise brown hill above. How anyone could have survived getting buried beneath it is something I can only explain as the grace of God.
However, people did survive, at least for a while, and had somehow managed to call for help. This is one aspect of the story that seems improbable and I am not quite clear on the details. It was what I heard at the time, and being awe-struck by the mound of earth that I had walked nearly a mile from our parked car to see, I did not think to question it. Greg and I arrived to see people already digging, one man with a short-handled shovel and the rest, maybe a dozen others, using tire irons and buckets to pound and scoop away the dirt. A woman was bent forward with her hair in her face, scooping between her legs with her hands while a man in a green cap stood beside the open door of his Dodge Ram, talking into the square receiver of a CB, the cord stretched absolutely straight. I could see other people standing on the other side of the slide, a crowd mirroring ours, but I couldn't hear their voices. The slide was a consuming thing, and all that lay beyond it seemed like a different country.
We were there for two minutes before the highway patrol arrived, a single car driven by a single officer with close-cropped hair and a yellow windbreaker over his beige uniform. When he stepped up to the edge of the road and looked down at the beach, his sleeves flapped in the wind and pressed against his arms and torso, revealing the bulk of the bulletproof vest beneath his shirt. He appeared worried, which is an easy emotion to spot from far away; he rubbed his jaw with the heel of his palm and looked back and forth between the slide and the edge. He couldn't have been much older than I was at the time, which was twenty-one, but it was his responsibility to take control of the situation. He returned to his cruiser and sat down in the front seat and then spoke to us over the P/A, kindly asking everyone to get back. He even said, Please. Composing himself, he explained that the slide wasn't stable and that a simple shift could send more. He asked the people in the crowd to go back and wait at their cars. Those digging ignored him and kept right on with what they were doing. Greg and I wanted to help; it seemed better than just standing around. But despite every Good Samaritan impulse within us, every urge to sacrifice ours
elves for the sake of strangers, neither of us was about to disobey the police.
A line of cars ahead of us tried to turn around and head back, but it wasn't long before a second officer rode by on a motorcycle and announced that the lane needed to stay open so emergency crews could get through. The road we were on was now closed and an officer was posted at the turnoff; anyone caught trying to go back before we were directed would be ticketed. At that point, people seemed to surrender to the wait, and though I was impatient to get home, I prayed I would surrender too. People unfolded chairs and blankets and set out food, intent on picnicking. It wasn't the worst spot for such things. I heard eight different radios tuned to eight different stations, at least two in Spanish. A few hundred yards ahead of us in line, four young boys stood shoulder to shoulder throwing rocks over the water, doing all they could to out-throw one another.
This gave Greg the idea to hit a few balls. He popped the trunk and unsheathed his three-iron and his grocery sack filled with chipped-up balls from the driving range where he had worked the previous summer. The balls were going to be thrown out; he would never have taken them without permission. The backside of our dorm faced a grassy slope, too steep to build on and which bottomed out at a junior-high soccer field. Greg drove balls from the hill whenever he was bored or had a problem he couldn't figure out, one of the many things about him I never fully understood. That morning I had played my first full round of golf at a tiny public course outside Pasa Robles, about a hundred miles west of Bakersfield where we had attended a wedding the night before. Golf was a sport I never had much talent for, and on that day especially I found that it required a much greater amount of patience and concentration than I had been prepared to give. But James instructs us to consider it joy when we encounter various trials, so I committed myself to learning, at least for the day.
