It's a Miracle!

by H. Claire Taylor

  She leaned forward, making sure to mouth breathe, and touched her hand to his heart. Even with the light pressure, there was a squelching sound that jump-started her gag reflex. She closed her eyes to steady herself and felt the magnetism pulse from her torso out through her arms and then into the young man on the ground in front of her. He jolted but then was still.

  Shit, did it not work? Had she just discovered the limitation of her miracle?

  She held her breath and was about to try again, when his eyelids opened and one watery eye stared back at her. Where the other eye should have been was just an empty socket.

  Shitballs. What happened to his—

  The screaming that erupted from him was like nothing she’d ever heard before. Hoarse, primal, loud as a police siren—the noise caused her to jump back from him quickly, and she fell onto her ass before hurriedly scooting away.

  If you could boil agony down to its purist form, it would sound a little like the screams coming from the resurrected one-eyed man in front of her.

  And then his mother began screaming, sheer panic, which sounded the same in Spanish as it did in English.

  “Holy shit!” Jess yelled. “Someone call 9-1-1!”

  Chris ran to her and pulled her to her feet as Miranda hollered, “What do we do?!”

  The body writhed on the ground, gurgling and hacking sounds occasionally mingling with his screams.

  What neighbors were home at this time on a Thursday were out on their porches now, though none seemed in a hurry to do anything helpful.

  “Rex, get my gun,” hollered Destinee.

  Jess turned toward her mother. “Mom, no! You don’t get to just kill him again!”

  “You want me to leave him like this?” she demanded frantically.

  The woman was in a heap on the ground next to her son, crying and trying to comfort him as he continued to choke on his screams. She looked up toward Jessica. “Agua! Agua, por favor!”

  “Is someone calling 9-1-1?” Jess yelled, looking toward Miranda, then Chris, then Rex and Destinee. No one was. “Someone call 9-1-1!”

  The screaming and gurgling intensified. “And someone get him some water!”

  As Miranda fumbled with her phone and Rex ran inside, hopefully to get water rather than to fetch Destinee’s gun, Jessica thought, This is a nightmare, right? This is just a nightmare.

  NIGHTMARISH, YES, BUT NO NIGHTMARE.

  God! Help! What do I do?

  YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE BROUGHT THIS ONE BACK.

  Well no shit.

  MAN, THIS IS JUST A BAD DEAL ALL AROUND.

  She looked down at the body that was still screaming and flopping in its mother’s arms as the woman wept with horror.

  YOU OUGHT TO PUT HIM OUT OF HIS MISERY.

  Are you really telling me to kill him right after I brought him back?!

  IT WOULD BE THE MERCIFUL THING TO DO.

  He’s not just some wounded animal!

  WELL.

  Okay, but he’s a human animal. Isn’t all human life precious?

  SURE. WHATEVER. BUT LOOK AT HIM. I MEAN … YUCK.

  Rex ran back out of the house, and Jess found herself slightly disappointed to see that he’d opted for the glass of water. He handed it to the mother, who poured it into her son’s mouth as her blubbering quieted momentarily. He gagged and when she rolled him over onto his side, he began vomiting, load after load.

  “God dammit!” Jess said, turning away.

  “EMS is on its way,” Miranda announced, pocketing her phone again.

  There was nothing to do but wait for the ambulance to show up then and hope that maybe in the meantime the young man died on his own, which really meant she hoped God did the necessary dirty work.

  Chris kept his arm around Jessica for as long as he could until he was forced to jet to the side of the driveway to begin vomiting violently. When Miranda looked over and caught sight of him, the last tenuous thread of her control snapped, too, and she ran to the opposite side of the pavement to let loose the contents of her stomach, leaving Jessica standing alone while her best friends spewed in synchronicity with the resurrected monstrosity until finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the ambulance arrived.

  “What the hell happened?” begged one of the EMTs as he absorbed the scene. He leaned forward to grab the body and move it to the gurney, but when he caught of whiff of the writhing bloated man, he jumped back like he’d been punched in the face. “Oh lord have mercy.”

