Death By Oak

Consider the ways a tree might quash you—
hurricane blown branches, driving full-speed
at a fat trunk standing firm. First, it’s seed—
sprouts follow. Years yield concentric rings. Do
we sympathize with shameless creatures who
wield axes, saws—who satisfy their need
for sky? Who dwells in shade? Does God? Does greed?
We human kind demand a direct view.
Under a willow oak, I sip and laugh
with friends. Oysters roast nearby. As crisp air
flits and flirts, a thin leaf choreographs
a swift dance into my cup. Without care
I gulp. Cool drink, vengeful leaf. Epitaph
reads “She didn’t belong here.” That seems fair.

 
Hell in Earth

Colossal branches cleaved up top, a cypress
carries on. Revived, renewed, reborn. Roots
ravaged, the cypress suffers in silence. Severed
connections. Languishing leaves let go.
A neighboring Mother can no longer nourish it—
the clipped cord more like a ravine than a slice.
Sightless, the tree ceases to perceive others near,
sorely feels their absence.

Cut off.

It is no longer one of a forest stand
but a lone, stranded soul. Once tall
and ambitious, like a growing
farmhand, its shoulders now slouch,
a kiss rejected. Restored roots require
divine intervention to resume growing
a glorious crown.

A star, tens of millions of miles removed,
an enormous gas envelope, and a dirt
covered crust are father, son, and holy
ghost, the Trinity of trees, if you believe.
What can be seen is life, while what cannot
be is healthy or healing.

Kathryn Jane Gwynn is a Midwesterner in southern exile, trying too hard to make sense of things that refuse her. She is also a mother, trying to raise kind people in a mean world. If not for birds, trees, children, and poetry, she probably wouldn’t believe in God.

tears of salt
salt of sea
sea of mist
mist of clouds
clouds of rain
rain of water
water of wine
wine of sacrament
sacrament of sacrifice
sacrifice of love
love of Christ
Christ of Gethsemane
Gethsemane of liberty
liberty of soul
soul of joy
joy of tears
tears of salt

Michael Shoemaker is a poet, writer, and photographer. His poems have appeared in Ancient Paths Literary Journal, Front Porch Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Magna, Utah with his wife, and son where he enjoys looking out on the Great Salt Lake every day. Michael enjoys pickleball and gardening.

To pick someone up the first time
The rush of being useful
Feeling needed
The second time? A repetition.
The seventh? A chore
But you must. Seven and more.
Seventy-times seven
Because they need it.
And so do you.

Pat Bergan is a professor at a university in the Midwest. He received a PhD in Computer Science and enjoys writing poetry as an alternative to his more technical research writing.

Lewis Meany’s insides tingled with anticipation as he waved at his family’s departing car. Even at that hour, the spring sun was beating down most intently on the flat and sedate parts of town below. He glanced down the hill at the rest of Taft, the rest of the city butting up against the rolling desert hills, and even though the sunshine made it a blur, his imagination filled in the images of the pastel, stucco box houses he had lived in until he was seventeen. Until he was thirteen, he thought most houses were one-bedrooms, and that it was common for parents to sleep in the living room. To Lewis, a three-bedroom house—let alone a five-bedroom home with a guest house in the back—would have been to him a mansion. An unattainable dream.

Those dusty, gravel-strewn streets, lined with a motley assortment of overgrown yards protected by grey, chain link fences, were his home. He had felt many things in this new house atop the hill in Taft Heights, but gratitude was not among them.

Lewis had done well enough at Taft High School, a school not known for producing Ivy League scholars. Most boys were destined for jobs in the oil fields, or other odd jobs around the region, prison, or moving away from the area to disappear. He had potential to get away from here, they said. We’ll help you, they said. Just fill out this application, we’ll even pay for the postage.

The minivan rolled down the hill, in between the vibrant green evergreens that lined the streets, shooting up into the air, and giving the impression of affluence. Down below, there was only a month or two where the trees—mostly deciduous—came alive with vibrant ardor before the sun beat down on them, pummeling it into the dusty brown canopy that Lewis knew best.

They were gone, he thought. Excitement swelled within him. He knew what he was doing today, and its power drew him to the house like a magnet. His enthusiasm led him to the bedroom. There was no more delaying. He walked over to the closet when the phone rang.

His mom had just gotten a new caller ID machine from Radio Shack, and it sat, a blue light blinking as the phone rang out. Lewis looked down at it.

PRISON, it said, in black digital letters.

That’s odd, he thought. Not odd enough to pick up though. He looked at it for three seconds longer, and then waited until the ringing stopped. Nothing was getting in his way. Lewis strode back into his bedroom and opened his closet door. In the back of the closet was a set of three dresser drawers built into the closet, and it reminded of the house he used to live in—the one-bedroom—whose one closet was built the same way, leading Lewis to utilize this one for the same purposes. Had mis mother ever know about this secret hiding spot? She probably did, he thought, and shrugged.

He got down on his knees and carefully pulled out the bottom drawer, tilting it backwards so that he could see down into the space behind it. He grasped the sides of the drawer like he was Indiana Jones and there was a golden monkey’s head hidden on the other side.

Three magazines, coming to him in different ways down the years. One was vintage and sun bleached, he found it walking down the highway when he was eleven, flapping in the wind in the grip of tumbleweed. He gazed at the decorously dressed bride and groom—having sex. In another the World War I female bomber pilot—in various stages of undress.

There was a VHS tape, the white label sprawled with different crossed out titles with the last remaining being “Star Wars”. A pipe, it’s red, white and blue tints swirling through the glass. Lastly, a bag of weed, just acquired this week with money gained from working a landscaping project that his stepdad Jon had helped him get, that he had thusly quit when he had made enough to get what he wanted.

He had fantasized throughout the evening before and throughout the morning…which order would he indulge himself. Video first? Take some time with the magazines?

The phone rang again and Lewis hesitated. Again, duty called, and he decided that this was the last time. The phone was coming off the hook after that.

He glanced down at the little round box on the counter.

PRISON, it said again.

He picked it up and before he could say “hello” a recorded woman’s voice was talking to him.

“You are receiving a call from the California Department of Corrections. All phone calls received or made to this facility are fully recorded in accordance with California law. This phone call will end in 180 seconds.”

There was a bleep and then a slight pause before anyone came on.

“Hello?” a meek voice asked.

“Hello?” Lewis answered back.

“Is Jana there?” the voice asked.

At first, Lewis stalled, wondering whether he should just hang up right then, but then this was the second time this person had called, and they’d likely try again.

“No, who’s this?” Lewis asked.

“It’s Richie,” this time the voice was more animated, expecting Lewis to know who that was.

“She’s not here. Who’s Richie?

“Hey, um, Lewis, it’s me Richie. We met at the reunion last year.”

Richie, Richie, Richie…. Lewis was sifting through his brain to place him. He could only conjure up the vague feeling that he had met him; Richie knew enough at least to demonstrate that there was a family reunion last year.

“Sorry, Richie. She’s not here right now.”

“Oh,” he paused—in the middle of this pause, a recorded message came on:

“This call from the California Department of Corrections will end in approximately 90 seconds.”

“Can you just tell her that Richie called?” he said, sounding forlorn.

“Sure thing, Richie! Will tell her you called when she gets back,” Lewis answered, careful not to give him a timeframe or a location of his stepsister’s whereabouts.

“Ok, thanks,” he answered, and then there was a click and the line went silent.

After placing the telephone receiver back up on the wall, Lewis stood there for a second staring at the phone. Any excitement he had had before—his anxious, anticipatory erection—was now gone. He didn’t know exactly why, other than the fact that Richie’s call had filled his head with too many questions.

He slowly walked back to his bedroom and looked stoically at his stash of bodily indulgences and sighed.

There’ll be time, he thought.

He grabbed it all and tossed it on his bed, took the pipe, bag of weed, lighter, and sat on the edge of his bed with his shoulders slumped as he fidgeted with the tools. He continued to wonder who the hell Richie was. He had a few people at the reunion who could have been meth heads or recovering meth heads. In Taft, it seems like everybody had them in their families, even a family like his stepdad Jon’s, who had ranches, streets lined by verdant evergreens, and owned more than one house.

Lewis struck the end of the lighter and lit the pipe. That wasn’t Richie though, he thought, Richie was someone else. He inhaled and let the smoke linger and as he continued, he let the knowledge of being all alone for the next few days enhance his high.

He leaned back and realized that he had a spare bag of chocolate Donettes at the edge of his bed. He grabbed a couple of them, put them into his mouth, and leaned back.

Richie, Richie, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

*                      *                      *

He awoke suddenly, sensing that someone was coming up to the house, even though his bedroom was towards the back of the house.

The doorbell rang. There it is, he thought.

He looked at the alarm clock next to his bed. He had only been asleep for about an hour. He slung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there, scratching his head, as if the doorbell hadn’t rung at all.

