“That’s a pretty toy, preacher man,” she says. The lines of her body are angular and improbable. She wears layers of other people’s clothes; each garment ragged enough to be delicate. It seems if you untied the sash around her waist, she would unravel, and all that would be left is laundry. Her voice you can feel on your skin for all the distance in the world. The Saint never speaks to her, but he sometimes dreams about it, which should count for something, he thinks. One day… No. He has his work to think about. He has God. He hefts the tweed trench coat (with the coat hanger still in to hide his embarrassing shoulder blades) about himself, nods vaguely, and shuffles on.
The Saint is rigidly reclined across the front steps. He is a tongue across back molars; though the edges of the steps are worn, they’re more accustomed to bite than he, and gnaw at the back and thighs of the prone patron. They would have at his neck too, but he has God (in the more casual form of a beaten up yellow enameled toaster) as his pillow, which fills him with a gentle glee.
The block of apartments behind him is brooding, clucking at its clutch of boilers and basements. It is suited to its age of dotage; the bricks crumbling to liver-red chalk, the melodic din of the fire-escape in a light wind. Its gutters have not been thought of for years, and sporadically the Saint is splattered with black pickled leaf litter tailed by last night’s rain.
He is stripping the flesh from a piece of burnt toast he made in God, watching a drop of gutter juice catch the streetlamp light. He is grateful, of course, for the star of scum and manna of the machine, the farther sun and the holy toast. He had a vision, once, in which he made the toast as usual, but when he chipped through the outer charcoal, he found God had transformed the bread to moist doughy banana bread, with desiccated coconut and plump raisons. But that is not the Toast; the inside of the Toast is stale white crumbs, like the kind bought to feed the birds, more texture than taste. He wonders sometimes if the vision was Satan tempting him, or God urging him on with his reward, when he is ash and the toast is not. He would ask God, but that would be degrading for Him, to have His Divine Message muddled with Satan’s or the Saint’s belly, or both. The Saint might ask someone else, but he doesn’t like it when they look into his eyes, it makes him claustrophobic and queasy.
He isn’t so smart all of the time. He doesn’t talk, write or read, so the words seem to fester inside of him, until they’re nothing but noise and signs. It is not unlike philosophers and prophets to wonder, but the things he wonders about seem so stupid, even to him, he is ashamed. The work of the Saint is relatively straight forward, though, so maybe it is better he can wonder at simple things. Sometimes God needs a pack mule instead of a lamb.
His tongue is a contraption of ruined kid-leather, atrophied from disuse. It seeks out the splatter on his cheekbone. It slicks down the puerile velvet of his cheek with the strain. It returns like the chord of a vacuum cleaner.
Rot fills the gutter juice with such richness. It invades each pore and pinnacle of tongue, then down, the jaw overgrown with gums, beside, beneath, between the wharf posts of his teeth, breaking waves against his cheek. He asserts his waning dominion over the currents of his saliva. He coaxes back its fungal veils that trail the broken bubbles of their stillborn siblings. A finer flavour fades in dusty swathes; the timorous tang of human blood, inside the veins of an undercooked leek. The black slime burns in pungent welts, the clotting numb of a whole clove bit. Leaf fragments delegate his fate along the ribbed roof. He closes his eyes and sighs at some fatal bride or noose.
He finds himself bent into the corners of the stair, wet, wide, out of focus. He tells himself he needed something to soften the dryness of the toast, but it is a lie. He crosses himself, and fixes God two settings higher to get the taste out of his mouth.
Some tastes are harder to get out than others. Some become part of the act of tasting itself, part of your mouth, part of you.
“That’s a pretty toy, preacher man,” she says.
“You follow me. Why?” Funny that his tongue should be so spry for her, an age of silence and toast shook off in an instant.
“You have a reason for going where you go when you go, maybe so do I.”
“Do you?”
She bites her lip, a girl of a woman, but she tends to keep her eyes from him which is comforting. “No. I’m not reasonable. With reason comes responsibility.”
He grimaces. “Oh.”
“I’m a good person,” she rallies, “well, I mean, that’s an oxymoron I suppose, people aren’t good, they’re complicated, but I try to do good, just not in any kind of organized fashion.”
“You talk a lot,” He says.
“There was a deficiency in discourse, nature hates a vacuum. But you, you are a man of reason.”
“The reason’s given to me. I am…“ But he’s embarrassed. He glances at the toaster and grunts awkwardly. I am the proud made lowly, he thought, I am ashamed of God. He hopes the knot in his stomach is guilt and not the gutter juice.
She sits on the railing of the stairs, holding her feet behind her, swinging a little to get her balance. “So what is your reason? What do you do?”
He considers. “I have to carry that around.” He nudges the toaster towards her, then before she can ask, “I get the feeling sometimes I’m supposed to take it somewhere, and I do, and it does what it needs to.”
She is strangely frustrated for a new acquaintance, “What does it need to do, make toast?”
“It’s not always a toaster.” He is hot-cheeked, “Sometimes it is a lottery ticket, or a cure for a disease, or a birth certificate, it is miracles, the work of God.”
“Why does God need a machine?”
“I don’t pretend to know the will of God.”
“There’s no such thing as Deus Ex Machina, remember, we studied it in English Lit, it’s an ineffective plot device. How can anything have meaning that just comes out of no where, that just is? Miracles don’t save people. Every decision you make in life ultimately leads to death. You could cure cancer, people are still going to find some other creative way to die, they’re really good at it. Jonah, come home.”
Just then, the Saint woke up, and it was all a dream. God hums and starts to smoke. The Saint has to turn Him off. He doesn’t pop up properly on His own.
The God from the Machine is not without remorse. He knows the Saint loves her, but He lets him think he sometimes dreams about her, which should count for something, He thinks.
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Okayyyyy... now was that the most contrived thing you've ever read in your life? I wrote it last minute for something, and these are the cuts of it, it actually was even more turgid and contrived before, if you can imagine, had this whole subplot involving a Valkyrie. Will cut and slash and burn, and hopefully it will evolve into something nothing like this, so your radical criticisms, much much appreciated.