  I’M SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING IT.

  The other EMT, a woman, began speaking Spanish to the inconsolable woman, and as she asked more and more questions, her face turned to one of disbelief and her eyes darted toward Jessica more than a few times.

  “I was just trying to help,” Jessica whimpered, stepping back to allow the first responders plenty of room (and because she was so done with this whole scene).

  With his stomach empty, Chris returned to her side and wrapped a shaking arm around her shoulder. As the EMTs loaded the screaming body onto the gurney and lifted it on the count of three, Jessica had the foolish thought, At least it’s almost over.

  And that’s when she saw the news van fly around the corner and onto her street.

  No. It can’t be. Not him.

  Despite his soft, unathletic frame, Eugene Thornton could hustle when he needed to, and the front tire of the Channel Six van hopped the curb only a moment before coming to a sudden stop so that the news crew could jump out, camera already rolling.

  How did he know to come here?

  Then it occurred to her: Is Eugene Thornton the Devil?

  The Devil Test results were, of course, inconclusive. But she suspected that the Devil wouldn’t be as openly unabashed as Eugene was about the level of enjoyment ruining lives brought him.

  “Rex, I ain’t playing this time,” Destinee said. “Go get my gun.”

  “We better get inside,” Chris said. “Wendy’s going to be pissed when she hears about this.” He tried to lead Jessica away, his arm still around her shoulder, and as much as she wanted to leave all this behind, preferably locking it away in a tiny box inside a safe inside a vault inside the darkest cavern of her mind, she couldn’t go yet. Not until she saw it through. Once the body was loaded up and the ambulance pulled away, then she could head inside, but not before.

  Thankfully, Eugene seemed more interested in getting shots of the body and the screaming Mexican woman than he did in hammering Jess with questions.

  Or at least he did at first. But once the ambulance doors closed, he didn’t miss a beat before turning and jogging toward her. “Ms. McCloud! Ms. McCloud! A few questions about the writhing man in your driveway.”

  “Yep, time to go.” She let Chris herd her toward the front door, and she followed Miranda, who was also jogging toward safety.

  “No comment,” Chris hollered over his shoulder as the reporter gained on them.

  When Jessica reached the doorstep, though, she stopped in her tracks. “What the hell?”

  As she gazed inside the house, she realized that some major redecoration had taken place in the time between when her mother drove her to Midland Memorial that morning and when she’d arrived home.

  Perhaps because she’d never been the recipient of decorations like this before, it took a minute for the “Happy Birthday Jessica!” banner and the bunches of helium-filled balloons and the triple-decker cake with a 1 and a 7 candle on the top to any make sense.

  Destinee, whose orders were not being followed by her boyfriend and had therefore taken matters into her own hands, rounded the corner from the hall with a shotgun on her hip. She paused when she saw Jessica staring. “Oh, surprise, baby.” Then she charged past her daughter, out the door, and started hollering for Eugene to get off her property.

  Chris hurried Jess the rest of the way inside as Eugene chuckled behind her, “You think this is the first time someone’s pointed one of those at me?”

  The last thing Jess heard before Destinee backed up
into the house and slammed the door was likely the only thing that that could have made a bad day worse.

  “A breaking discovery at the McCloud home,” Eugene said excitedly. “We’ve just discovered that today, July seventh, is the birthday of Jessica McCloud, who some call the Mooretown Messiah.”

  Jessica wondered if the string of profanities her mother shouted was enough to keep the audio clip from being usable. But it didn’t matter. Eugene could re-record it. And he would if he needed to, because he’d just hit the gold mine.

  Jessica walked straight to the couch, moved a wrapped gift out of the way, and then flopped facedown onto the plastic-covered cushions.

  Miranda sat down on the floor next to the couch right by Jessica’s head. “That was messed up.”

