*Fiction — December 1, 2022
The Failed Messiah
{
}
.firstcharacter {
float: left;
font-size: 100px;
line-height: 60px;
padding-top: 4px;
padding-right: 8px;
padding-left: 3px;
padding-bottom: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
}
Back then many men messaged me but Fitguy1244 was the only one who said he wanted me to peg him and make him my little bitch. Once we settled on a price, I said, Okay, and went over to his beachfront condo, dressed in swim trunks and a tank top—I wasn’t trying to put any more effort into this arrangement than necessary. On the walk over, I looked up how much the condo was worth, and it had last sold, presumably to him, for three million dollars. I knew exactly where it was. Hippies usually smoked weed and slack-lined out front, which made me wonder, before texting him to let me in, if that was why it wasn’t worth six million.
I didn’t know yet that he was a failed messiah, he’d only said that he was an entrepreneur. I’d been used to the word entrepreneur being synonymous with drug dealer or podcaster, but Fitguy1244 must have been a successful one since he agreed to pay me $1,000 as long as I’d do his makeup, too.
“Do you have your own makeup?” I’d asked, knowing my crusty, decade-old mascara probably wouldn’t do the trick.
“I do,” he said with a winky face. “You can do me up all pretty like your very own doll.”
I was nervous my lack of makeup skills would result in him looking like Billy the Jigsaw puppet. I had never been interested in makeup, which at first had seemed to make my father happy—“My girl knows better than to be tramping around town, shaming God”—but once I was older and I wasn’t his little girl anymore, he grew resentful. “Oh, a baseball cap again? You could at least put on some lipstick so the girls don’t start coming after you. Say some Hail Marys on your way out.”
If I’d known Fitguy was a failed messiah, I probably would have ghosted him. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with being a failed anything, let alone a savior of the people, and growing up Catholic had left me terrified of organized religion. I’ll never forget the summer I cut off all my hair and my father wouldn’t let me leave the house for a week. You’d have thought I was a leper except for the fact that Jesus didn’t bother healing me. My dad came into my room, saw what I’d done, and told me to come closer, he had something to tell me. I couldn’t have been older than nine. I inched toward him, running my hand over the back of my bristly head.
“God knows what you’ve done, and God is the angriest he’s been since that night, you know which night I’m talking about,” he said through his teeth. I did know the night. For the first time in my life, my mother had gone out with some friends. A Fleetwood Mac cover band was playing a few towns away. The show ran late, and when my mom didn’t come home at 11:00 PM like my father had instructed, he blew a gasket. I hid under the kitchen table while he ripped my mother’s paintings off the wall. According to my father, we were lucky God didn’t drop a bomb on our house.
“He can do that?” I’d asked from underneath the table. I’d found a ladybug, I was playing with it.
“He can do whatever the fuck He wants,” he’d said, smearing leftover spaghetti all over my mother’s Big Sur painting and muttering the Our Father.
She’d spent something like thirty-five hours on the Big Sur painting. I didn’t know if that was a lot or a little for painters, but it was longer than I’d spent putting together my Lego space station set so I knew how my mom’s eyes would look even before she walked in the door.
Cutting my hair was like that night except I was the one who got slapped around a bit.
But like I said, I didn’t know shit. Just that Fitguy’s profile said he was “very sweet but had a wild streak” and his net worth was $20 million. Within four messages, he’d begun referring to me as Daddy. I remember thinking that he moved faster than two lesbians who’d met at a Julien Baker concert.
His condo looked very lived-in. There were pizza boxes and near-empty beer bottles everywhere, even in his bathroom. Video games stacked on top of books stacked on top of skillets and basins. It was weird, observing this mess of human detail against the white sand and turquoise water backdrop outside his window, an image pristine enough to earn a spot in a travel brochure. The litter box, which desperately needed cleaned, was in the bathroom right next to the toilet. I would learn this weeks later when I got my period on his bed. The cat and I would sit on our respective toilets like two old men on a bench flipping through the newspaper and bitching about the economy, the smell of ammonia searing my nostrils.
When Fitguy opened the door, he knelt before me and kissed my bare kneecaps. “Welcome, Daddy,” he said.
“You should know, I almost never wash my knees,” I said, but he waved me off.
He crawled on his hands and knees over to the coffee table and drank the backwash from one of the old bottles. I turned away, pretending to examine a photograph of him and an older man, possibly his father. His father had a severe look about him. I didn’t like his face, the way it tried to crush you, then I remembered that I didn’t need to like anything for the time being except money. I was desperate for money, huge wads of money I needed to pay for my procedure.