The doorbell sounded again, and he remembered his stepfather’s admonition to pick up phone calls and figured that this extended to in-person visits as well. He got up and ambled to the door, his body still loose and relaxed from the high that put him back to sleep. The doorbell rang again. Perfectly spaced and persistent, Lewis thought.

Lewis opened the door and staring him in the face was a young man, about the same age as Lewis, and although he was an adult, he had the carriage of a teenage boy. A big mop of thick, black hair lay on his head, parted down the middle, and he was wearing a No Fear Shirt and long black basketball shorts down to his shins.

“Hey!” he said. “Is Jana here?”

The boy was Asian, but with dark skin, and bright, round, coal black eyes.

“Richie?” Lewis asked.

The boy’s face brightened. “Yeah! Hey Lewis,” Richie said. “Is Jana here?”

“Did you call me this morning?”

“Yeah! That was me!” Richie continued excitedly.

“From prison?”

            “Oh yeah,” Richie paused, but continued smiling. “I just got let out this morning.”

Lewis scratched his head and let the memories come flowing into his mind. He did vaguely remember meeting Richie at his stepfather’s family reunion last year, looking even more boyish last year than he did now. He wasn’t fat, yet he seemed to have layers of baby fat padded to his round face, his forearms, his calves. Lewis now remembered wondering how he was related to Jon and Jana’s family, as every person there were as white as saltine crackers.

Lewis scratched his messy hair. “I’m sorry, Richie,” he said. “Jana went with my stepdad and mom on a trip this morning. They won’t be back for a few days.”

Richie’s smile twitched, and he looked down at the ground. “Oh…” he said, trailing off.

Richie looked up and said, “Do you think you might be able to give me a ride to church?”

Richie paused and looked at Lewis’s impression. He seemed to sense Lewis was searching for some reason not to, and interjected:

“I tried my Grandma’s house this morning, but she wasn’t there. She must have forgotten today was the day. So I tried here.”

“You walked here?” Lewis asked.

Richie nodded his head and smiled, and then added, “Well, I got a ride up to the Transit Center.”

Still, that was a walk, Lewis thought. The Taft Correctional Facility, on the outskirts of town, was known to everybody, not least the boys and men who had matriculated through Taft High School. The facility, a minimum-security prison for men, was often used as a cautionary visual tale for school administrators, but if you were sent to prison, you’d be lucky to be sent to Taft. Lewis had never been in prison himself, but he knew several classmates who had, and several who went to harder places like Calipatria or Chuckawalla.

“Yeah, sure,” Lewis said. “Just let me get dressed and cleaned up a bit.”

Lewis now remembered why Richie had gone to prison. When he was 18 and still a senior in high school, he had a fourteen-year-old girlfriend, had sex for the first time and got her pregnant. Both families worked with the situation, and the child and mother had actually moved in with Richie and his Grandmother. For nearly a year, things were going smooth, until a certain bee got under the maternal grandmother’s bonnet, and they went to the County District Attorney. It took less than a month for Richie to be convicted and sent to prison for six months.

Now, as they drove down the hill to church in Lewis’s green 1991 Toyota Celica, the issue of prison was dancing through his head. Lewis went for it.

“So, what is prison like?” Lewis asked.

“Oh, well…have you ever been to summer camp?” Richie responded, a boyish smile on his face.

“No, actually.”

Richie continued as if Lewis hasn’t responded, “Well, it’s sorta like that, just not as nice. When you get there, you get uniforms, and you’re given instructions like on the first day of camp. Obviously, people aren’t nice, like on the first day of camp. I think that’s the biggest thing to get used to—nobody is nice there.” He paused. “But…you get used to that pretty quick.”

Lewis nodded as if he were listening to Richie regale him with stories of his summer vacation.

“Weren’t you afraid of getting beat up there?” Lewis asked, then added, “Did…you…get beaten up?”

Richie chuckled, “Oh, the guys at Taft aren’t so tough. And I’m a big guy. There was a guy, a short dude with a bald head, who seemed to sort of…bump into me…I think on purpose, and I just bumped right back into him….”

Lewis imagined Richie doing so with that shit-eating grin on his face.

“For the most part, we go outside, work out, and a bunch of guys play cards, watch movies…you know,” said Richie.

“Huh,” said Lewis, “it doesn’t seem that bad.”

“Oh, no, it was bad,” said Richie, and for the first time, his smile fell and he looked straight ahead. Lewis reached for the radio and turned it on, and they sat in silence for the remainder of the trip.

There was a time when Lewis was a regular church attender with his mom, and a fervent believer. He went to every church that she attended, and throughout their lives, they were varied and eclectic—Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian; they even once attended a New Age Spiritual Center. When he entered his teens, and his mom knew that she wouldn’t be able to control him for long, she left it up to him to join her. And for the most part, he did.

Lewis parked, and Richie got out and turned around to thank him, but Lewis was already out of the car.

“You don’t need to come with me,” Richie said.

“I’m already here, I might as well,” replied Lewis.

Greater Taft Christian Center—or “GTCC” as it was commonly called—was a former Presbyterian turned Pentecostal Church, its transformation illustrated by the paint job, changing the stentorian brown to some kind of sky-blue color. They walked inside and Richie craned his neck over the parishioners to find his grandmother.

“Looks like she isn’t here,” he said.

The pastor was exactly how Lewis remembered him—a squat, cheerful man from Alabama with jowls that hung like full grocery bags. 

Something was different though. 

It looked like Pastor Dillingham ate Sugar Ray, and then put on a blue pinstripe preacher’s suit.

Huh…frosted tips, thought Lewis. 

Below the bleached blond spikes atop the pastor’s head were finely manicured eyebrows, and below that, on his left side, a respectable gold earring. 

“Lemme hear ya praise Jayzuss!” he yelled out and then clapped his hands in wide, flapping motions. 

Lewis and Richie found a seat as the “worship” part of the service began, a part which, when he was coming, Lewis would miss deliberately. He blamed it on the time it took him to look nice for church, even though he rarely showed up in anything nicer than a pair of jeans and a polo shirt. He could handle everything else, but thirty minutes of forced jubilant singing killed him. 

As Pastor Dillingham began his sermon with gusto, Lewis thought back to the Pastor’s more ridiculous sermons. Pastor Dillingham was the prop comic of evangelical preachers. When the Lakers were in the playoffs with Kobe Bryant, the sermon started off with an unseen announcer in a deep, booming voice announcing the Apostles, and in came the ushers, all wearing the jerseys of various star players. Peter, Paul and John were replaced by O’Neal, Fisher and Fox, as they dribbled up to the basketball hoop astride the stage and made a shot. Then the lights went down. 

“And now,” the voice bellowed, “introducing the Prince of Peace, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords! E-man-u-elle himself….Jeesus Chriiiist!”

In entered Pastor Dillingham in a “Kobe” Jersey. 

He was the only one to miss the shot. 

Now, as the pastor finished his sermon, Lewis looked over to his left and glanced at Richie. If there are any spiritual awakening happening to Richie, it definitely wasn’t happening on his face. He looked dead ahead, the same placid smile beaming between his brown cheeks.

The pastor next set the stage for the altar call, asking those who needed to be saved to come up and receive into their physical bodies the power of the Holy Spirit. Lewis knee why the ushers also made their way up front, and why some of them situated themselves in between and behind certain women. 

“If you have not given your heart to Jesus—or if you just need to recommit your heart and receive the Holy Spirit—I want you to come down here and join us today,” said Pastor Dillingham.

The band had started playing again as people made their way to the open space in the front of what could ostensibly be called the altar, but Lewis considered the stage. Pastor Dillingham’s tone softened, as he prayed, in preparation for the steady rise and hum of the communal act of speaking in tongues. The woman who had been accompanied by two ushers was the first person whose voice rose and broke out above the din of prayer.

Lewis watched as the woman, arms raised, bellowed out in a series of incomprehensible string of consonants. All eyes in the church were on her, and even those at the altar who had been praying, their prayers softened, and their attention was diverted to the woman.

A woman seated on the opposite side now sprang up and responded to the woman speaking in tongues. “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting,” she belted. “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire, that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tonguesas the Spirit…enabled them.”

The first woman then stopped speaking in tongues and began to shake uncontrollably, the two ushers hunched in anticipation, but not yet touching her. Her body threw itself back, and the ushers placed her on the ground, her lips still silently moving in prayer as she lay still, eyes closed on the ground.

“There are mee-ra-culls happening here today…do you feel it?” said the Pastor. “Shambalalaca!”

Lewis had heard him say the nonsensical word, and it struck a discordant note in him. If he was speaking in tongues, Lewis thought, why was he saying the same word over and over again?

The Pastor had his eyes closed, and was now muttering his prayers, “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus. Shambala-la-ca, la-ca-ra-doe!”

