Wow! Positive reviews I worked hard on this one (lotsa research too, believe it or not) so thanks for the validation! Raife, I don’t care for religious prose either, but overtly making fun of the snake-handlers woulda been easy. Tougher is trying to take their side (to a point). As for the protagonist and the little girl, I deliberately left out what happened to them in the end because I wanted to keep all this activity in a sort of moral limbo. Thank you for reading such a long piece, and a million thanks for the kind words!
Short Story / Signs and Wonders
And these signs shall follow them that believe…. So many variae lectionarum, so many qualifiers, so many subtle diversities of meaning spread out behind words like signs, words like believe, she thought as she contemplated her pale wrists. So thin. So weak. Thin compared to most of the other women, weak compared to nothing. Just weak. Human. The black lace, so little there on the cuff as to be mistaken for an uneven seam, the black lace resting slight like inky tissue dissolving against the whiteness of her flesh. Her skin was milky as bookbinding paste except for the tiny pink needle-eye-sized puncture pairs. One here. Another there. She tried to stare into one set as eyes, but was distracted by her overly elegant dress. What she had chosen for simplicity suddenly seemed obscenely chic. Was she attracting stares to her lonely place in the rear? No. That sort of thing didn’t happen here. These people weren’t like that. Everyone was lost to the building bootsteps of the music, the ecstatic march away from the world. She felt it through her feet first. It rose in her body and met the faint scent of oil on her forehead. Its fragrance suggested stone and wood and water, like the stairs up the Citadela of Budapest, the trek skyward to that dizzy view over the Danube, that river which has carried so much blood from so many battles away from that thick-walled city which no one else in the room had heard of. There should be no shame in that, she thought. Where you are is always a here, and looking elsewhere is too often looking for reasons to think you’re better, better than the there or the here, between and above.
Sooner or later she would feel herself moved to the front of the church, ex animo. It wasn’t something you accidentally drifted toward like a night of debauchery on the Spuistraat in Amsterdam when you’d only gone out for a cappuccino and light shopping. It couldn’t be something you dove into like the seedy La Chueca of Madrid when you really wanted to let it all go. It wasn’t made of motivation, nor was it suggested by circumstance. It was The Spirit. The thought of it made her regret the banal memories of those evenings, memories that were folded and dampened and split, clumsily fished from purse or pockets and reassembled the next morning.
She clung to memories that were more like electric states, with the nighttime sky raining invisible flame and her arms twitching with bubbling pain and acidic spasms. She always healed, and was never afraid she wouldn’t. It was this she needed. And these signs, she thought, shall follow them that believe. She felt the spread of a soothing calmness found an inner assurance that her faith would not waver into pain again.
Her auntie Tia had always worn a pressed-flower smell that seemed as dusty and final as her black book of Latin prayer. Her auntie had never read her the parts of the Bible she would later discover a powerful but hidden need for, the parts that confirmed, the ones that lay out a method of manifesting truth, the passage that staked out a place where the real meets the ethereal in faith and pact and everything. It was Punkin who first read her this, on an airplane.
Although it was difficult to understand at first, his American accent was beautiful, comforting, with none of the usual grating nasal arcs or clucky tonguing. His speech was softened and smooth like the newel post in the narthex of St. Jean de Luz cathedral, given curve, deepness, and shine by being handled, held for what it is by hands who only have real use for it, unembellished and unadorned. “Most people agree that when you get it, when you take the faith, that it doesn’t nothing to do with reasonable and rational. That it’s just faith. But they don’t show it. They don’t live and demonstrate. They just say it’s faith so they won’t have to talk about reasonable or rational, because that might shake their faith. That’s the opposite of faith, really, plus they don’t demonstrate and confirm. People like that get bit real quick, but then they wouldn’t take up the signs to begin with. With that, all the sudden they’re all reasons and explanations. Some people got different ideas about faith, but when it comes down to it, they don’t demonstrate. They only explain.”
Everyone from moody Tuscan chefs to wild-haired German physicists had spoken to her of beauty as simplicity, but this had all seemed like a trope lifted from literature until she learned it from Punkin, after helping him fasten his seatbelt. He was on a stop-over at Washington Dulles midway through his first-ever trip on an airplane. He seemed eager to face his fear: “Flyin’ couldn’t be no worse than drinkin’ poison.”