“It’s been a hard few weeks,” he explained, sitting back on his haunches, accidentally knocking a few bottles off the coffee table. I’d thought he was referring to the storms we’d been having, so I nodded along, like yeah I get it, man.
He didn’t seem rich but then again, I’d never met a rich person, I’d only seen them on TV. For all I knew, this was what they looked like. Greasy, shoulder-length waves and an eight-pack, complete with the v cut on his hips, despite the pizza and beer. I remember liking that he had an outie belly button. I don’t know why, but his belly button convinced me that he was trustworthy, that he wasn’t going to cut me up into tiny pieces and put me on display at the local library.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, praying that he wouldn’t, even though I knew praying was for assholes.
“No, no, don’t worry about it,” said Fitguy, blinking rapidly, water leaking out of his eyes. I felt grateful for this small mercy but then I felt guilty about feeling grateful, and I wasn’t sure if it was Catholic guilt or just human guilt. It’s always been hard to be a person, but back then, it felt even harder. Who was I and what did I want from myself?
I don’t know what I was expecting when I got to Fitguy’s place, maybe a Patrick Bateman-Bruce Wayne hybrid would have made more sense to me. Since I was taking this man’s money, I didn’t want another reason to feel sad for him, and yet there I was, feeling sad for him. It was my greatest weakness, feeling sad for people. Time and time again, it rendered me friendless. No one wanted to be friends with someone who was always frowning or crying at them. No one wanted to be reminded of their own tragedies. Now, other people’s tragedies, that was the good shit. Once I discovered this, I trained myself to put my tragedy on display at every possible opportunity. When I stopped using Accutane, for instance, or when I started mentioning how my mother killed herself and my father disowned me for being bisexual, all of a sudden I had more friends than I knew what to do with. But they were the kinds of friends who wanted me to come to their parties—and for what? Decoration? Entertainment? I was neither of those things—but if I ran into them at a coffee shop they would pack up their laptops and run, blaming the poor timing on poor timing.
As far as I could tell, though, Fitguy didn’t want this from me. He wanted to be the tragedy—or more accurately, he wanted me to participate in his tragedy. I was happy to give someone else a turn for once. Fitguy seemed to snap out of his mood because he stood up, straightened his posture, and brushed his hair behind his ear then glided over to me, and before I could stop him, he gave me a hug like no hug I’d never experienced in my life.
“You don’t have my consent,” I groaned into his shoulder.
“You are so, so, so loved,” he whispered in my ear, his voice calming. When he spoke, I imagined a paintbrush gliding along a canvas in smooth, effortless strokes.
This cool, unfamiliar feeling washed over me; it was pleasant in its eeriness, as if a ghost had walked through me then stopped and decided to take me with them wherever they were going.
“You dick,” I said, starting to cry.
“My bad. Old habits,” he said, breaking away.
“You owe me another thousand for that,” I said, trying to sound stern and like a Daddy and he quickly agreed, although I think that was just his toxic generosity at play.
I was jealous of all the women who were good at this because I wasn’t. I was jealous of the hot-as-hell dominatrixes I saw online—they walked men around on leashes and oozed authority. I wasn’t made for it. I was the kind of person who married their ex in Vegas because they didn’t have the energy to say no. It had always been easier to simply go along with things. That’s why I had a wiener dog stick and poke tattoo—another ex gave it to me when she was already my ex but we were still fucking six days a week.
Anyway, my point is, when Fitguy said, “It’s none of my business, but why do you need the money?” I surprised myself by saying, “Did I tell you you could talk, bitch?” His eyes lit the fuck up and he said, “Yes, Daddy, yes yes, make me your little whore.”
“Again, you don’t tell me what to do,” I said.
“Of course, Daddy. I’m sorry, Daddy,” he said.
It was clear neither of us had done this before and had anyone been watching, I would have been thoroughly embarrassed for the both of us, but he seemed to have no insecurities, no self-consciousness to speak of. It was like he somehow knew that he was the only person left in the world despite never having opened the front door to check. I can imagine that quality would have made him an excellent messiah, if only he hadn’t flopped at try-outs.
I don’t know if I looked away or what, I guess I must have, but suddenly there was a stack of bills in his hand. I thanked him while pocketing the wad, thinking about the high-quality sperm I could purchase with it. Maybe I could pay Timothee Chalamet or Harry Styles to jizz in a cup and ship it to me.