Lewis felt movement to his left and moved abruptly as Richie made his way up to the front. The ushers who had been attending to the woman on the ground, now ran up to Richie and laid both of their palms on his forehead, joined by two other ushers. Four men were now circled around Richie, their hands-on different parts of his head, shoulders, back. The Pastor felt the switch and responded to it.

“We are all sinners, Lord. Each and every one of us! For those that are hurting….for those that seek you Lord, come down on us today,” he prayed, eyes closed, then muttered in a low tone through his thick lips, “Thank you Jesus, thank you, thank you, thank you Jesus.”

“Shambala-la-ca!” he added.

Richie made his way back and smiled as he inched his way past Lewis. When Richie left the front of the church, the Pastor signal to the band to close things out, and people started to dwindle. The woman on the floor was helped up by the ushers who had helped her on the way down, and she slowly made her way back to her seat.

“Jimmy,” Pastor Dillingham motioned to the guitarist, “let’s bring it down for a moment.”

He paused and closed his eyes, and then looked up to the ceiling, the microphone wavering under his chin.

“Something is coming to me, and it is powerful,” he said. “There is someone here today. Someone who needs healing, and God is calling me…right now, this instant. I know you’re out there and God is calling you to come up here and be saved.”

Pastor Dillingham let that intention sit there in the silence of the church, as the congregation waited for this person he was calling to make their way to the front. He opened his eyes and strolled across the stage, his lower lip tucked neatly over his top, creating ridges in his mighty chin.

“I’m not wrong about this one,” the pastor said, “this is strong, and He is calling me! You are out there…I know you are!”

As the pastor let the silence float over the congregation a second time, Lewis sat and looked inward. He thought about the Hustler and the Jugs magazines he pulled out of his closet and wondered whether he had put them away before he left.

“The Lord does not strike me with this every day!”

Lewis thought of his pipe and the weed, and whether Richie could smell it on him.

“I know y’all wanna get out of here…go watch football…but we have a soul here that God himself is calling personally.”

The third silence was too much, and the congregation, pulled out of its Pentecostal comfort zone, began to stir, some with excitement, most with nervousness. Pastor Dillingham let the microphone hang underneath his chin as he strolled left and right, right and left, across the stage.

Is he talking about me? Lewis thought. Am I supposed to go up there? He thought about the opportunities he had passed up in recent years, about time wasted, about weeks that mimicked other weeks, one after another, because nothing different happened.

“You are sitting there, and you are afraid of your sin. You are afraid of your life. You’re a failure,” the Pastor paused, “but God doesn’t think you’re a failure. Jesus is not afraid of your sin. He is calling you to come up here and give that to Him.”

Lewis was shaken when Richie got up and scooted past him again and joined Pastor Dillingham on stage.

“Young man, what is your name?” the pastor asked.

“Richie.”

“Richie, God called you, through me, to come up here today, and I just want everyone to raise their hands towards Richie and pray with me today.”

As the pastor prayed, Lewis felt a sense of longing, a deep well of purpose that was locked under heavy steel doors, deep down below him.

Lewis saw that Richie was crying now, and through his tears, he said:

“I had a baby with a girl who was underage, and I spent time for it. I just want to do what’s right. What’s right for her. What’s right for my daughter.” He started to hand back the microphone, then added, “That’s it.”

“Praise Jesus!” Pastor Dillingham exclaimed. The congregation exploded into applause and rose to their feet, as the band started up again, and Richie made his way back to his seat.

The service ended, and as Richie and Lewis walk silently side by side through the church lobby, they saw Richie’s grandma coming down the stairs from the balcony.

“Richie!” she exclaimed and held his cheeks in her hands. “I’m so proud of you!”

She looked over at Lewis, recognizing him for the first time. “Lewis! Did you bring Richie here today?”

Lewis nodded.

“Thank you so much!” she said.

“Well, I’ll be going now. Great to see you, Richie!” Lewis felt embarrassed but didn’t know why. “I’ll see you both later.”

He turned to walk out of the church and was confronted by a middle-age woman with bangs down the middle of her forehead and curly locks of hair flowing to her shoulders. She stuck out her hand with a trifold brochure in it.

“Thank you for coming to GTCC! Have you added yourself to the email list yet?” she asked.

“No thanks,” he said, unsmiling, and walked out the door to the midday desert sun.

Randall Terrell is a freelance writer and public relations consultant living in Southern California’s High Desert. When he’s not writing and reading, he’s looking for adventures throughout the desert to share with his wife and 11-year-old son. He is currently working on memoir that tells of his efforts to track down his homeless father’s last days. He can be found on Instagram at @RandallTerrell

Have I not commanded you? Be brave and have courage. Do not be afraid or discouraged for the Lord, your God, is with you.

            It had been a standard practice for Esther–the woman we now examine–that no one had ever quite asked her to do. The pastor never felt a need for these handout verses. Many of the church attendees never remembered the verses they grabbed on their way out. It had become second nature to Living Hope of Christ Church, an almost ghostlike motion, that as one walked towards the creaking, slightly molded wooden doors to leave the Sunday service, it was only natural that they would grab a verse from the glass pot on their way out, in the same way it was only natural for them to open the door before they walked into it.

Now, as we first look in on Esther, it is a Saturday night and this verse is the last of 120 that she has copied down to fill the pot. Words the young woman had memorized, etched into her mind, and etched into her own hands in a way–callouses left behind for the sake of filling that little glass pot by the church door. A little collection sight where churchgoers could grab a verse, step out into the parking lot, and likely lose those little slips of paper in the rubble of fast food wrappers and junk mail piled in their cars.

            When finished, she set the glass pot by the front door of her little apartment so that she would not forget it when she awoke in the morning and left for church.

            Now we will look at Silk. Before you ask, yes, that was truly his name, and yes, he was awfully tired of people asking why. He was just Silk. What you need to know about Silk is not much, for he was not the type of boy people wrote short stories like this about, rather long elusive novels that we always say we will get around to reading but never do. All you need to know is this: in the year 2028, he will find the ultimate remedy for climate change that will both stop our impending doom and relieve 80% of child hunger worldwide. Don’t ask me how. Just like Silk was only a boy named Silk, I am only a voice born into the present. You won’t remember this story or my storytelling in an hour, but I promise it will echo when the time is right.

            Back to Esther. Her dress was modest corduroy. For Esther was the type of girl to make herself outrageously plain. I cannot imagine the hours of deep internet scrolling it took to find such an uninteresting dress–especially a corduroy dress- that was so wholly uncatching to the eye. Many young women made quite a ritual about their Sunday best, and while Esther understood that for them, she was quite sure there was no reason for it on her part. She had never found herself to be any sort of beautiful when she was standing with freezing feet against an acrylic floor in her prodigiously tiny apartment bathroom, so how would she ever be any sort of beautiful standing in the house of the Lord?

            She arrived at 7:30–the service was at 8:30–along with the other early risers. Mostly older women with nothing much else to do for the day or high school students who had a service-hour fulfillment to meet.

            Her quaint voice greeted them all delicately and warmly as she held doors and unfolded chairs and wiped down tables, and, most importantly, as she set up her glass pot by the door.             “Esther.”

            The Pastor at Living Hope of Christ was fairly young in comparison to other church leaders in the area who all looked and sounded as if they would be meeting Jesus very soon. Scott was middle aged, curly haired, always exuberant. Above this, though, he was attentive.

            “Good morning, Pastor, how are you?”

            Scott had told Esther many times to call him by his name. She cringed at the thought. He did not know who Esther was. Not truly. He did not know of the things she had done before her nights were spent copying Bible verses for an overlooking church. He did not know what she had said, what she had seen, what she had done, or who she had done it to. In other words, Esther was quite sure she was unworthy of the mutual respect that a first-name basis established among two people. She rarely said anyone’s name if she could help it. She certainly could not speak the name of this man of God.

            They made polite conversation which I will spare you the details of. Just as Esther made an active effort towards dressing plain, her speech was just the same. The second she talked too much, it was quite certain everyone would know who she had been. Hence, she stuck to a mental script and was taken off guard when the Pastor strayed from it.

            “Excuse me?”

            The two held the doors now, one on each side, as the morning service attendees began to crowd in. Esther averted her eyes from the Pastor’s wise brown eyes, unsure of what he could uncover in her own eyes if he tried.

            “I only asked if you wanted to begin teaching a Bible study group for children? You do so much for this church, Esther, and we would love for you to do more if you have the time. The children would love you and we will pay you as well as we can.”

            We will take a break now to return to our friend, Silk. Given what I’ve revealed to you already, it is an understatement to say Silk was intelligent and driven. He was also quite rich, even before the world-changing accomplishments. And at the time we are now observing him, he is nineteen years old and a student at a renowned Ivy League institute that he was still not entirely convinced he was accepted into even though he is now in his fourth year.