  Jess nodded, her nose squeaking against the clear plastic. She turned onto her side to face her friend. “I shouldn’t have brought him back.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, baby,” Destinee said after setting down the shotgun. “You couldn’ta known.”

  Jess huffed and propped herself up on her elbow. “Did you see him? Maybe I couldn’t have known, but I definitely could’ve guessed. Guy was seriously mangled.”

  “FUBAR,” Coach Rex muttered from his place between the TV and cake. When the others turned to look at him, he added, “That’s what we called it in Iraq. It stands for … well”—he looked around the room at the teenagers and reconsidered—“it’s probably not appropriate—”

  “Fuck, Rex, what’re you going on about?” Destinee interrupted. She waved him off. “Doesn’t matter. Listen, Jess. Forget all that. It’s your birthday. Let’s celebrate. How ’bout some cake?”

  The idea of eating didn’t sound particularly appetizing after all the vomiting she’d just witnessed. “I’m good. Y’all can get at it.”

  Destinee looked to Miranda, who grimaced and shook her head, then to Chris who hesitated but nodded. “Yes, please.”

  “Do you want us to sing happy birthday first?” Destinee asked.

  Jess leaned forward, arms braced on her knees, and pinched the bridge of her nose to stave off a tension headache she felt setting in. “Please don’t.”

  And so Destinee went ahead and pulled the candles out of the cake and lit them before bringing them to where Jessica clearly wasn’t getting up from the couch. “Make a wish, baby.”

  I wish I couldn’t perform miracles.

  NICE TRY.

  Through gritted teeth, Jessica blew out the candles.

  “Sounds like you’re relieved to be back in school, then,” Mrs. Thomas said from her large office chair at Mooremont High. It’d taken a solid half hour of non-stop storytelling for Jessica to catch up Mrs. Thomas on all the gory details of her summer, but the effort was well worth it, as Jess took a deep breath, felt the muscles in her chest and back relax, and melted into the love seat nestled in the corner of her principal’s cozy office.

  “You know, Mrs. Thomas? I actually kind of am. I never thought I’d say that.”

  Mrs. Thomas laughed. Jessica always thought the woman’s laugh sounded like a cherry blossom smells. “And to make good news better, it’s your senior year, which is always the easiest for students like you, who chose to get so much of the hard work out of the way last year.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be the hardest,” she said. “That’s what everyone always says.” She was pretty sure Mrs. Thomas had even said it a handful of times, but she didn’t mention that.

  “It can be the most stressful for some, sure, because of the pressure of selecting a college, the SATs, getting used to the idea of leaving your home behind and starting out on your own life where you’re the only one responsible for yourself …”

  Jessica’s shoulders clenched. “I guess I haven’t really thought about all those things.”

  Mrs. Thomas pressed her lips together, shook her head, and swiped at the air between them. “Oh no, there’s no need to worry. There are plenty of students who I do worry about in that regard, but you’re not one of them. You’re level-headed, competent, a hard worker, all the things colleges drool over. And the great thing about a town like Mooretown is that you can leave for years at a time, and when you come home, nothing’s changed.” She chuckled lightly, and Jess felt like she was missing the joke, but she chuckled along anyway. “You’ll be fine. One step at a time. It’s only your first week back, so you have months to decide what college best suits you. And you know I’ll write you a glowing letter of recommendation when that time comes.”

  “Thanks.” Jess glanced up at the clock on the wall. “Speaking of which, I need to head over to my first college counseling meeting.”

  Mrs. Thomas beamed. “Oh wonderful! Tell Brian I said hello!”

  Jess nodded. “Sure thing.” Though it didn’t make much sense to her why she would pass along such a message when the two of them had offices only yards away from one another.

  “Anyway, I don’t want to keep you,” continued Mrs. Thomas, “but thank you for stopping by. I’ve been meaning to check in with you all summer, see how things were going with you and your highly publicized miracles.” Jess rolled her eyes. “I knew there’d be more to the story. There always is.” She wiggled her finger over the touchpad of her laptop to wake it up. “My door’s always open, you know. Don’t be a stranger.”