“How does it look?” Fitguy asked, pulling down his boxers and waggling his dick, not necessarily at me, but you know, around. Waggling it around. It was a pretty penis, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.
“Looks used,” I said before stomping into the bedroom. That was when I caught sight of his mood board. “Resilience is key!” it said. When I asked him about it, he smashed the board over his knee, then said, “What mood board?” and I thought that was very brave of him. I asked him if he wanted the makeup before or after and he said before, it had to be before, then brought this very expensive-looking makeup bag into the bedroom.
“Like a doll,” he reminded me. Sweat was pouring down my ribs, my hands were shaking. “Daddy needs a Xanax,” he said, magically popping one into my mouth as I got to work. I didn’t do half bad. Blue eyeshadow, rosy cheeks, red lipstick that I even made him blot on a tissue like I remember my mother doing in the driver’s seat mirror before going inside the house to greet my dad. Then he handed me his strap-on he called Whitney, and I fucked his tight little ass.
Afterward, he asked if he could take a picture of me to memorialize me—his words, not mine—and I said sure, what the hell, as long as he agreed to keep my face out of it.
“Why don’t you have a passcode?” I asked, alarmed at the ease with which he unlocked his own phone.
“Why would I?” he asked, smiling softly, as if he couldn’t fathom a world in which he had anything to hide. I knew then that I had to have his secrets. I covered my face with my hair, and he snapped a few photos then burst into tears.
I patted his head and said, “Is this part of it?”
“Not everything is about you,” he said, which struck me as a weird thing to say to someone you had just paid to paint and peg you. I wasn’t sure if I was still supposed to be Daddy or not, so I waited to see what he would do. When he went to the bathroom to rinse off, I grabbed his phone off his pillow and went straight to his text messages. The first thread was between him and his mom. This wasn’t apparent to me right away, as she wasn’t saved as “Mom” in his phone, but rather “Ride or Die.” At first, I wondered why I was the one who had to peg him if he had a ride or die, but the text that said “You’re still my number 1 spawn” forced me to reconsider the nature of the relationship. I scrolled up a little to see what it was he’d done to deserve such a title.
Her: I’m so proud of you! [Confetti emoji]
Him: Shhhhhhh it’s just a try-out
Her: That’s not what the angel said when he brought good news to the people!
Him: Yeah, you’re right. He didn’t have to try out, he just had to be born or however it is angels come into existence.
Her: Gotta go, dad wants roast beef again. Love you. Kisses. He sends his well wishes.
Him: good one, mom
[a few days later]
Her: How’d it go?
Her: Helloooooooooo?
Her: I swear to
Her: if you don’t answer your mother!
Him: [several straight-faced emojis]
Him: I realized it wasn’t really for me. [Shrug emoji. Angel emoji. Levitating emoji.]
Her: What? I’m calling you
Him: This type of thing happens all the time, Mom. Change in management, you know how it goes
Her: great, how am I going to tell your father?
Him: easy, just don’t
I heard the shower turn off, then grunting. I put his phone back on the pillow how I found it then shouted that I was leaving, to hit me up when he wanted round two. Fitguy shouted back to wait, but I was already out the door and researching local try-outs but all I could find was an open call for a semi-pro indoor soccer team.
***
The next time I went over to Fitguy’s, I used purple eyeshadow for his right eye and silver for his left. I formed cat eyes with eyeliner. Things were looking up. I even let myself have some fun. While I was pegging him, I said, “Don’t look away, I am the bringer of good news!”
I have no idea why I enjoyed telling on myself, but he didn’t seem to get the reference. He closed his eyes and held onto the headboard, his biceps undulating under his skin. After, he took some more photos then rinsed off and I went through his phone. It became our routine. This time, I read his conversation with someone named Jupiter.
Him: You up?
Jupiter: No i’m asleep
Him: That seems wrong
Jupiter: i heard about what happened you know
Him: delete my mom’s number please
Jupiter: that’s what you get for not going down on me
(Ha!)
Him: does that old drunk still work the desk at your place? I’ll sneak past him
Jupiter: nah they’re actually hiring
Jupiter: i can ask if they’re looking for a failed messiah by any chance
The shower turned off, then grunting. I put his phone back where I found it, then left without saying goodbye. On the way home, I grabbed a six-pack and cigarettes even though I don’t smoke. All night I hunkered down at my laptop. I looked up “failed messiah,” but couldn’t find anything that wasn’t about some famous blogger, who decidedly was not Fitguy.
