She stands in front of the three Elders briefly, and then curtsies. It’s an unexpected move, foreign and endearing. They are already smitten, ready to believe whatever she says.
You sit in your wooden, straight-backed chair, as the Elders begin talking to your daughter. You know it will end. It doesn’t matter.
“We’ve heard some things about you, Dear One,” Pastor Ed says. `We understand that you can…do things.”
“I can recite the Ten Commandments,” she says. “I know all the books of the Bible in order, Old Testament and New. I know the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Those are all good things, Dear,” Pastor Ed says. “Very good things, to be sure. But we’re talking about a different kind of things here, my Dear. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
She looks down, as if she’s highly embarrassed. She shuffles her feet. She glances over at you like she’s asking for permission. She doesn’t need it. “Go on,” you tell her.
She stands in front of Elder Freeman. “Will you give me your hand, Elder?” she asks, and he seems thrilled. He’s Cinderella and she is Prince Charming, inviting him to the ball. He holds his trembling hand towards her, and she reaches out with her own, placing her palm on his.
Her eyes flutter shut and she tilts her head to one side, like she’s listening. She mutters softly to herself.
“What is she doing?” Pastor Ed asks.
“Receiving,” you say.
The girl’s eyes snap open. She fixes Elder Freeman in place with her stare. Smiling, she says, “Those children are lovely, Elder. But why don’t they live with you? And how come their mother isn’t Missus Freeman? Do Brent and Shelley know they have sisters?”
Elder Freeman’s face grows red. He backs away from your daughter slowly. “How do you know?” he whispers. She simply smiles at him like she can’t comprehend what he’s saying.
“The Holy Spirit is upon her!” Elder Flynn cries.
“But what if it isn’t?” you respond. “What if it’s something else?”
Elder Freeman is crying bitterly, pounding his fists into his legs. Your daughter is moving on down the line, taking Elder Flynn’s hand next. He gives it to her eagerly, his eyebrows twitching with anticipation.
She zones out for a few seconds, blue eyes rolled back in her head. When she comes to, Elder Flynn is practically drooling. You can see it in his eyes. He wants his gold star, his little crown, a thumbs-up from the Tongue of Fire.
Her face is stern. She pulls her hand away from his, like it’s been stung. “I don’t know why you think that’s funny. She told she was peeing blood. Why would you laugh at that? And why would you keep kicking her?”
Pastor Ed clears his throat. “Look, folks, nothing that happens in this room leaves this room. We’ll deal with all of these things later.”
“Don’t you see?” you ask. “She’s trying to get you all riled up! This isn’t edifying. It’s not unifying. This is not what the Holy Spirit does!”
“The Spirit comes to reveal the truth, in love,” Pastor Ed replies. “No one’s been condemned here. We just have some things coming to light, and that’s okay. We were told in Scripture that would happen.”
He stands and straightens his tie. Clearing his throat, he holds his hand out to your daughter. You shake your head. This horror show can’t go on much longer.
She takes the Pastor’s hand and does her little fade-out/fade-in. She shakes her head, like she has just received a profound revelation. She holds on to Pastor’s hand with both hands, shaking it gently, in a comforting fashion.
“So that’s why the Newberrys had to leave the church. I understand. She was beautiful, yes, she was.”
You are incredulous. You cannot believe they are falling for this pious line of crap, and yet you knew instinctively that they would.
“Show us,” Pastor Ed says. “What else can you do?”
Your daughter looks at you. That’s your cue.
“I’m going to step out for a moment,” you announce, but no one hears you. It doesn’t matter. You know what happens next.
Body to body, job to job.
***
You prayed, angrily, fiercely, to whomever would listen. Ranting to Jesus. Yelling at Odin. Calling forth Anubis.
Daring Satan to rise up.
Whatever gets the job done, right? And you’re desperate, so you make promises. You promise things there’s no way you can follow up on. No way in Hell.