If she hadn’t settled for business class, and if he’d not been bumped up, the meeting would never have taken place. This provided a weight neither could miss later. She could smell his innocent nervousness, something like cotton and almonds, a world away from the brine and mortar smell of Venice, or the ozone and new carpet smell of Tokyo. It was something he had carried from where he came: Lupo, Tennessee. That was two years ago, and the time intervening between her visits there felt like thick chapters of lies wedged apart by fine metal bookmarks, shiny and sharp edged.
She felt herself stirring on the hard wooden planks of the rear pew, remembering the things Punkin had said to her, “Well with faith and the Holy Spirit, it’s not always something you can see. The Devil can be like God in all that, in the spirit of all that. But snakes, the serpent is a visible part of the devil. Most of the times it’s no things you can see or know like normal. But the serpent, you can see that because the serpent is a visible part of the Devil. Most of it’s not like that. Evil. You can’t see it. But it’s there. If you leave what’s there up to just what you can see, you might as well be blind.”
It wasn’t only the shape and filling of his words, however, that did what they did to her. His painful earnestness was alive in his eyes and every gesture was firmed by an honesty that revealed those of most men to be affectations hiding fear and uncertainty, or bloated with ignorant confidence.
She found herself off the pew and sliding up the aisle like a spot of crushed ice skating across a hot grill, the move made slick by what’s left behind. Phantoms of doubt fled in her wake, and the intellectual pomp of her linguistic prowess became a cartoon caricature before the old tongue, new to her, whose pure language seized the sounds she made and spelled out the truth in Spirit. The band was banging out in full swing, and a vocalist before the musicians gave breath to Mark 16:17-18: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover!”
“God told me you’d call,” Punkin had said, barely audible over the static on her cel phone with which, on a sudden whim, she called him from her suite in Innsbrook. The view onto the mountains and a cluster of buildings tucked into a deep valley had reminded her of his description of Lupo, Tennessee and that she had programmed his number into her phone’s memory.
“He told you?” She had asked, incredulous, but certain that he believed.
“I was thinking about how a young woman with your kindly life must talk to a hundred strangers on airplanes and not give’em another thought much. I thought no way you’d call. But just then my wife came in and said that out of nowhere a guy she gave a lift to filled up the whole truck full of gas. I thought the Lord must need me to drive a far piece soon, and that must be the airport, seein’ that I was just thinkin’ on those lines.”
“It’s not too far, is it?” She had asked. “I can rent a car. I don’t want to put you out.” These things were spoken by her before she fully realized that she would be flying back to the United States, to Tennessee, to see Punkin preach in the religio loci of The Jesus Christ And Almighty Father Church Of Holiness And Signs Following.
“You’d never find your way from Memphis to Lupo. I’ll fetch you. Go ahead and get your ticket.”
Aussitôt dit, aussitôt fait, she thought. No sooner said than done, and only contemplated later.
“People say we’re getting it wrong. That we’re taking things out of context. I know a lot of people haven’t even checked to see what out of context it is, and still they say it. If you’re fair minded, and you believe The Word, I invite anyone to read the whole chapter and not take it how it is, honestly, unless you want that, unless you already want from the get-go to decide it doesn’t mean what it does. Then you gotta ask why you want that in the first place, ask yourself if there’s faith in that.”
She found that her doubts were lodged mostly in his conception of people, in general, really believing in a god at all.
“Everyone has heard God speak. I don’t think you can spend much time on his Earth and not have him show you something, awesome or small, and say to you I am in this.”
These exchanges occurred during their long trips in his truck from the city’s outlying areas to more remote regions, past astoundingly tall and thin trees, into the vertical density of them on hilly roads that wound around less like the clean curve of roads but more like the natural meandering of streams. While they wove their way through this land, Punkin gave her his story in it.