Over the course of the next few days, I thought about Fitguy more and more. I had a dream that I impregnated him. He was the most beautiful pregnant man I’d ever seen. Glowing like an angel, he rubbed his belly and said, “Have you ever loved someone who doesn’t yet exist?” “Yes,” I whispered. “All the time.” When I woke up, I willed myself back to sleep, to re-enter that dream but I couldn’t find a way back in. My pregnant messiah was gone.
I Googled his phone number in an effort to learn more about him: his name was Gabriel, of course it was, and I could pay $29.95 to gain access to his full background check, which didn’t interest me in the slightest. I knew he hadn’t been arrested. He was the type of man who blushed as he stole a blueberry from your oatmeal. According to my Sunday School education, a messiah was a leader or savior of a particular group or cause. Okay. So, Gabriel had apparently failed to do that. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me, I hadn’t ever known someone capable of such a task. That explained the household detritus, the stormy moods. You had to feel bad for the guy. There had been a lot riding on his sexy shoulders. But that didn’t mean it was my responsibility to pick up his pieces. Hadn’t I had enough religion gone wrong for one lifetime? What was it about me that insisted on chasing down new and exciting versions of my childhood trauma? I had a feeling I didn’t want the answer.
When I wasn’t with Gabe, I messaged other men who paled in comparison. They wanted “discreet fun” for when they were in town. They wanted someone “sexy and down for an adventure.” I did receive a message from one sugar mama who seemed lonely. “Closeted married woman looking for a night out.” I met her at a Mexican restaurant over forty minutes from her house. It was empty except for one man at the bar. On the TV, the weather person talked about record temperatures, melting ice caps. If these were the end of days, I felt I’d been robbed. My sugar mama spent the night looking me in the eye and caressing my leg. I felt too sorry for her to kiss her, and I felt even more sorry when she handed me $500 and a Get Well Soon card.
I drank vodka sodas and watched the ocean waves beat against the rocks. The time between seeing Gabe was kaleidoscopic, dizzying and impossible to track. When he texted me, my pelvis tingled. I resented my body’s betrayal. I knew he couldn’t have felt the same way about me, what with his late-night texts to Jupiter and his condo that grew more and more pitiful looking by the week. I could tell he was depressed but we didn’t necessarily have the kind of relationship where you took turns sharing your feelings until the only feelings left to feel were the good ones. He looked like he was losing weight, too. Now he had a sixteen pack and you could count every one of his ribs, even the floating ones. It would be unethical for me to continue observing without intervention. The next time I went to see him, I would speak up, I decided. I would soften my eyes and quiet my voice and make like I was the real messiah in a world full of failed messiahs. I would rise to the occasion for once.
The walk to his place was short but eventful. A man everyone calls Bubble Man popped a huge, swollen bubble on my head, wetting my hair. After my hair-cutting incident, my hair had become the most important thing to me. I couldn’t go to Gabe’s with matted animal hair.
“One day you’ll meet Jesus, and you’ll have to answer to him,” my father had threatened, scowling at my bowl cut. Meeting Jesus, at least the Jesus my father had drilled into me, wasn’t on my agenda, so I vowed to never cut my hair again.
I ducked in The Holding Company to dry my matted hair under the bathroom hair dryer. A woman was sniffling in the stall, her feet pitter pattering under the door.
“You could try rearranging your living room,” I said, scrunching my hair with my hand. Gabe would be ashamed of my inability to connect.
“Who’s there?” the woman sniffled.
“Someone with a mop for hair,” I said, leaving. It was amazing to me how easy it was for me to leave. I wondered if it was genetic, if it had been easy for my mother to leave, too. It hadn’t seemed easy for her but what did I know? I stopped at the bar and took two whiskey shots with the bartender, who was wearing an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, his chest pubes peeking out.
“Do I know you from somewhere?” he asked, scratching his beard. He reminded me of a refrigerator. He was big and square and humming. Despite his chest hair, I wanted to take him with me, not just to Gabe’s condo, but everywhere. I didn’t know why I had that impulse exactly—my impulsiveness was the creepy crawly type, I could see it under my skin, trying to break free.