            He attends Living Hope of Christ church because his parents do so. He was in a constant state of work and living up to the expectations of his parents who had come from next to nothing, so while this one-hour weekly service was a slight relief to him in terms of it being the only time he was not doing some math or chemistry assignment, it was mostly a period of immense pressure. Having to sit with his parents as they whispered throughout the service about how his pants were too short or where the other 3% went on the test he got a 97% on (yes, his parents still check his grades.) Sunday service was also a feeling of wearisome nostalgia. The last time he said a prayer was when he was nine years old. That was the last time he had the genuine feeling that there was anything in this life worth praying about.

            Esther had denied the chance to teach the Bible study class. Children are extremely impressionable. If anyone is to take the duty of influencing them, how could it be her?

            Sunday service is over now. It had been a sermon she hung upon every word of. She always did. But hearing the Pastor speak always had a bad aftertaste for Esther. Hearing of topics like hope and grace and goodness felt relieving in the moment, but when she was left afterwards to mull it over, she was only reminded of how little of these things she had in the past. How could a murderer have hope and grace and goodness in her heart? Esther assured herself no amount of repentance could make these words applicable to her.

            More than that, how could a murderer teach children? How could a murderer create anything but destruction in these children?

            Denying to teach the Bible study class was not an act of humility or bashfulness on Esther’s part. It came from the sense that she had already caused so much destruction in the world, so how could she ever be capable of anything good.

            A quick intermission now, if you don’t mind, to have a discussion on the topic of murder. Esther was not intentionally a murderer. More, a circumstantial killer. It had been a night, four years ago, in a college friend’s flat. The night was full of white lines and vapors and powders and other things that are entirely not the point of this story. A boy was there, someone she degrades herself daily for not being able to remember the name of. He began spazzing. Something was wrong. Beer bottles crashed  and young, dumb kids began spiralling. He was unconscious before they knew it. An overdose. And in that moment there were two options. First, to get help, and bring the police into a room of extremely illegal happenings that could put away every party member in jail at best and, at worst, could bar them all from the universities and awards and bright futures they had ahead of them. The second option was to leave and to deny, deny, deny.

            Around her, fifty young men and women began to frantically choose the second option. Grabbing everything they could, leaving no evidence behind, avoiding the unconscious boy’s shallow breath, and evacuating. Some, like Esther, lingered in their moral conflict, drowning in the weight of the life that was on their hands. But slowly and surely, everyone began to leave. And, eventually, Esther did too.

            The boy wasn’t found until the following Sunday–the first time Esther ever went to church. Esther wondered how long it was after she left that she finally died. And since that night, she had been dying every day, little by little.

            Speaking of death, as we near the end of this story, it is very important for you to know that Silk planned on killing himself. He did not necessarily want to die, he was only overcome by the fear of living. There was his parents, and his school, and his lack of passion for everything he had built his life around. There was fear of the future, fear of his competency to face it, and the fear that he would never become anything.

This fear was all he could focus on on the Sunday service day that we have been examining thus far.

Esther walked home. She had no car, recognizing that a person such as herself was unworthy of the freedoms and responsibilities that came with having one.

She carried her now empty glass pot.

Scott the pastor was still in the church. He liked to linger a while. He liked to pray. You’ll remember now that he was an attentive man. He could read emotions well. He could practically smell fear from a mile away and he could smell it all over Esther. He prayed courage over her. He prayed she would realize how much her efforts meant to the church and to God. He prayed with the assurance that the Lord will always provide.

And the Lord will always provide.

“Heyyyyy, pretty lady.”

Esther rolled her eyes but endured it like she always did. There was a number of construction sights on the route that took her from the church back to her apartment. Though I know many things, I do not know why construction men seem to be so much more desperate for procreation than the rest of us.

Esther stayed silent, locked her eyes down, and accepted her punishment. For that is how she saw every inconvenience in her life: a well deserved punishment.

The man followed her for an uncomfortable length of time, leaving behind his work and instead prioritizing the classic game of How Uncomfortable Can You Make a Stranger. It was a game he was especially good at. He made crass jokes with overtly sexual overtones and did so with the most gruesome smile on his face.

And then the Lord provided.

Something Esther had never felt. A weird, yellowish, and bright feeling strung up inside her. It was like a twinge of anger but with something more to it. A bit of courage.

Perhaps, she thought, not everything must be a punishment. Perhaps some things can be an opportunity.

She spoke to this man. This creepy man. This man who was as fallen as her. And she told him the Good News. The Word she had never felt worthy to speak. The story she had, up to then, only been able to share through hand copied verses to people who already knew it. And she spoke it. She spoke the salvation. She spoke it all.

The construction worker at first did not listen. But then, somehow, against his own will, he did. He listened. He cried. He wiped his tears as he walked away so that the other construction men would not know he cried.

The next Sunday, Living Hope of Christ Church had a new member.

I hope you will not mind if we trail back in time again, this time only slightly. We are now back at the end of the church service and we are now with Silk.

Silk did not consider it a prayer but that’s what it was in essence when he asked for a sign. He had made his plans already for the night to come. He had written the letter to his parents. He had abstained from the thought of his mother finding his dead body. He was ready.

Unknown to himself, he was also desperate. He asked for a sign. That if, somehow, living was worth more than the fear, it would be revealed to him. But Silk, like many of us, said this prayer with more faith that it wouldn’t happen then that it would.

When the service was over, he made his way to the door. Like everyone did, he grabbed one of the paper Bible verses that were by the door on his way out. He didn’t usually read the verses he grabbed because taking a verse had become one of those things that he only did for the knowledge that other people saw him do it. But today he felt an urge to read it. A desperate, edge-of-the-cliff urge to read it.

Have I not commanded you? Be brave and have courage. Do not be afraid or discouraged for the Lord, your God, is with you.

Lydia Johnson is an aspiring writer from North Carolina. She is 17 and is involved in the theatre and writing clubs at her school. She is currently attempting to crochet a Cookie Monster.

PREFACE

I appreciate that Veronica and Heart of Flesh take a broad yet profound view of Christ’s teachings and I suspect the world would have been a much more truly spiritual place the past 2 millennia if every ‘Christian’ had done so. Jesus certainly never said to slaughter other Christians in religious wars (or to wage war period!) He warned against laying up vast wealth or calling ourselves princes, queens and kings and I’m sure He would never want us to put dogma and doctrine above His core teachings, so simple yet so hard for many to emulate: love one another and love God. That’s it, but that is everything. And that is also what is so tragically hard for humans to do.

Now parts of what you are about to read are ‘hard going’: that is not meant as a ‘trigger warning’– life does not come with trigger warnings. But the awareness that I had whilst actually drowning [and so unconscious in terms of the physical world] might be called hell—yes, certainly one version. What we do in this world is very important, but none of us know, or can know where we go next when that ‘awakening’ we call—and fear—as death happens. We’re not given to know for good reason, it seems: After all, someone who has lead a good life may for whatever reason do something very bad at the end of it; and conversely, a bad person may repent at the last moment and find forgiveness. I don’t know—no one does. Did God put me in hell because I tried to kill myself? Or, as I’ve come to think over the past 50 some years, did I put myself there, because suicide is self-murder and what evil is worse than murder? And in the past ½ century plus I have come to see all of what I experienced, the darkest and hardest parts as well as the miraculous, as a gift from God– and it is not hyperbole to say that God gifts us every moment of over day, gifts that no other species is blessed with: sentience, imagination, joy, laughter, hope, and most of all, love—a force so powerful none of us really comprehend it. Perhaps that is why we reduce it to greeting card cliches, but as you’ll see, it is, to quote loosely Erich Fromm in his great book, ‘The Art of Loving’, it is the inability to love that puts one in hell.

It is human, very human to want certainty, but it is not nor has it ever been given to us except in rare moments, like when you know you have done something good, or you know you are loved, or more importantly, love someone else so deeply you wouldn’t hesitate to die for them. After all, that is what Jesus did, isn’t it? He knew with certainty he would be murdered, for no reason whatsoever, yet He fled not, but went to that cross with a love so profound for our sorry species, our conflicted, self-destructive, vain and often ignoble species.

What sort of man would do that? Well, a man of God, obviously.

THE DAY I REMEMBERED MY SOUL

When I was 24, I killed myself. I put it that bluntly because it was not an attempted suicide, a cry for help, but a decision to self-murder. Yes, it was a desperate act, a last attempt to escape what my mind feared as lifetime imprisonment in a mental asylum [they still did that back in the early ‘70’s]. It was even, in its own way, logical– to my then agnostic mind at least. I had been suffering a profound clinical depression—the kind where you stop eating, sleeping, emoting, desiring. In time your body begins to break down: I shook like an old man with Parkinson’s instead of the once healthy and robust young man of just a few weeks earlier. I had decided as a teenager that there was no God, no soul, no heaven or hell– all just fantasies for those [unlike myself] not brave enough to accept that death means extinction of not only the body but the personality, consciousness itself. I know many people have that view today, and it does not appear to bother them, Well, why would it, until they’re faced with their own deaths?