  “I won’t,” said Jess, and then she grabbed her backpack and made the short walk from the principal’s office to the college counselor’s small room.

  She’d dreaded the start of these college meetings, and the only thing that made her consider the possibility of them being tolerable was the fact that Mr. Foster, her seventh grade science teacher, had managed to “escape the gaping and insatiable hellhole of junior high,” (his words, of course) and was now Mooremont’s college counselor.

  She tapped at the ajar door to his office and peeked in. He looked up from his desk. “Come on in.” As she did so he added, “Jessica, so nice to see you.”

  She paused for a moment, foot in the air. He sounded … not entirely unhappy. “Really?” she asked, continuing her progress into the office.

  “Of course. You were a good student. I suspect getting you into college is going to be almost no work at all … considering.”

  “Considering my grades, or considering I’m the daughter of God?” She set her backpack down and sat in the wooden chair at his desk.

  He swallowed hard. “Both, I guess.”

  She relaxed, hoping he might too. The poor guy was still tightly wound. “Mrs. Thomas says hi.”

  “Oh. Um. Okay.”

  “I was just chatting with her.”

  His head tilted back then nodded slowly, like some deep meaning was dawning on him. “Ah. I see.”

  “You seem stressed, Mr. Foster.”

  He exhaled sharply. “Yeah. I really can’t complain, though. This job is way easier than teaching.”

  “Does your job security depend on the number of us who get into college?”

  He grunted, the weight returning to his shoulders like old times. “Unfortunately, yes. My job is to somehow make sure people like Gary Higgins and Greg “Wake and Bake” Burns decide a four-year degree and crippling student loan debt is the best decision for them.”

  Jess nodded agreeably and let Mr. Foster’s disdain for Greg wash over her, savoring it for as long as she could without it becoming too obvious. “Well, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m going somewhere.”

  Mr. Foster forced a smile. “Right. So, any ideas of what you want to study?”

  “Uh … not history?”

  “Not history,” echoed Mr. Foster dryly. “I guess that’s a start. What about, um … medicine?” He squinted his eyes upon saying the last word, as if bracing himself against what he already knew to be a mistake.

  So he’d seen the news. Just like everybody else. The riddled corpse had been blurred out to spare viewers, and wasn’t that just nice for them. Maybe someday she would just be a viewer of horrible things in Mooretow
n, rather than a constant eye witness.

  The image of the Mexican man’s mangled body hadn’t taken a night off from her dreams yet, and she’d all but given up trying to pretend his nationality didn’t play a strong subconscious part in the fact that he usually started off as a colorful piñata and morphed into a colander-esque corpse as soon as he’d had the candy beaten out of him.

  “Not medicine,” she replied.

  “Yeah. That … that makes sense.”

  He turned in his chair, pulled a file from a hanger, and Jessica saw her name written on the tab. He flipped open the folder, set it on his desk, and then shuffled a few pages deep until he pulled out a sheet titled Initial College Questionnaire. “Why don’t we just zip on through this Kafkaesque quagmire of paperwork that the school requires, and then we can dive into the stuff that’s actually useful.”

  Jess nodded and he began going line by line, reading the questions aloud. “Are you planning on attending a four-year university?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do your parents have a college savings account set up for you?”

  Jessica laughed.

  Mr. Foster glanced up at her, arching an eyebrow.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Uh, no, I don’t see that being a thing.”

  He nodded and ticked the No box.

  “Highest level of education for your mother?”

  “Uh, I don’t think she finished high school.”

  He ticked the Some High School box.

  “Highest level of education for your fa—uh.” He chanced a look up at her, and she frowned.

  “I don’t think He went to school. But He knows a lot of stuff anyway.”

  Mr. Foster nodded. “There’s not an All Knowing box …”

  She waved him off. “Oh no, He’s not all knowing. He’s just knowing and all that. Bad translation.”