I left the bar and that impulse grabbed my hair at the scalp and pulled me in the direction of the pier. I walked using the traditional method of picking one foot up, placing it in front of the other, then picking up the other foot and willing it forward. I knew from photos that there was a split second when both my feet were off the ground, that there was a moment in which I was floating. This small fact anesthetized me. When I arrived at the pier, I couldn’t even squeeze onto it, the crowd was so dense. The onlookers were enraptured by a large, terrifying white man man balancing on the handrail, one foot in front of the other, arms airplaned to the side. He must have been 6 ft 6 in.
“You have to give yourself up to God,” he said in a deep, commanding voice that had a bit of silkiness to it, enough to make his command sound more like a request you simply couldn’t turn down.
Everyone was nodding. A few people shouted, “Here, here!” Several people got down on all fours, faces pressed to the wooden slats. One woman took her top off. Most people were confused on what to do about that one—was baring your tits the ultimate sign of devotion or sin? The giant on his balance beam nodded at each tit separately, something I found strangely empowering. Like, yes, yes my tits are not a unit, but rather, tit one and tit two, with their own separate thoughts and feelings. And just like that, he pointed at me.
“What about you, pretty little lady?”
“What about me?” I asked, recoiling under his insidious gaze.
“Have you given yourself up to God?”
“I’m not really into that type of language.”
Now I had people’s attention. Even those in table-top position sat up to get a proper look at me.
“And what type of language is that?”
“Sounds like God wants to jackhammer me.”
That was when the giant fell off of his balance beam and into the crashing waves below, and I turned around and ran all the way to Gabe’s, not even stopping when I got a side sticker.
When I arrived at Gabe’s house, huffing and puffing, I removed my hand from my knee long enough to knock a few times, but he didn’t answer. I heard him rustling around in there like a mouse. Still no answer, so once I pulled myself together, I checked the door and let myself in. He was sitting in the middle of the floor with his legs spread, a dozen or so scrapbooks opened before him. He looked at me with guilty, wet eyes as if he’d secretly wanted me to find him like this.
“What’s going on?” I asked, moving a scrapbook and taking a seat beside him. My bones creaked and cracked. Everywhere, photos of a corny, smiling white family. Gabe, his parents, and a red head who I assumed was his sister. He didn’t answer, just pulled out a graduation photo, Gabe in a blue cap and gown, smiling a close-mouthed smile, eyes focused on something to the left of the camera, and his father beside him, at least two feet of space between them. I could imagine the time before this photo, the mother pestering Gabe for a photo like mothers do and Gabe pushing back a little, like Mom, come on, haven’t you taken enough pictures for today? while his arms dangle loosely at his side. His mom raises the camera to her eye then waves his father into the photo with her other hand—”Get in there, Dad! Look proud!” What the photo doesn’t show is Gabe going back to his dorm room and blacking out in his bed, alone to the skeptic’s eye but not to the believer’s—God sits pretzel-style at the foot of the bed, His arm reaching for the bottle. The question of the night: Where do we go from here?
It seems it was just one of many questions God was unwilling to answer because here was Gabe pancaked on the floor in front of me, witless and wilted.
“I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a double major in Religious Studies and Marketing,” he began. “My father thought the only difference between a successful and unsuccessful religious figure was good marketing. My father was of the opinion that a solid website with persuasive and optimized content was enough to make the people come.”
“Hot,” I said without thinking. He shot me a reprimanding look but kept going.
“My father is a priest, he has connections. He’d gotten word that the Pope was looking for the next messiah to save the people, or at least distract them from the fact that no one can save them when the planet explodes. According to the Pope, climate change is a prime opportunity to recruit believers. People are more vulnerable right now.”
“Imagine Jesus sitting around keyword stuffing his website,” I said. “Like, Climate change ark and Bible climate change. Oh, what about Climate change second flood.”
“That’s your takeaway from what I said?” Gabe asked.
“So, your dad got this bright idea that you would be the next messiah? I guess he’s one of those people that thinks Jesus was white, too?”
“He’d been priming me all along. Raising me for slaughter,” he said.
“But.”
“But I didn’t even make it to slaughter,” he sighed. “There were so many other great candidates. Come the big day, I choked. I was supposed to go on the pier and successfully draw a crowd of at least 300 people. I couldn’t get more than sixteen. It was the most embarrassing day of my life and now I have to figure out how to break it to my father.”
“That does sound embarrassing,” I agreed, thinking of the giant between the jaws of a shark. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve never successfully gotten more than two people to come to a party I was hosting, and one of them was a baby.”