“When we started the church, we had a hard time handling a lot of things, but every problem was something we could look at as a thing to fix in our hearts, and then God showed us the way. Like with the snakes. Thinking about it, it makes sense that they was the hardest part, the trial in it, in more real ways than just what you’d think. Me and Mawmaw was livin’ in a public assistance duplex and they don’t allow serpents. Mawmaw—that’s Katie, my wife—her ma couldn’t keep’em because she sits kids for a living, and my ma and pa are dead. It turns out, out of nowhere, we see an ad for some highway turn-off snakehouse for tourists. So I calls’em up and say ‘hey, if I can catch you some nice big ones, I’ll do it, but you gotta let me borrow them.’ The guy asked why, and I told him why I can’t keep’em. And he said ‘Heck, I know a place you can rent and they won’t care.’ The rent was something we could make, easy, and we found a whole load of brethren in the area and we’ve lived there eleven years.”
She asked “How did that show you something you could fix in your heart?”
Punkin said “Cause first of all that’s a story that a lot of people would laugh on. Bein’ in public assistance housing that don’t allow serpents. Ok. Ha ha. I understand, I guess, until you stop to think about how it’s all set up. What you think is normal and natural about the ways everything is set up ain’t necessary to be natural or God’s way. The devil sets up ridicule for you by makin’ people believe that all the man-made rules of living and working are natural, and if you do something that seems off to those people, then they think it’s all right to ridicule. It’s easier to laugh at someone than it is to ask why you laugh. I never put anyone in danger with any serpents. I take more precaution than people do with their dogs or their cars or just what they let their family put in their mouths or watch on TV. It’s just that the world has gone one way for so long, people can’t see that. I don’t blame them. I try not to judge them. But pardon me if I can’t go along with’em. We had to go with our hearts, and not be afraid for the risk. So we moved. It was a blessing, too, in the end, and we had to look in our hearts to realize.”
She felt too close to him, suddenly, to feel impertinent asking “Surely you have had the occasional doubt.”
“I love the way you talk. You take all the words like they’re new and put’em right in the places like it’s the first time they’ve been there. Watch out. God may use you. I’m just sayin’. Anyway, doubt, oh yeah good God Almighty praise him I’ve had doubt. Once, a brother named Wayne was puttin’ a rattler back to the box and shut the lid hard down before he had it in there good. He hurt it. I took it out. I didn’t have the anointing so I grabbed it real careful right behind the jaw so it’s safe, and the poor critter hung there limp as a dishrag, poor thing. I took to petting him, and Wayne he says ‘Punkin, you getting’ soft?’ and I says ‘Maybe so.’ The serpent is the visible part of the devil and here I was coddling to it like it was my baby.”
“What did you do?”
“Wayne and me mashed its head in with a rock and I felt bad about it. I have forgiveness for anything. Least I try to. You know, you’re born for whatever you are. That snake was what he was. In the book of Mark, when Jesus was seen back alive after the crucifixion, he didn’t say go out to hurtin’ snakes. I did doubt for a while. Once holding a copperhead after that, I had doubt and wavering, but I just stayed in the anointing and said ‘Serpent I won’t hurt you because of my choice to do it, and you won’t hurt me because you’re stayed by the Spirit.’ The doubt left me then.”
And the doubt left her as she approached the pulpit where Punkin testified: “Jesus was crucified! He was entombed! He came back to life, yeah buddy, back to life walking and speaking to his children. The giant rock that sealed his tomb was moved and he spoke AND THESE SIGNS SHALL FOLLOW THEM THAT BELIEVE! If coming back from the crucifixion is strange, brothers and sisters, if rising from the tomb is strange, if returning to speak to the flock after being mercilessly crucified is strange, then mister, it’s no doubt what He said next will strike unbelievers as STRANGE! Taking up serpents as too much to do for God! What could be too much to do for God? Following the signs as God says we will is trifling compared to what God has done for us!!”
She danced to his words, as she spoke as well, unfamiliarly, and Punkin continued, “If you’d reduce what God says his believers will do, then you reduce God. Read the Word, brothers and sisters! It’s not out of context! It’s not a figure of speech! And it’s not just for those olden times! It’s the truth of faith! What more can be said? Words die before a truth like that.”