You want to clean the chapel with bleach when you have finished. You’re sure you’ve profaned something, everything, everyone, with your prayers. You feel like an infidel, a follower of some old dead path, Moloch in the time of mutiny. Your fear has made you talk nonsense.
When you check on your family, your wife has passed away, a victim of blood loss. The doctors, of course, did all they could. That’s what they always say. Your daughter, however, has made a drastic improvement in almost no time. She thrives now, and it is as if nothing were ever wrong. New skin covers over the hole in her head. Synapses fire, neurons make new pathways, burrowing like termites into soft tissue and her brain rebuilds itself. Long live the New Flesh.
You are in an odd situation. You mourn your wife, your bride, the beautiful one you married when she was seventeen, the one who bore your first and only child. She called you “Sugar.” She called you “Banana-Brain.” She made fun of you in ways you wouldn’t let anyone else get away with because you loved her, and she loved you, and you spoke in the language of intimates. And now she was gone, and it was your responsibility to box her up and file her away, like old tax returns, like embarrassing pictures.
You are now a single father. There is only one girl in your life now. And you are left wondering, who answered your prayers? Who picked up on your wretched requests and decided to answer them? Was it Jesus? Are you supposed to thank God for this situation?
In your darkest heart, you think not. You are pretty sure someone… something… else intervened.
***
You are waiting in the car. The engine is running. You have watched this scene before. It plays out like a movie in your head.
They always ask, “What else can you do?”
The answer is always the same. “I call the fire,” she says, “and the fire comes.”
She opens her hand, stretching it out flat, palm up. There is a small tornado on her palm, tiny winds twisting and spinning, gathering the dust motes from the air. Friction begins within the vortex, particle scraping against particle, making sparks. Within seconds, she is holding a burning cyclone.
The men are astonished. This just confirms their belief in the Holiness of your daughter, the fire of the Spirit appearing, just as it did on the Day of Pentecost. They’ve never seen anything like it before. They may fall to their knees. They may cry out to their god in thanks in adoration. It doesn’t matter how they react to the initial sighting.
It is at the height of their fervor that she attacks. She always goes for an Elder first, usually the one she feels has sinned the least. You’re guessing she chooses Elder Freeman in this case, with his secret family stashed away in another town. She directs the fire, shooting it straight at him, catching his ratty flannel shirt on fire. He screams in agony as the skin on his chest begins to bubble and char.
Elder Flynn is next, and from what you can tell, he’ll know he deserves it. He opens his arms wide and embraces the fire, thinking it has something to do with cleansing. He doesn’t make a sound, the poetic holy justice ringing through his guilty brain like the loudest bell.
While they can all still hear, she starts through the list of names. “For Ashtaroth,” she intones, her voice loud and flat. Pastors have studied these things. They have read the hierarchies of angels and demons.
You can imagine the look on Pastor Ed’s face when she whips that name out. When the realization sinks in of just how incredibly wrong he has been about this innocent little girl and the whole situation, it’s far too late. She strikes him in the face with
fire, cackling as his hair singes and burns. It’s even better for her if the Pastor has a beard.
Pastor Ed does.
They roast, the three of them, as she dances around the room, invoking King Paimon, Belial, Azrael. Beelzebub himself. She has told you in the past she can see their faces in the flames, grinning and giving their assent and approval.
She marks the walls with arcane symbols, scorching them into the drywall and cinder block, using the flame as a pen. Satanic imagery, seals from the Necronomicon. The building will have to be blessed and consecrated again, assuming the fire department arrives in time to save it.
Out of the building she comes, nary a scorch or smudge on her or her pretty dress. She gets into the backseat of the car. “Drive,” she says.
There is nothing to gather. Your clothes are already packed and in the trunk of the car. Your belongings are in a storage unit, waiting to be reclaimed.
“Where to next, Mistress?” you ask your daughter.
