She was staring at him from behind the cash register with empty, drained-out eyes.
Her face was thin and pale and her sagging skin looked dusty, as if she had slit vacuum bags down the middle and powdered her face with it's insides.
The convenience store was absolutely silent.
The only sound was coming from him.
It was the gun in his hand, as he pulled the trigger.
Everything about it seems so right.
The earth is dying, that's for sure. And the people on it as well. We're all like homeless cancer patients coughing up blood in alleyways with our insides all eaten up like apple cores. See, the world's got this mindset. They're all under the impression that the earth could be split in half any day now and that each second dropped to the floor could be their last one. This could be the last meal. This could be my last cigarette.
This could be my last kiss.
As a result, they've got sin bleeding from their ears.
They treat life like concentration camp inmates put before banquets of food.
There is no restraint. There is no morality. There is no cleanliness. They're all nothing more than fleas, laying eggs of lies and deceit and carnality.
~
But not us.
We are the lit oil lamps in a mansion-full of tired looking candle stubs.
~
Father Brian is standing at the pulpit. In his hands is a bible and an iron cross. The words spitting from his mouth crown the air with thorns, so that my skin prickles like so many nurses sticking me with syringes whenever I move. I feel my sins being tossed out of my soul.
They grovel at my feet.
Beside me, Mary is sobbing and rocking back and forth and sweat is beading on her forehead. Her eyes are surrounded by black circles. Her wrists are as thin and brittle as wineglass stems and her hair drips down her face like dead weeds.
Sitting on her lap is her son.
His head is bowed.
Father Brian's voice is the trumpet of God and he spits like actors reciting lines of Shakespeare.
~
God's trumpet rasps an awful lot like the voice of tired old prostitutes with cigarettes wilting from the side of their mouths.
But as Father Brian always says, “Angels have the wings of crows.”
~
With fiery indignation, Father Brian speaks the final words of his sermon with the finality of nails securing coffin lids.
His skin looks all stretched out and his fingers are those of dead pianists.
The poor man. He works so hard for our salvation. He sacrifices his health for the security of our souls in the kingdom of heaven. I want so much to give everything I have to Father Brian. I want to give my life to him and his cause.
~
Outside, the sky is dressed in duct tape clouds and weeps like Christ as he suffered in Gethsemane, little sequins of blood polka-dotting his skin. Since the roof of our chapel is tin, the rain spatters on it like bullet shells bouncing off of Middle Eastern streets and synagogue floors. Mary is mumbling under her breath and her son begins to cry. I know what is coming next. We all do. In mere seconds, our spirits will shuck our bodies and shuffle through the door and let the wind take them into the stratosphere.
I exhale heavily and watch a particularly large sin struggle and writhe on the ground like a rat with it's spine pinched in a mousetrap. It begs for mercy and turns it's mutilated face up at me as Father Brian's words and ideas prick at his skin and rip through it like buckshot through Chinese paper walls.
I smile as it screams.
The noise is an exquisite hymn.
I wonder if it could be written onto sheet music.
~
Father Brian says, “My children, we are the final pilgrims. We are the last party of true believers. Tonight, as God receives you all into his rest, the world will burn behind us. Sodom and Gomorrah will ignite like matchsticks.”
From the congregation, “Amen.”
“Tonight, your eternal salvation shall be realized. Tonight, those people outside we once called brother and sister will puff up into nothingness and all their souls will descend into Hell and writhe in torment and indignation.”
I like the imagery.
Their skin will shrivel up dissolve away like the upturned faces of Japanese men and women as atomic bombs Technicolor the sky.
And then they will wail and screech and gnash their teeth and the righteous watching them will enjoy a good performance.
Because their torture-noises will be music as well.
Croaking, deep-throated organ notes groaning the same way trees with their bodies sawed in half like magician's assistants do when chainsaws munch on their insides.
Father Brian steadies himself with the podium and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.“My children!” he cries, “Absalom is dead! And we are no more to mourn the wicked. We must leave! We must flee! The Lord's hand is hovering over us! He sobs for the dead walking their streets and sitting in their churches and sinning in their ignorance. Tonight we transcend the veil. Tonight we will rest”
~
“Amen!”
~
He places a cup of tea in my hand last.
I can smell the poison.
It smells like Saint Peter's robe and ash floating in the wind during nuclear winters. It smells like better times. Happier times. Beside me, I see Mary and her son clutching their cups. The boy's fingers tremble like face card towers in San Fransisco earthquakes. Tea slops over the rim of the cup and burns his thighs.
Father Brian has his hands outstretched toward heaven and whispers prayer.
My heart will fall asleep like a child sitting in it's father's lap and all that marvelous blood will sludge to a stop and loiter around in my veins waiting for the traffic lights to change.
Home.
I'm going home.
~
Father Brian smiles at us benignly.
He lowers his hands and nods his head.
“Go, my children.”
Ethan was curled up in a bombshell hole.
His ears were bleeding and the bone in his left leg was sticking out the skin and his throat was caulked shut with little screams and sobs and prayers.
The sky was masked by wedding veils of smoke and boiled with sounds. Sounds like helicopter blades thumping the air like riot police beating protesters with rubber clubs in city squares or machine guns perforating the chests of soldiers like children ramming air holes in the lids of firefly jars. There were locust plagues of grunts in the air and bombs inflamed the sky with meteor shower luminescence.
Ethan was very far from home.
His wife was having a baby.
Now though, he wished he could tell her to get an abortion, because he didn't want any child of his born into a world where little boys and girls were christened with the blood of their neighbors and given hand grenades to use as pacifiers.