She was answering for and undoing Eve. She was inside belief. She was moving and acting, doubtless and clean. Alive in the music and the spirit unseen, she felt in her bones the truth of the thing. The thing was above the lie of the world, a haven from evil and its anti-Word words. The cool skid of the snakes’ scales on her skin was defied, unafraid, by His power within her. Draped, adorned, by the visible part of the Devil, she danced in the sign with a blithe haughty aspersion of evil’s paltry shade. She felt the worldly siege on her senses cease and slip into days that were passed and trampled as she skipped toward the Kingdom in a lively glide, a gleeful jig awhirl with the Spirit. Her shoulders took on others of the serpentine Devil’s brothers but felt no increase in weight. They were a writhing jumbled shawl, insignificant as a scarf of air, even with its tangled cords making occasional stupid lunges with their dumb open mouths, the taps of their poor excuses for attack having less effect than the touch of a landing fly. The strength of the voice that spoke her body overrode with glorious volume the niggling buzz of the pitiful pinprick responses of the serpents as they pumped in instructions to guide her nerves to revolt. Pain was a problem of the flesh she’d ascended beyond sight of. The flesh was a world-weight she’d slipped free of. The world was a wait for reward in the form of pure love. She was nothing but what she was doing, in faith and triumph over fear and torment.
In her mind she was able to summon all the furious detail of the Rubens horror in oil paint, The Head of Medusa, housed in the Kunsthistoriches Museum of Vienna. Medusa’s head was rendered in the pale stone-hued flesh of Rubens’ usual brush, somehow both meaty and hard, like a statue slain, the decapitated head’s eyes still fresh with the horror of being severed from the body as the lips sicken to slate and the snakes escape in a slithery riot. She remembered how the sharpness of the reptilian detail was at once more realistic than the dead head, but somehow false in its textbook precision, compared to the ghastly passion in Medusa’s unnaturally bulging eyes, goopy throatspill of blood and gore, and the odious pallor of flesh sapped of life. The snakes seemed painted by a different artist, but perhaps their very shapes, colors, and character are such, essentially, that all one can do is render their cold appearance, without the embarrassed flush that spirit and soul may work on anything systematic, whether it be painting or seeing or thinking. She remembered seeing Punkin take them up the first time, and how the serpents struck her almost as parody-creatures, limbless and struggling against their peculiar handicapped bodies in queer movement, lacking the sensible tread of mammals, the fantastic grace of birds, or even the adroit creep of insects. Snakes seemed somehow fake.
This falseness of the serpent and how it lends itself to the fiction of stylization was thick in other examples she called to mind, one at a time like a slide show, beginning with the Aztec taming of the sinewy snake, elevated to godhood by imposing the square upon it. Harsh angles and rectangular symmetric substance emboldened their statues of Quetzlcoatl and Coatlicue, both bound and liberated by the sharpness of geometry into deities that embodied wholly the contrary possibilities within form itself, the prospect of being. How bravely misguided Quetzlcoatl seemed in both his statue’s poor form and in his sad afternoon seat in her memory at the Museo Missionario-Etnologico at the Vatican, with its mopwater smell and self-important security gaurds, appendages of a religious bureaucracy just as false as snakes, but multi-headed like the Hindu snake-god Vusaki of the 1,000 mouths that will one day belch forth the poison that shall burn up creation; or Ladon of Greek myth, having only 100 heads but each speaking a different language. He was the guardian of Hera’s golden apples: the object of Hercules’ penultimate task. The serpent seemed to wind its way into every culture’s dreams and delusions, emerging like the Vision Serpents of the Mayas, which would rear up dripping crimson from the entrails of a blood sacrifice, sometimes spouting prophesies, sometimes regurgitating the fetal forms of new gods, adding to the demon pantheon of a pagan people. The Australian Aboriginals call the very creation The Dreaming, during which the rainbow serpent Ngalyod emerged, his movements carving valleys and waterways, and whose gift to humans was circulation and menstruation, and who is seen to live on in the rainbow, as is African Aido-Hwedo, often shown devouring his own tail, whose name means “you are both in the earth and the sky,” and who symbolizes the living qualities of everything flexible, sinuous, and moist, such as smoke, the umbilical cord, and nerves.