“Don’t know yet,” she says. “Keep driving. He’ll tell us where to stop. Oh man, you should have seen Pastor Ed dance.”
You drive out of town, seeing only the smallest wisp of smoke rising from the roof of the First Assembly, where you were so recently members.
***
All along these two-lane country back roads, wooden sign after wooden sign point the driver to the direction of a church. So many different kinds. Baptist, Free Will Baptist, Millennial King James Only Baptist, Methodist, Catholic… the list is endless. This is what you do. This is the promise you made in that chapel: to take care of your daughter and make sure she lived the life she was meant to live.
So you float, different churches in different towns, doling out something that might be justice and feels like murder. You catch a glimpse of your daughter sometimes, in the rearview mirror, staring at you like she doesn’t quite trust you. She scratches her palms when she does this. You turn on the radio to distract her. She loves that old-time gospel music, four-part harmony and fiddles.
Jesus is the shepherd. His body is the church, different bodies making up the whole. The people are his sheep. Sheep are to be slaughtered. Body to body, job to job.
“Turn left here,” she says, tapping your shoulder. “Stop when you can and get us some coffee. It’s going to be an all-night drive. There’s a tent revival in Elders Keep we need to hit.”
The Ghost in Yo u
When the ghosts left, you were inconsolable. They didn’t say goodbye. They didn’t stop to say thank you. They simply faded into the old green and yellow wallpaper and disappeared. Melinda, your wife, swears there was an audible “pop” as they drifted backwards into the ether.
You never knew their names. You called them Patricia and Daniel. Melinda named them the Pattersons, skipping over first names entirely. When you would see the rocking chair moving by itself, you would tell Melinda, “Patricia is in the rocking chair again.” She would reply, “The Pattersons do love that chair.” you would sigh. So impersonal.
When the ghosts left, so did your standing in the community. No longer were you the ones with the haunted house. Children quit stopping on the front walk, whispering and pointing furtively at the front door. Neighbors didn’t have to ask, “So, how are your houseguests doing?” referring to the Pattersons, Patricia and Daniel. Your guests had left. Suddenly, you were left facing your normalcy, just you and Melinda, and you did not like it.
They had been pleasant ghosts, Patricia and Daniel, and you had enjoyed their company. There was always someone to talk to, even if they could not reply. You would watch the news at night, Daniel by your side, barely visible, his mouth moving silently, as if he were giving his opinions to the screen. You feel sure the two of you would have agreed on the issues, if you could have truly conversed.
When Melinda would bake pies in the kitchen, Patricia would often stand in the corner, watching the process. Her eyes would roll back in her ghostly head, and she would point at Melinda, mouth open wide in a silent scream. “I know, I know,” Melinda would say. “It needs more butter.”
Those were the days.
When the ghosts left, there was no one to watch the news with but Melinda. She had no opinions on the Important Issues Facing Our Nation Today. You would ask her questions. “How do you feel about the economy, Melinda? What do you think can be done about the high unemployment rates?”
“Oh, I don’t like that newscaster’s tie,” she would reply, arms crossed sternly. “And I can’t stand the way he pronounces his esses. He lisps. He is a lisper.”
Even though you never actually heard Daniel’s opinions, you feel sure he was in agreement with you on most things. Melinda’s chattering was banal and distracting. Daniel’s silent mouth moving was comfortable, companionable. You realize, with some consternation, that you are more at ease with the dead than the living.
It doesn’t occur to you until after the fact that Melinda would be angry. She certainly seems unhappy here, with her schedule of drudgery, simply repeating the same patterns of housewifery day after interminable day. The cleaning, the cooking, the bathing, the sleeping; all the ridiculous minutiae of being alive. You think you are doing her a favor. You tell yourself that, anyway.
In reality, it is incredibly selfish.