Now what I’m about to relate will be believed by some, disbelieved by others, and the rest will probably just shrug their shoulders and give it no more thought. Yet is there really any question more important than the possibility of life after death: That you, your character, personality, memories– your consciousness will continue, not for years or decades but forever. We are the only species out of millions to have a sense of mortality—then too, we are the only transcendent species as well. And I think they are related, because what I was ‘shown’ [the best if rather feeble word I can come up with] is that I am two beings, sharing the same space or life as it were for a time: the one mortal, the other immortal, existing without beginning or end, beyond time itself. The mortal one we all can see, the other one is trickier—though I suspect far more people have experienced something of the ‘paranormal’  than one might surmise, based on accounts I have been told over the years. [Oxford did a study finding that 71% of the population had had at least one paranormal experience—and this in secular Britain.]

I had been attending the London Film School in Covent Garden, London. I have loved movies almost as much as books since childhood. For some reason which I still do not fully understand a half century later, I dropped out in my third and final term. The unconscious mind is far more powerful than most people wish to acknowledge—can any of us really be said to know ourselves completely? Again, it’s not surprising that many aren’t aware they have a soul as they can’t even acknowledge they have an unconscious mind which affects their thoughts and emotions, not only in their dreams but in the waking world as well.

Of course if I had thought things through, I might have decided to become a screen writer–I have wanted to become a writer since I started thinking—really thinking—as a teenager. (There too I fancied it would be writing the Great American Novel: I never thought I’d become a published poet in my 70’s.) But I didn’t think of it, and soon after I returned to the States I fell into a profound clinical depression, as it was termed in those days. Day after day I would walk around the dining room table in my parents house, asking myself why I had abandoned my dream—a hard thing for anyone, is it not?

Each day I walked around that table, all day long, eating less, sleeping less each night, asking myself why I had ‘run away’ from my one chance—as I saw it then– to follow a childhood dream. The more I did that the more I wished I could go back in time, back to London and the film school, and stop my foolish self from ‘running away’. That was part of the torment—seeking a time machine to correct my near fatal error as it turned out. My parents were not very sophisticated and thought a camping trip to Vermont with a high school buddy would ‘snap me out of it’.

But each day we were driving through the beauty of that state, things just got worse. I had largely stopped sleeping or eating, my nerves were so shot my hands shook with unceasing tremors, and while I knew that the mountains and valleys we drove through were very beautiful, I did not ‘feel’ that beauty one iota. It was the same when I saw a pretty woman: I knew I should feel an attraction, but I felt nothing.

It got worse. One day we drove up to a scene where a dog had been hit and killed by a car, and the woman who owned it was weeping profusely. I could not understand, at all, why she was so upset. I had no empathy, I had no feelings at all it seemed, good or bad. And in subsequent years I came to realize that all our mental processes, be they thoughts/ideas, or appreciation of art and music and literature, all our human thinking is fundamentally emotional, and MUST BE BASED on an emotion– or we cease being human, alive, transcendent– and soon become the living dead.

And that is not really hyperbole. Depression does not just stop you from relating to other people, but it cuts you off from yourself as well– you feel hollow, empty, a walking shell, very much a living hell. Believing it was only going to continue to get worse until I lost complete control and was ‘put away’ to suffer and suffer, without hope as I saw it then, it seemed logical to end my life as soon as possible. So one night when we stopped at a large campsite by Lake Champlain, I decided that after my friend went into the tent to sleep I would walk into the lake and drown myself (for some reason I had a sense that drowning was a painless death.) But I wanted to leave my parents a good-bye note: I still had that much humanity left in me. But my hands shook so hard that the pen just made scribbles, and at that moment these words—these exact words– came into my head: ‘Just let me write this’.

And almost immediately, as soon as I had uttered this ‘prayer’ to God, the God I had stopped believing in as a teenager, my hands became completely steady—and yes, I mean instantly. It was like going from 100 mph to standing still, without any deceleration whatsoever! Then I looked up from the camp table I was sitting at, and saw the stars of the Milky Way and ‘felt’, for the first time in weeks, their beauty—and I thought to myself, why would I want to die? So I went into the tent and slept, the first good night’s sleep I had had in a long time. 

The next morning I woke up, refreshed, happy to be alive (the depression seeming like a bad dream, now over), and my vanity had returned: I would shave and shower. But as I walked towards a large building where the showers were, I felt ‘something’  come from behind me and into me, as it were, and before I got to that building I had begun shaking again, like a dried leaf blowing in the autumn wind, soon to fall to the dirt. I tried to shave but my hand shook so much I knew I would just cut myself.

And now I was desperate. I don’t know why I was so naive the night before when weeks of suffering disappeared as soon as I sought a bit of help from the God I thought I had stopped believing in. It could have been the ‘placebo effect’, my mind did not want to die along with my body so its unconscious part  shut down the depression—I am pretty sure this is how my shrink interpreted it when I told him about it. I might have agreed with him, except that it was not logical that my ‘mind’ would then return me and my body to that profound clinical depression, and make it even worse than before!

As we drove into Montpelier that morning I saw a bridge and knowing I had very little time left before I lost complete control, I told my friend to go for breakfast and I would join him after I walked some to ‘calm down’. I walked to that bridge that spanned the spring-swollen Winooski River and hesitated! Not because of fear—I still saw death as extinction and so preferable to the living hell I didn’t seem able to escape. Twice I walked to the ledge to jump but something pulled me back: I interpret it as the ‘life force’ that many writers have alluded to– whatever it is in us (and it is not fear) that wants to keep us alive. But I knew as I walked away the ^third time that if I did not do it then, I would not be able to later—so I turned and ran to the ledge, and flung myself over.

Because we don’t forget the best or the worst in life, I remember like it was yesterday, and not 50 some years ago, how pleasant it was to fall through the air [I can understand why sky divers love their sport]. I don’t remember hitting the water, but I do see myself going feet first through some rock-strewn rapids (I have a scar on my back from hitting one of those rocks, but thank God it was not my head!). I went unconscious briefly again it seems because my next memory is of finding myself swimming in the river, and as I saw the shore I thought to myself, why am I swimming, I want to die…and I put my arms    straight up and sank.

The next part is hard. Not hard to recall—if only!– but hard to relive, hard to accept I suppose. At some point I was conscious, not of having a body, just ‘pure’ consciousness. I have no doubt it’s hard if not impossible to believe if you’ve never experienced it: Even in our dreams we have bodies. And I could see, but what I saw was  an infinite darkness, far blacker than the darkest night. I was utterly alone, and worse of all, in torment. I don’t use that word lightly: it was beyond any imaginable pain and my consciousness was roiled by it. And again, I called out to God, not to end it but with a question: ‘How long will it last?’  To this day I have no idea why I asked that question.

When I regained ‘this world’ consciousness, I was on the bank of the river in a gurney being put into an ambulance—it lasted only seconds until I passed out again.

I spent four weeks on the psych ward and had a series of electroshock treatments, which appear to have done the trick in alleviating the depression. I began rebuilding my life, taking college courses for a new career and seeing a very good shrink for the next two years. He was a good man who helped me a great deal to explore my ‘unconscious’ side– talk therapy it’s called today. But I’m sure he rationalized away    the hellish experience of my unbodied consciousness, my soul, as I was drowning in 12 feet of water. 

I wish I could do so as well. Accepting the reality of hell can be terrifying, but I am a big fan of reason [which will surprise the secular minded]. And my reason tells me if things are not a matter of chance, but are directed by some Power or Mystery none of us can really comprehend, then ‘God’ could have as well left me there. The man who jumped into that river to save me was a Vietnam vet riding by on his Harley when he saw me jump. There were about 50 people on the river bank that day  (so I was told) and nobody did anything, except for an ex-soldier who drove his bike to save my life.

I know our memories can play tricks on us, but usually it happens for the commonplace: getting a date or name mixed-up, thinking you did something when you hadn’t. But from what I’ve read and have been told by others who’ve ‘dipped’ into the twilight zone’, we don’t forget trauma. And what could be more real than death, or the prospect of death? I wrote a little ‘memoir’ some 25 years after the event, and everything was as real then as it had been when I was 24—and it is all just as real—and yes, perplexing still, another 25 years later. But not just for me.

When I started taking some college classes for a new career, I met a young woman in one of the them. The mutual attraction we had was immediate and intense (a few months before when I was depressed I would have felt no attraction.) Soon we were living together, and while we had an inordinate amount of passion for each other, we never developed the friendship that I came to learn was the sine qua non for a long term relationship. if we had an argument we would just go make love to resolve it—and yes, we

had a lot of arguments. Passion, especially very intense passion, really does need the ballast of friendship, to temper not its joy but its wildness….