How freeing it was to flout the serpent’s lengthy hold on human fear and hope, to defy its incarnation as the very creator of man, as woven in colorful Chinese tapestries depicting Nu Wa molding the first people with her wriggling through mud, or to dismiss its incarnation as an evil lord like Egyptian Apophis, representing darkness, struggling eternally against the sun. Did any other creature find itself so widely given the confidence of gods, or bestowed with such lasting symbolic potency as the caduceus twin-snaked staff held by Asklepius, god of medicine? Or the Celtic deity Cernunnos whose bas-relief tableaus have him holding the limbless creatures that somehow stood for both death and birth? These worlds of pseudo-meaning, these flat past lives, gave a gravity to her gleeful handling of their slithery vessels by virtue of their very irrelevance. It was empowering to join these people in the shrugging off of centuries darkened by the serpent’s demented pretense, its ambitious phantasm shams of glory. The others probably didn’t appreciate the historical power in their defiance of the visible part of the Devil, but this did nothing to dilute their fervor. They were like baby Hercules who slayed, bare-handed, two serpents when he was only eight months old (perhaps as practice for Ladon, later), joyously dismissive of their danger.
Suddenly she was less alone in herself, newly aware and ecstatic in the communion of the room alive with dancing and leaping, testifying and talking Truth with mouths claimed by the Holy Spirit for utterances unspeakably real and untouchable by tongues numbed by the dull idioms of envy, gossip, commerce, sex, fashion, labor, ego, or even emotion. They were all souls in fusion.
These other bodies were wholly animated by the Spirit sharing hers. A few old men were clapping time and testing their worn voices against the challenge of heartfelt praise. A few women’s arms were in the air above faces in rapture with closed eyes and open, awe-silenced mouths. Children skipped about in the pews, except for one who approached the front bouncing on one foot before the pulpit, reaching up and ready to share in faith’s power.
As she watched the wide-eyed girl hopping in prayerful panic and stretching her arms up in beseechful hope for her own miracle, the woman in the expensive black dress was moved with a spirit that was not generosity (that would make the Spirit something hers to give), but was emboldened by the simple brutal glee of the hungry little soul before her. The only appropriate move within the Spirit was to select one of the smaller serpents and sling it into the sphere of the child’s eager faith. It landed over one shoulder, and its spindly cursed body was grasped by the tiny but strong left hand of the little girl, who then bore the reptile aloft, its tail tickling at her elbow, its thin smile struggling to level itself eye-to-eye with the cherubic face whose mouth poured forth with abandon an American jump-rope song, while she switched her hopping from one foot to another.
A man’s thick hairy forearm suddenly shot into action, snatching with rough animal force the child’s frail wrist. The little girl was torn from her reverie, kidnapped from whatever vision she’d been blessed with in the anointing, as the intruder dragger her into the faithless space of fear and doubt. With an elegant arc and fall, the serpent spotted his moment. Thus unstayed, he lodged two fangs in the girl’s cheek and worked his evil juice into her before being ripped free by the manly hand who’d caused the injury. Blood streamed from the girl’s face. She looked up, unaware of how her expression was given vivid punctuation with bold red drips, and said “My name’s Christy!” before she was hauled away by the brother who’d grabbed her. The band stopped. People were shouting in unspiritual tones and textures. Somebody let the Devil in.
She turned to the rear of the room and saw it. Four men wearing local police uniforms and wielding firearms had entered, moving up the aisle. Punkin attempted to slow their progress, showing open hands and a wish to move action toward discussion. He was quickly wrestled to the floor, face down, and handcuffed. His cheek was mashed against the pale green carpet, distorting his features but still allowing her to see, despite the force of an officer’s knee on his head, his fear, his troubled insides, not for his own sake, but for her, the woman staring back, her body dangling with attached snakes, angry and exacting their own in-built liquid revenge.
One of the lawmen recited a passage with an affected gravity, as if it were gospel: “Code thirty-nine, section twenty-two zero eight states that it shall be unlawful for any person or persons to display, exhibit, handle, or use any poisonous or dangerous snake or reptile in such a manner as to endanger the life or health of any person. Any person violating the provisions of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and punished by a fine not less than fifty dollars nor more than one hundred and fifty dollars, or by confinement in jail not exceeding six months, or by both such fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.”