After choking through another dinner that Melinda had stumbled through constructing (a homemade pot pie with burnt crust and too much cream of chicken soup), you arise from the table and kiss the top of her head. “Delicious,” you proclaim. You always tell her dinner is delicious, even when it obviously is anything but. You place your plate into the sink, silently draw a long, skinny knife from the butcher’s block on the counter and thrust it through her neck, side to side, piercing both arteries. She gurgles in protest, her eyes wide with surprise. Her hands ball up into instinctive fists, which she bangs against the table like a petulant child.
“Oh, come on,” you say. “Don’t make a big deal out of it.”
You withdraw the blade, and blood shoots through the holes in Melinda’s neck like water out of a lawn sprinkler. It will require a bit of mopping up later, but you are prepared for that. Melinda turns to look at you, her face filled with surprise and hatred. Her countenance takes you aback. Again, it didn’t occur to you that she would be angry. Melinda’s expression certainly seemed to say otherwise. You don’t expect someone like Melinda to take being murdered so hard.
Her body finally deflates and dies and, as you knew it would, her ghost appears right there in the kitchen. You smile and said, “Hello.” Melinda’s ghost simply points at you, her mouth wide open, her eyes ablaze with fury.
“You seem upset, Melinda,” you say, “but, look! The house is haunted again! And this time, you’re the one haunting it! Isn’t that spectacular? We’ll be the most popular house in the neighborhood again! The children will stop and point and stare, all because of you!”
Melinda shakes her ethereal head and disappears.
My plan, you think. How could this plan go wrong? You walk across the kitchen to the sink. You pick up a washcloth, soak it with hot water from the tap and begin cleaning up Melinda’s blood from the kitchen floor.
That’s when you slip in the veritable lake of her blood and hit your head on the corner of the green marble kitchen counter. You feel your skull crack. You try to move but your brain doesn’t seem to be sending signals to your nerves anymore. Your body twitches embarrassingly before giving up the ghost, in a literal sense. The last thing you see as a living person is Melinda’s spirit, crouching over you, her eyes crinkled upwards in a silent laugh.
There’s no way of telling how many years have gone by. Linear time doesn’t have much of a role in the ether. You can’t get any older and you’re already dead. There’s not much to look forward to. There’s no looking forward when time is non-existent.
A new family has moved into your old house, and Melinda and you are playing it cool. The two of you show up in mirrors occasionally. Melinda enjoys turning the lights off and on. You lik
e standing over the bed of their youngest child while she naps. She seems sweet and innocent, and her cheeks are red and alive. When she awakens and sees you, she screams and begs protection from her god. You want to make her feel better, but she does not accept your comfort, preferring to wait for one of her parents to arrive and wipe her tears away.
“That scary person,” she says. “The scary person was watching me sleep.”
You finally get to meet the couple that haunted your house while you were alive, and learn that Daniel and Patricia’s real names were Robert and Katrina. Funnily enough, their last name really was Patterson. You’ve had many discussions about the old days, what it was like to be alive, how strange it is now to not be able to smell anything. There are rumors, of course, about what else there is. Some speak about a tunnel with a warm light at the end. Others talk about a dark stairway that leads down, down, ever downwards. No one is for sure. It’s not like there’s really such a thing as life after life after death.
Rumors and conjecture can wait until later. For now, you stay in the house with Melinda and the new tenants. You sit on the couch and watch the news with the man. He has begun to see you. He believes your name is Franklin.
Pictures of You
This is an unscheduled meeting.
You are seated at a large oak table in a room where the heat has not been turned on in months. It is like a tomb for conference calls. Across from you is your immediate supervisor, a corporate clone named Benjamin. Ben, for short. Seated next to him is Pamela, a short frump from Human Resources. Next to Pamela is Mr. Godfrey. He is the head of the entire department.
The three of them murmur amongst themselves as you sit nervously in your cloth-covered swivel chair. You have no idea why you are here. You are punctual to a fault. Your work is good, your productivity high. You have even fostered the development of some new processes that have lessened the amount of paperwork the department has to wade through every month.
Short Stories About You Page 3