So one ordinary afternoon after our classes, we returned to our rented studio and made love, as we usually did in those heated days. No drugs, no drinking, we intoxicated each other enough. Suddenly I found myself outside my body, that is, my consciousness. I saw my then lean and youthful body between her legs (and 50 some years later I see it just as clearly) and though I could not see her own soul, I sensed it ‘hovering’ near mine—as she told me later she did mine. [I also remember clearly knowing it was my body but not feeling any ‘attachment’ to it—it seemed unimportant to my consciousness then, to my soul.] And then, as suddenly as we had left, we were back in our bodies.

To this day I see that shared experience as a great gift to both of us. I already had proof that I have a soul, but that awareness was gained in a very different circumstance. Over time several people have related their own ‘out-of-body experiences’ (OBEs)  to me [people seem to relax with me when I share my own paranormal encounters and tell me things they say they don’t readily share with others]. In my late 20’s I was teaching ESL in Tokyo and one night having a beer at a bar with an Australian. He was a typical Aussie, friendly, down-to-earth, a surfer as far from ‘mystical’ as one might expect. He told me that one day he had been sunbathing on Bondi Beach near Sydney when suddenly he was about 50 feet up in the air looking down on himself and everyone else. He still seemed freaked out by it, emphasized that he wasn’t drinking or on drugs—I smiled and told him, ‘That was your soul’.

At the other end of life was a 91 year old man I met at my health club a few years ago. I don’t ask people if they believe in God– the question is too emotional, it seems, for both some believers and skeptics. Instead I ask if they think anything of themselves continues after death. He told me he didn’t used to think so, until in his 40’s one Sunday when as usual his wife ‘dragged’ him to Mass with the family. Sitting bored as usual, he suddenly found himself, his consciousness, hovering beneath the nave of the large church, looking down on himself. his family and the entire congregation. As with myself and the Australian surfer, he soon found himself (his consciousness or soul) back in his body. He added as a postscript: ‘After that I got in good with the priests.’

There are thousands of written accounts of NDEs and OBEs and other paranormal events, going back at last as far as Plato’s telling of the near-death experience of the soldier of Ur after a great battle. I understand why many people are skeptical– I probably would still be an agnostic-materialist myself if I hadn’t gone through what I did. The body-brain is such a complex organism that if you open a closet and something falls off a shelf, your hand will automatically reach out for it before your ‘conscious’ brain is even fully aware. And of course we’ve learned so much about medicine and science, but any good doctor will admit medicine is a much art as science [one question I like to ask MDs is if they know of patients who died who should have lived given their prognosis, as well as patients, whom their doctors had written off, surviving—and every one so far has said yes.]

And while I’m a great fan of science and its myriad benefits [I’m alive and walking because of it], it is important to remember that science is an impartial method, not a ‘god’. Be it hi-def TV or your I-phone or thermonuclear weapons, science reflects our human interests and values, and is only concerned with the natural world, the universe we can measure. If there is a supernatural world permeating the natural one, science and scientists haven’t a clue. We live in only 3 dimensions, 4 if you count time; the naked eye cannot see most of the spectrum of light, nor can the ear hear the full range of sound.

Because I live in a body in a material world, I have no idea how I could see without eyes or think without a brain, but I did—as apparently many others have over time. I know as I know I breathe that my ‘self’, my personal being, in some form or another has always existed and always will [though in what place may be the tricky part.] Can’t prove any of it, but then I can’t even prove I love my wife– but I’m beginning to realize only now as an old man, after being with her the better part of half a century, how much I do love her, though can I or anyone ever know how much of anything we are in this world of birth and death?

So I’ve come to suspect dying—the great universal human fear (and we seem to be the only species to fear it in the abstract)– may be akin to waking up shortly after a dream: You recall the dream, and how real it seemed whilst you were dreaming it, but now realize ‘life’ is reality, not the dream. And what about the tens of thousands of dreams you’ve had and don’t even know you had them? Would it then be so surprising that if we are re-incarnated, as I suspect myself, we don’t recall our past lives—save perhaps in bits and pieces.  Like feeling an attachment to certain places, or taking an instant liking—or disliking—to someone you just met. Or perhaps the work you seek or the music or books you love?

The man was right: for the time being, we can only see through a glass darkly….

Until he was 24, Nolo Segundo believed only matter was real– until he sought to end the suffering of a clinical depression by self-murder. For over 50 years he’s known life is a long dream… death the awakening.

“The Day I Remembered” was previously published by Braided Way, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and Vox Populi.

I’m sitting in the church
that I grew up attending. The
wood pews, the candlelight, the
arched roof and walls
perfectly designed
sculpted to loft voices to the heavens
and cast God right back down to
mortals’ ears.

(I used to think sunlight
splitting storm clouds
was God breaking through.
The Resurrection, modernized.)

The stained-glass Mother and Child
stretches up over me. Reds and blues
and motherhood. Baby Jesus knows
something I don’t.
His mother knows more.

Soft clack of footsteps. My next-door
neighbor returns to her pew, bouncing
an irritated toddler on her hip. He sniffles,
curls askew, and she brushes his nose
with a careful finger.

Awash in holy red, sacred blue, divine sunlight.
Mother and child, modernized.

(I used to believe in God
with all the faith of lambs.
Sometimes I still do.)

Abigail lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her family. She is a recent high school graduate submitting this piece for a grade in her Creative Writing class. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, but she’d sure like to find out.

I watched her through the window,
whisper-soft, feather gray,

over my morning coffee.
A tiny slip of being,

a charcoal smudge,
a pencil sketch against

the reluctant morning, she sang
the bleary-eyed sun

with a single eye full of dawn.
She opened her wings,

their span the length
of my open hand, and flew away

with my heavy heart.

Jessamyn Rains is a homeschooling mom of four, an Illinois native who ended up in Walden, Tennesse, which is as peaceful as it sounds. She is a former English instructor and world traveler who plays music and writes. She also dabbles in philosophy and foreign languages.

I always believed he meant it when he said he’d pray for us.

He’d sit down on one of the student-section tables and swing his legs, his face a smile as he asked how we were, how he could pray for us. Every one of us. During every class.

He’d come into class and say, “I’m not sure we should have a quiz today. I think…” he’d look around at us with that gentle smile, “Callie should decide. Callie, should we have a quiz today?” Then he’d fill our Canvas grades with 100’s.

Every time I hear American Pie, I remember our lit analysis class. We’d sit in his favorite classroom and analyze, analyze, research, analyze The Great Gatsby, superman comics, “Dover Beach” and “Dover Bitch,” A Rose for Emily, and enjoy our learning, our new English skills, as we became fluent in the scholarly language.

He’d start each class with an informal but heartfelt “How are you?” and circle around the room until we’d spilled our prayers into a no-judgement zone. Three weeks into class I said I was exhausted, please pray for my sleeping issues – every class, every class after, he’d ask me about my sleep, was I getting enough?    

Callie, Abby, and I always laughed about it later, because it seemed like such a small thing to remember; but it wasn’t. He cared. No one else had ever consistently prayed for me over something so small, so invisible.

Everyone vilified previous lit analysis classes – he told us to expect poor grades, that we’d improve as the semester wore on. I was ecstatic when he handed me my graded paper. I’ve always wanted to know if he left any comments on the essay I handed him two, three days before he died. I want to know if I disappointed him.                                                                    

After he passed, that class crushed me – it grieved me to receive D’s, C’s in the classroom   where he’d been so proud of us.                                                                                                        I

I refuse to believe he would’ve been disappointed in me, though. It’s impossible to imagine him disappointed in any student, ever. He loved us too much.

Our first zoom meeting as advisee and advisor, he asked if there was anything, anything he could pray about for me. I believed he meant it – not like the rote question-and-answer so many of us do. I know he prayed for me. He asked me if he could share my prayer request with Julie. And he said he understood how strenuous it was – that he’d waded through it too. Months later when I met him in person, I still believed he was praying for me.

I didn’t know him as long as I would’ve liked to. I’d looked forward to the day I could meet him and Julie together. He always talked about her. I can’t remember a single conversation where he didn’t mention her. His love was so apparent, so honest – I began to believe in the beauty of marriage.

I asked for his perspective on one of my other assignments for another class. I asked if I could email my writing to him; he emailed back with honest, heartfelt feedback. As trite as it sounds, it felt seen and cared for in that email. He asked if he could share it with Julie. And he told me he’d be praying for me.

He talked about his experience with schizophrenia, OCD, depression. I thought, if he can survive three mental illness, then I can survive one. I couldn’t imagine the exhaustion he’d faced. I’ll never forget his openness in that phase of life. He became a symbol of hope and survival.

If there was ever a professor, a person who I knew loved God, it was him. He exuded peace, offered us care, concern, attention, and time in every class, every interaction. He was calm in the midst of shuffled schedules and stressful assignments. He was a smile in a challenging class, a laugh on a sleepless day, a prayer warrior amid lifelong battle. 

A day before he died, he asked us to pray for him. He said that Julie had been feeding a stray cat, and they had two dogs. We asked, prayer for you, or the cat? And he laughed and said, “Both.”