She answered back, with all the resonance she could summon: “Mark Sixteen. Verses seventeen and eighteen. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast aside devils; They shall speak in tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing,” but before she could continue she was interrupted by a man and woman from among the believers. The man detached the snakes and began stuffing them into the dynamite box next to the pulpit. The woman was correcting her: “No, hon, it’s ‘they shall cast out devils,’ not aside. And it’s ‘they shall speak in new tongues’.”
By this time, Punkin had been removed from the room, and suddenly it and everything seemed much, much more empty, and emptiness’ blackness spun and swelled to insinuate its swirls through every shape in the space around her, grasping her apprehension of it, taking her mind wholly into it, spotted only by little pinpricks of light like distant stars as she swooned and was guided by sudden hands of help to a stillness on the pale green carpet of The Jesus Christ And Almighty Father Church Of Holiness And Signs Following.
Her vision clung to these stars, and began to become familiar with them, or at least half of them. The leftward half of the celestial sphere was blocked by the aged planks of a roof jutting over a wide porch upon which she lay, looking up at half a sky of stars. Female voices near her spoke quietly, and almost seemed related to the slight recurring breezes, cool and mellow.
“No. She insisted on no docs or hospitals. Anyway, we knew you and Campbell were working on this for some time. We knew the test was coming.”
“First of all, Mrs. Whatley, it wasn’t me and Campbell. It was just him doin’ his job. Knowin’ the law is Campbell’s job, and he warned Quint about it, and Quint shoulda warned Punkin. The law is the law, Mrs. Whatley, and it’s there for protection.”
“You know you can call me Blaire. Been doin’ it for years. I don’t know why you’re tryin’ to take some official tone with me, but you don’t know Quint well enough to call him like that.”
“OK, Blaire, You know that Quintillian knew this was a long time comin’. Campbell gave’em fair warning. And the law’s the law. Have whatever crazy beliefs you like, but you can’t be recklessly putting people in endangerment.”
She wondered which stars had died, had already given up their light, but whose darkness hadn’t reached eyes on Earth yet. She knew that the twinkling of more distant stars was often very old light, aged through the incomprehensibly vast space that gave a humbled pace to even the speed of light. Given the awesome sprawl of the cosmos, what could matter about the tiny biology of torture occurring within her, nerves and veins sizzling like short-circuited coils of flimsy filament? She concentrated on the gleaming distances scattered across the section of night’s firmament that she could see beyond the edge of the wide worn porch roof. She thought she spied the constellation Draco, connecting the shining points of its own parts in imaginary continuity through the bluish blackness of space.
“I wonder how much that dress cost.” Said a new woman’s voice, in whisper.
“Hush. She’s awake.”
“I know. I just think it’s real nice. I never had a dress that was all black.”
“Funny thing to wear to church.”
“Don’t judge.”
“She needs a hospital.”
“She’s been through it. She has faith. We need to respect that.”
“You people are crazy. You know that, dontcha? All y’all belong behind bars.”
“You think she’d let me borrow it?”
“What?”
“Well, I’d have to reduce a little first, to fit it right. But maybe….”
“What’s her name, and how do you know she ain’t a journalist or something?”
“I forgot her name, and just lookit. If she’s doing what she’s doing for a job, then that’s just a side fact.”
She could not recall her own name. She couldn’t even find the right way to ask herself or the right place to search; efforts both ways seemed to distance the answer by their own alien positioning power, but it didn’t seem wrong. It only seemed awkward. Her mind carried on with its other memories and her pain and awe, leaving her name behind. It slipped away, unmoored from its referent, except perhaps for the millions of other women who claimed it. Something quickly sickened her about this, about the weakness of names and their thin ghosts of sound. The sense of sound’s subtle but serious flaw strung itself throughout the conversation she overheard beneath the beaten eave that blocked half the stars.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was strung out on drugs.”