“He was so fucking thrilled, you should have seen him. Pouring me drinks, making me steaks. It was like he finally noticed me and not only noticed me, but actually, I don’t know, liked me?”
Then Gabe’s phone rang, and he leapt up and answered with someone else’s voice and someone else’s authority. I could tell right away that it was his mom. He assured her several times everything would be okay, he would figure something out, he wouldn’t make her do his dirty work.
“Tonight?” he said, looking at me in my board shorts, at my nipples showing through my mother’s Fleetwood Mac t-shirt. I never was one for bras. I suddenly felt very aware of myself, as if it were my first time being inside my body and boy, had this body gone places and seen things.
“Okay, okay, I’ll be there. A guest? You want me to bring a guest? Why? Jeez, okay, Mom,” he said, hanging up.
I grinned then lifted up my shirt and flashed him.
“I could hug you again if you wanted,” he threatened, his eyes soft and browning. His eyes weren’t brown, not really—they looked like they were always in the process of turning from gold to delicious brown.
“Me! I’m a guest,” I squealed like a cheerleader. I had no interest in meeting his stuffy religious-brained parents and yet, there I was, presenting myself like a resume hot off the press.
“I think you may have misheard me…” he trailed off, scratching his beard. I squinted my eyes and imagined him pregnant with my child, like in my dream. He would make a beautiful pregnant man, I was sure of it the way that a child was sure no one had ever built a more perfect sandcastle than they had. I found myself, for the first time, feeling disappointed in Gabe failing as a messiah. Was I just as bad as his father? If he were the messiah, he could perform miracles and we could create a family in which every person in the family was happy and free, with the only sin being apologizing for who we are and what we want. We would smile in photographs because we wanted to, and our arms would wrap tightly around one another like koala bears clutching trees.
“I have an idea,” he said, smirking and shimmying over to me. The charm was activated.
And that was how I ended up in the passenger seat of his red Camry in a nun costume I’d picked up at a Halloween store, smoking out the window and swallowing my spit. I was regretting my decision to help him, but I was in it now, and he looked so jolly I thought he might explode like a potato in the microwave. I would come away with pieces of him stuck to my skin.
“You remember your lines, right?” he asked, turning down “Rhiannon”, which I’d only just realized had been playing. Had he put that on for me?
“You’re the most impressive religious figure we’ve ever seen, we need you down here, we need you, we need you,” I deadpanned.
“I’m 86% sure you’re joking but I’m going to need you to bring that up to 100%,” he said. I didn’t respond, I was trying not to throw up again. His parents lived in the mountains. Old money, or whatever. We had to take a bunch of narrow, curvy roads to get there and after maybe the fifth curve, I’d lost my breakfast beer out the window.
“You really weren’t made to have long hair,” I said, observing him. The wind was whipping his hair all over the place, and judging by his flinching, he wasn’t crazy about taking the harder hits to the face.
“No, no I wasn’t,” he said, solemnly. “It was part of the messiah look.”
I wished my father could see me now, a royal guest at a royal religious dinner. A respectable woman, he might say. Finally, you’re becoming a respectable woman. The very thought made me tremble; I’d never wanted to be a respectable woman, I’d only wanted to be a wanted woman. Perhaps it was the song—it always did things to me—but when Stevie sang “Wouldn’t you love to love her?” my blood pumped faster, my fingertips prickled, and I leaned over and kissed Gabe’s scruffy cheek in what became the first lip-to-flesh contact we’d had up until that point, well, unless you counted the kneecap fiasco. You’d have thought I’d have taken 35,000 volts of electricity to his face the way he jumped in his seat, his head slamming into the ceiling.
“And to think, you’re the best nun we’ve got,” he smiled, rubbing his head, acting as if my touch hadn’t terrified him.
I wanted to ask him about Jupiter, if he still loved her, or worse, needed her, but I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t know a lot of things. Like why I still prayed even though no one had ever responded, or why I thought responses were better than answers. I didn’t know how a human need began, what type of seed it sprouted from, or what made it grow. I didn’t know the strength it took to let yourself need someone, even as you speed through the mountains, with your long, beautiful hair covered, his long, beautiful hair wild and not so beautiful, on your way to convince two people that you are who you say you are, that there’s never been another you, that your God came in the form of a man by the sea. That your God is only your God because he has failed.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 10. View full issue & more.