I can’t remember if I prayed for him or the cat. I think I did. I hope I made that small sacrifice of time for him.

Elizabeth Smith loves coffee, reading romance novels, and British literature. She is a senior English major excited by the prospects of graduation and a return to Texas, her home state.

Change

The Spring breeze
Catches early rain
Which drifts and glitters down;
Reflections from my chin and brow
Outline the drops along my nose.
In forest glades some trees stand tall
While others kneel;
And when the winds blows through
Have smiles upon their faces.
As Winter’s icy harshness fades,
A tentative touch
That crowd of famous yellow things
They nod and smile and let me lift
And plant them in my soul.

Dawn

Early light shafts
the ocean’s metal;
Bay’d about,
sand and tide whisper
lingering litanies of lunar longing;
Wily windsurfers
weave waves;
While
thin threads of modern man
cross-stitch.

Bob Nimmo wrote four musical comedies; has had poetry published in magazines and journals throughout Asia and the Caribbean and has produced twenty-three books on Literature. He has released three collections of poetry and has a lyrical presence on Twitter and a following on Instagram.

I tried to arrange spiritual dressing
for the wounds I inflicted on my soul,
forming holes,
instead of blessing.

I listened to the goons who don’t want me whole
and hold out to me
a lesser reality,

life without my Lord,
denying his Word,
his life without end,
the tremendous blessings from my friend.

Phil Flott, a retired priest, just got his MFA in poetry from St. Thomas in Houston (by zoom).

with two toothbrushes
and brass polish. Wetted bristles
cleansing the brass plaque
embedded in the wooden bench.
She reads out the plaque inscription:

In loving memory
of Norah and Ambrose Taylor.

There sits Ann Clifford,
neé Taylor,
nay, Grandma
born to the names
on the plaque.
She has been scrubbing
for more than twenty years.

Next to her
sits Norah Clifford,
born to Andrew Clifford
and his wife, Marica.
This is her first time
scrubbing.

Offerings of manual labor,
labors of love,
repeated labors
of relentless scrubbing,
sacred scrubbing
set to bagpipe hymns.

She teaches me
the best way to hold the toothbrush
and bend the elbow.
We admire our work
and sit in silence
hands folded in our laps.

The mountain before us
blesses our endeavors.
Benediction.
The two toothbrushes
return to the bag.
And we process off the island.

Norah Clifford grew up in Lambertville, New Jersey. Norah holds a B.A. in Creative Writing with a minor in Music Performance from Franklin & Marshall College. Norah currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana where she interns with the Tennessee Williams Festival nonprofit. You can contact Norah at norahmclifford@gmail.com.

They don’t sell them in the store anymore,
she told me one day, when the ache in my
chest wasn’t quite so bad. And they were
our favorite. She didn’t mean anything by
it—one of those conversation fillers that
don’t mean much to anyone. Unless you’re
the kind of person where anything means
everything, all the time. A blessing and a
curse and a garden all to myself. This wasn’t
what the promised land was supposed to look
like. I’m not supposed to be here, alone, with
a packet of seeds that say I can grow back love
in 75 long, lonely days.

Tia Cowger is a graduate of Eastern Illinois University with minors in Creative Writing, Studio Art, and Entrepreneurship. At twenty-eight years old, she’s still trying to decide what she wants to be when she grows up. Currently, she enjoys working with her hands in areas such as gardening, painting, quilting, pottery, and poetry.

Although the disappearance of Edgar Woods from public life was met with some surprise, the shock faded quickly, giving way to occasional spells of unpleasant silence when somebody brought him up at a gathering. His house, the granite driveway of which once beckoned the liveliest of partygoers, was generally thought to be his hermitage of choice, though for all anybody knew he had gone to Australia. His lights were off; the blinds were drawn. A faint creaking could be heard from the inside by little boys who dared one another to go up by the wasted window trellis in the garden. The rotted vines had been eaten away by insects, and left to hang from their frames like corpses left for the crows.

But life went on without Edgar; another locus was found for his famous parties, and the partygoers migrated there. The smell of cheap cigarettes and expensive wine, of perfume worn thin by sweat and hor d’eurves ground underfoot moved elsewhere. If Edgar had been remembered, even by his closest friends, for something other than a geographical beacon to wine or women, then he would have been remembered at all in his exile. But he was not.

Day after day, his garden went to rot. A thin layer of grime settled on the hood of his sleek black car. Louisiana humidity generally dictates that a man dead is to be buried within a day, but whether he was dead or alive nobody knew. That famous humidity ate away at what was artificial, and infused power into what was natural. New vines, vines which he did not plant, began to creep back over his house. Surely, people began to say, he did go to Australia. No man, especially one who used to like such fine things, would be found in there. Not living, leastwise.

And so it was that people stopped watching his house, so that nobody saw the woman who stepped foot on his porch. It was the first Friday in September, and he had been gone for nearly a year.

The woman was tall, with pale skin and a Roman nose, and thin brown hair gathered at her neck. Her eyes were hard and blue, not cruel, but very direct. They stared with unflinching simplicity at the door of her brother. They knew that he was inside.

She knocked twice, her hard white knuckles rapping at the door with such force that the rotten wooden door seemed to buckle a little under them. The creaking of floorboards, so faint that even curious little neighborhood boys would have been hard-pressed to hear them, sounded in the parlor. Then there was silence, and Edgar’s sister knew that his eye was to the peephole.

All at once the door swung open, and the woman stepped forward, and the door was slammed violently back to closed, casting her back onto the porch with a bashed nose and bruised shoulder. But now she knew the door was unlocked. Fast as lightning, she laid her hand on the handle and threw the force of her body into the door, opening it again, wedging her foot in the crack and heaving with all her might to save her bones from being crushed. With one last shove the door swung open again, and the blackness behind swallowed her whole.

With a bony white hand she threw up the light switch, and when the electricity failed her, she yanked down the blinds beside the door. Dusty light streamed into the foyer. Edgar stood in front of her. He was cleanshaven and even dressed as normal, but heavier than she remembered, and his eyes were empty and beast-like when they met hers. Still, the family resemblance was strong. Both sets of eyes displayed a particular sort of piercing neutrality—something about their color, something about their placement in the face—which in ancient times would have been associated with prophecy, and in modern times with hereditary madness.

“Edgar,” she said. Her nose was freshly leaking blood, but she took no notice.

Her brother snorted like an animal.

“I’ll do you the dignity of not inquiring after your health,” she told him. He was silent a moment more, breathing heavily, before he spoke.

“I am going to gut you, Ella,” he said to her. “I am going to cut you up and eat you like the rats.”

“You think you can frighten me? I was raised in the same hole as you. I don’t get scared anymore, not by pathetic beasts who crawl into a hole to die. Not by you.”

He had nothing to say to that.

Ella Woods swept past her brother into the rest of the house, tearing down drapes and wrenching open shutters, twisting each set of blinds determinately off of their hinges so that they could not be closed again. What she had told her brother was as true as could be expected under the circumstances, and if there existed other entities, beast or man, capable of scaring her, she did not find them in that house. The light came in, exploring almost cautiously the house which had been kept dark so long. Insects fled from the light like shadows; shadows hid themselves like insects. A man or woman with nerves more sensitive than Ella’s might have been alarmed at what they saw. Edgar himself was such a man, and he flushed with rage and fear when he saw the ruin he had been hiding from: the bottles and plates and crawling insects, the cigarettes and smashed light bulbs and dead things which littered every surface. But she would not be stopped. Room after room, window after window, the house that had been made into a dungeon was dragged to the foot of the sun to be judged by it.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked of her, in a voice little more than a whimper. They had reached what had been the dining room.

She looked for a moment without compassion at the shutters in this last room before tearing them down and placing them squarely atop the other rubbish on the dining room table. “I am here to offer you a choice.”

“I made my choice.”

“Will you sit down?”

“I made my choice,” he repeated.

Ella brushed a spider off of the mahogany dining chair, seated herself at the head of the table, and said nothing to him. There was no response to her gesture, save the buzzing of those patient flies which had dutifully replaced his old circle of acquaintances.

She resumed as if she had not expected an answer at all. “Our mother is dead. You did not hear about it because you were locked away here and nobody cared enough to tell you. All the same, she was a pious and God-fearing woman, and she demanded on her death-bed that I deliver to you a message and offer you a choice.”

“I made my choice.”

Ella laughed. “You made your choice, did you? Do insects choose to bury themselves in the ground?”

“You stupid woman! Does a man not have the right to do what he pleases in his own house? I have always lived exactly as I want. You will not affect me with any story of our mother; she was a crank and a fool.”

“I won’t argue with you there. I wouldn’t personally have thought to knock at the door of a burrow and preach religion to a worm; but that is what she wanted, and I am here to enforce her wishes. I guess I have more sympathy for religious fools than evil ones.”