This unidentifiable voice sounded similar to her old friend Athena’s, recalled from endless café conversations while blinking the residue of thick Milano smog collecting on her contact lenses. The similarity was not there in any general way, like an accent of area. It was the fall of their R’s; a clumsy half-trill; a fouled D; a numb tongue-tip lazily lost between Delta and Theta. Athena’s blasé banter visited her imagination and joined the conversation, complete with midsentence pauses for the demands of smoking, while the stars throbbed in fear of the approaching moon.
“Oh. You are too much…. Those, I mean.” (the bitemarks on her arm) “Delicious. Elegant and intimidating. Beautifully insane.”
“I wonder if I could let the seam out a little bit. Up here, on my arms? I wonder if it’d do that. No, it’d be better to try to take a pattern from it. Katie can do that, can’t she?”
“Katie is trying to get Punkin out of jail. You people are lucky you aren’t all there. Ya’ll make us all look like a bunch of crazy hillbillies.”
“She didn’t bleed really. Anyone notice that?”
“Darling, I can see the fascination…. Really…. But these return trips. The repetition makes it something morbid, neurotic.” Athena’s voice wasn’t as clear as the others, but her face was immeasurably sharper. “Don’t misunderstand me: morbid is gorgeous on you. Neurotic is merely… Neurotic.”
“She’s so pretty. I wonder what it’s like to look like that all the time. Even like that.”
“Yeah. That’s how you wanna look. Your arm swolled up like a club and a face with no blood in it. If she passes on, it’s on your hands.”
“My sweet moon sister, if it were possible to go to America and find the truth…. You needn’t bother. If it is there, it will soon wash up on our shores, neatly pre-packaged.” She could imagine the sloppy curls of smoke around Athena’s nose as she compulsively let wisps escape in a slow creep from her lips before inhaling.
“Pretty or what. Vanity will do you in, thinkin’ after whatcha ain’t got. You’d best just settle on your own matters.”
“And where’s her husband or boyfriend or ‘lover’ or what? Who’d let a girl like her off to be crazy with y’all?”
“It’s hard to believe she doesn’t have a fella.”
“She almost seems too good for that, for messin’ around with all that.”
“If I wanted to endanger my life by going to a place with too much space and no culture…. I’d take a boat to Antarctica.”
She could see the heat radiating from the planet, emanating a waviness into the black air of the night sky, its curves tickling the stars into twinkling distortion accompanied by a distant crunchy series of sounds, like a Morse telegraph of intermittent static. The bursts of static reminded her of a photograph she had seen: rows of gigantic curved dishes pointed at the sky, listening to the stars.
“Too good for that? Good Lord, girl, get a hold of yourself. Listen to you. If folks would just sometimes stop and think about what the hell you’re really saying, what you’re doing, the county wouldn’t be hauling your people off to jail. Too bad they ain’t got classes in there on how to think straight.”
“What folks call thinkin’ straight is sometimes just straight lies, flat out.”
“We should get her some water, maybe see if she can drink it?”
The gravelly bursts of distant sound increased in volume and tempo, grinding nearer and nearer, unremarked by the voices.
“You see so many women like her on the magazines and such. I bet not many’s trying to live for God. Not many like her.”
“God or not, some people just ain’t right in the mind.”
The approaching crunch of steps became banging stomps on the porch’s floorboards. An excited voice joined the others.
“There she is! I knew Punkin might know where she was, but they wouldn’t let me talk to him. I was able to understand her in the tongues!”
“I’m getting out of here. You people. It’s unbelievable. That woman should be in jail. She threw a snake at a little girl! Why can’t y’all just go to church on Sunday, listen quietly, and go home and live your life like regular people? I’m getting out of here.”
“G’wan then…. She spoke in tongues and you heard the translating?”
“Yes!” The soft impact of knees landing on the porch’s wooden surface vibrated through her back and arms. She felt a face’s breath near hers, hands clasping her aching limbs.
“The first part of what she said in tongues, and I heard her, in the anointing it was like Proverbs because I told it to Rita, and she wrote it, and Rita saw that the first part is from Proverbs but we didn’t know what the rest is. We couldn’t say.”
“What did she say?”
“Hold on. She said, For the lips of a strange woman drop as from a honey comb, and her mouth is slick as oil: but her end is bitter as absinthe, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell. Susan Sontag did not invent the black turtleneck, but the night was painted by Dawn Powell.”