Edgar’s lips parted as if he were going to speak, but instead he slowly bared all of his teeth and laughed in a high, unnatural way. “She’s convinced you!” he shouted in mean delight, recovering a hint of that famous joviality which his friends had forgotten. “The old fool convinced you of her piety—piety which she didn’t even believe, in by the way—you know it was hypocrisy! Hypocrisy of dogs!—of rats!—and now you come here to feed it to me!” Still laughing, he settled into a chair opposite her. The two looked at one another for a long moment, and then Ella began to speak again.

“She wasn’t very complicated, our mother. She only knew one thing, and it didn’t save her from alcohol or opioids and it didn’t save her from death, but she read the entire bible and she learned one thing. She learned more than you or me, because she birthed us, but we forgot we were born. She knew the doctrine of creation. Do you scoff at it? I did too. No, please, don’t get up. If you get up I’ll kill you, and they won’t find your body in here until you’re too rotten to incriminate me. Only listen, and shut your mouth. Shut your mouth or I’ll kill you. I mean it. I had forgotten I was born because I didn’t remember it in the first place. I didn’t know, not with my guts anyway, that there was a time before, when the world went on before me. You knew that better than me, of course, with your college-course nihilism—we’re all familiar with your snide, your self-satisfied despair. But look, the doctrine of creation has got two parts, and they go like this: first, that one time there was a time when you were not, and second, that never ever, not in a thousand years, will that time come again. We are contingently, idiotically bounded by time, but only on one side. Do you understand what I’m saying? No? I’m sorry, you’re going to have to listen anyway. It’s like this. Some men think they have lived and will live forever, and other men think they are some kind of momentary aberration in the much more rational universe that has gone on and will go on without them. It’s up to the doctrine of creation to tell both sorts of men that they’re wrong. And it means something else as well, something very strange—strange because of men like you, in fact. We can do things for no reason, but we can’t be—can’t have been—created for no reason; we have got to be created because we are good. And you can’t un-create yourself, because you cannot take out what’s good in you. Isn’t that strange? Isn’t that a strange thing to think, with men like yourself abound? That always, there is good—”

“Ah!” Edgar shrieked with laughter and flung his upper body entirely onto the table, his long arms reaching near to the place where Ella sat. “You think there’s still good in me! You think that I have good deep down in my heart and I might change my mind! That’s what our mother told you!” And he laughed and laughed, baring his teeth again like a hyena, screaming with animal mirth.

Ella stood up in a flash and flung her seat out from behind her. It skittered and hit the wall behind her with a thud. “You have misunderstood me,” she said sternly, as his laughter subsided. “I do not think that at all. You have missed the point of the doctrine of creation.”

“But you said that—”

“No, no, you have to listen. Even dogs, even disgusting insects can listen. Listen carefully. This is what it means to be created. I’m telling you right now.” Now she began to speak with hurry, her voice trembling almost imperceptibly. Edgar smiled at the small sign of weakness. “That is the whole mistake that people make when they don’t know the doctrine of creation. They think that there’s got to be something good in them—”

“That’s what you—”

“No! Shut up! I’m trying to save your life—I think—or save you from hell, I don’t care which. That’s mom’s business. You have to listen. Everyone knows there’s something good in them. But because they don’t know what our mother knew, they think that it’s because of them, because of something they chose. And so they think that as long as they can see something good in themselves, that means they’re not too far gone. That little speck of goodness that hasn’t been extinguished yet means that fundamentally, deep down, they’re one of the good ones; that they’re still in control. They don’t know that it’s a mark that has nothing to do with them; it’s from their past, a past before you—they—even existed—”

“I’m not limited by the past,” said Edgar, his face falling naturally into long-practiced smugness. “I don’t think I have to be good.”

His sister, still standing, began to sway slightly like a tree. “But you do,” she told him. “Deep down—I don’t mean psychologically, I don’t mean that it could ever come out to the surface exactly—but deep down, down in the Truth of it, you think that you’re perfectly fine. Our mother always told us that we were such good children, you know, even when it wasn’t true at all. And I think that all this time, you’ve believed that. And I know you have, because I saw it—I saw that that’s exactly how it has to be. It’s just true. We all act for some good, you know…”

“Not me.”

“It’s not like that,” she responded, looking past him rather than at him. “I’m sure for you it feels just like that. But you’re missing something; you’re missing that you took that optimism that you detested from our mother, and you made it part of yourself, and now you pat yourself on the head and tell yourself you’re a good boy, just like she did. Only deep down, so deep that you don’t remember and you don’t care; but that’s all the priests mean when they say that pride is the root of all sins. They don’t mean that it looks that way, even for Satan, even for you. They mean it just is. It has to be. No, you don’t understand, and you never will—unless you choose to understand, I guess. That’s the choice. I think I can see you won’t make it; you will never make that choice, because it’s a different kind of choice than insects choosing to bury themselves in the dirt, it’s a kind of choice you have never made before, a sort that you don’t know and don’t like. But I’m offering it to you anyway. That’s mom’s business.

Look at me—listen to me, or I’ll kill you myself. This is the doctrine of creation. It is a terrible doctrine. It means that the world, that you, and I, the world and the spiders and the bottles and the dust—it’s all good. Fundamentally, with the ink we’re written in, we’re good. And that means that isn’t any limit to our evil. If we weren’t created than we would stop existing once we got wretched enough; we would hit a wall, we couldn’t go about like this, thinking we understand ourselves. But we are created, so the good is intact; no matter what we do, that goodness is the same, you know, the one that makes us understand ourselves and feel that we’re not too far gone, that even someone like you isn’t too far gone. But our mother know the truth and so do I; I know that you—that all of us—we are made from Dust and Good; that is our origin. The good is guaranteed, it is secure on that end, and that means that you can go as far, as deep into the dust as you like, until there is no getting out, and you will live forever in the mire; you will go on forever and ever without end, yes, unto ages of ages, because of that other ingredient, because of the good. It is not the dust but the goodness which will damn us…”

She trailed off. Edgar had grown pale as she spoke, and had crept backwards from the table. He had returned to an upright sitting position, with his head twisted slightly to one side as if he were trying to retreat from an unpleasant smell.

“You’re the same as me!” he told her, and began to laugh again, harder and harder, but without humor, his neck still twisted unnaturally. He began to heave as if he were about to throw up, but did not stop laughing. For the first time Ella began to be affected by the putrid smell that swelled through the whole house. Its epicenter was the kitchen, which was nearby. Still, she maintained eye contact with her brother. As a word seems less and less like a word the more it is spoken, Edgar seemed less like a man the longer he sat in a chair like one.

“We’re both created,” she agreed. “That’s what I’m saying. It’s the same—the same ingredients, always. But you—” her eyes darted to the ruined house around them. “I saw something, Ed. I saw the thing that could save us.”

He met her eyes again in a flash. “Do you think you can—what? Save me? I lived the high life, the best life. I lived until there was nothing left! I ate it! I ate an entire life, I ate the food and the liquor and I ate up the girls and the money and now I will eat the rats. I am happy. I am happier than you can ever be, than our mother ever was. It’s not myfault that you’re afraid of the dark.”

“I told you, I’m not afraid of anything. That’s the point. That’s the point of the doctrine of creation, is that there’s only one thing that is worth fearing, and that’s what’s true. But what’s true asks for a different kind of fear. It’s the kind of fear that worms can’t feel, just like this is the kind of choice worms can’t make. It’s the beginning of wisdom.”

Edgar suddenly heaved again, and spittle flew across the table. He produced a low groan, and said nothing besides.

His sister leaned forward, just slightly, and put her hands on the table in front of her. Something stern and bulletproof dropped from her face. She asked, once—it was something like pleading—“Will you leave here? Will you start again?”

The opportunity to finally deny his sister what she wanted—what their mother had wanted—brought a familiar comfort and helped Edgar recover from the unpleasant feeling she had introduced to him a moment ago. He straightened out his neck, met her eyes, and smiled. “I told you already,” he said to her. “I made my choice.” No, he decided, he was not afraid of her. There was fear in the room, that was all, and he had gotten mixed up and thought that it was his own.

Ella left without saying another word, exiting the house by the same path she had come in. When he was certain she had gone, Edgar set to work returning his home to darkness—except that he did not repair the dining room blinds, but left them where they were, atop the great table like the fatted calf at a banquet.

Esther Berry graduated from Thomas Aquinas College and now lives in Ohio with her husband. She has enjoyed writing fiction since she was a child, and is currently pursuing graduate work in philosophy. Her favorite authors include Charles Williams, Leo Tolstoy, and George MacDonald.

June 2, 2023                                Volume 8: Issue 1

It’s been a year since we last published. And for that, I do apologize. There are many reasons for the delay which I won’t bother you with but I am determined to get back to a regular schedule. So, take a look at these writings and feel free to comment, if you are so inclined.

Blessings to you all.