“Praise the Lord.”
“Praise him. Praise his name.”
“Is one of those her name?”
“Hush. Praise the Lord.”
”Wait, what is her name?”
“Praise him. Praise his name.”
You need to log in to urbis or create an urbis account to review this writing.
Reviews
Sort Reviews by Newest | Oldest | Highest Quality | Lowest Quality | Newest Comments |
Goatfish1 reviewed Version 1 -
Read 100% of the Item
I stand and clap. Wonderful! Engrossing. I cannot say anything except what I loved about this beautiful prose. It made me wistful for the New Yorker of decades past. Still clapping. wow.
I almost skipped past this gem, my finger ready at the words ‘variae lectionarum’ but I read through the paragraph and my finger strayed from the mouse and my eyes locked to the screen. This was a reading experience and I am enriched for having read it. This is writing. This is what writers try to eke out of their souls. Marvelous!
To keep this short, I’ll list only a few sections from the many I loved.
Page 6 of 21 – “Everyone has heard God speak. I don’t think you can spend much time on his Earth and not have him show you something, awesome or small, and say to you I am in this.”
Still clapping.
Page 7 of 21 – “It’s easier to laugh at someone than it is to ask why you laugh. ” This is only a small section of the many great pieces of dialogue delivered by Punkin. His voice was distinctive and character defining.
Page 8 of 21 - ”“I love the way you talk. You take all the words like they’re new and put’em right in the places like it’s the first time they’ve been there.”
Standing on my chair clapping!
Punkin’s words almost convinced me to wrap a few serpents around my neck. I don’t have the words to describe to you the joy of reading what you have written. Not only the storyline, but your writing skill is remarkable.
Page 13 of 21 – “They were all souls in fusion.” Love this.
I could go on but I don’t want to get too lengthy. I noticed a few typos. I was so involved in the story that I wasn’t watching for them but there were a few I stumbled on:
Page 5 of 20: “barely audible over the static on her cel phone” s/b cell
Page 11 of 20 – “with its mopwater smell and self-important security gaurds” s/b guards
Page 14 of 20 - ”as the intruder dragger her into the faithless space of fear” s/b dragged
My favorite section overall was the cerebral journey through the serpents’ past. This story had depth, was insightful, and touching.
I wish I had the knowledge to give you the review worthy of your writing, but I can tell you my thoughts as a reader.
Still clapping. Loved it.
- add/view comments (2)
crlepley reviewed Version 1 -
Read 100%% of the Item
this story was very interesting and made me think. i liked the different views. it was sort reflective…. which i liked. the ending really completed it. this story resonated in my mind and thats what i think is its biggest quality. it was unique and worth the read. thank you.
be reviewed Version 1 -
Read 100%% of the Item
Interesting combination of a European educated person’s thoughts with this idea of the deep South culture.
It is a joy to get some philosophy and searching for reason and God presented in a visceral story like this.
I understand you were working on this this accent for Punkin, (I’ve family in the Ozarks) but I tripped over a couple lines. It felt like you removed or edited something in these two lines and/or the tense is wrong or there might be a word missing.
1. “Most people agree that when you get it, when you take the faith, that it doesn’t nothing to do with reasonable and rational.
2. Most of the times it’s no things you can see or know like normal. But the serpent..
Over all, really a finely crafted work. Incredible details describing how individual people and places smell.
I found I had to look up a few things as I was reading this. But, I like that. We are living in the post information age after all. Where there is so much, too much to know, so that many kids have given up and gone knumb on us. It is refreshing to find I might have to open a tab and go learn something at wiki-pedia or google to get a joke :-)
writingwriter reviewed Version 1 -
Read 100%% of the Item
This is a well developed story, I like your use of sticatto sentences and the Latin. Overall a great read!
RaifeQuaid reviewed Version 1 -
Read 100%% of the Item
As much as I don’t care for religious prose, this was extremely well written and had me drawn in. I couldn’t stop reading it. The details area exceedingly vivid and the manner of prose is delightful. The only problem I have is if the woman who was bitten ever woke up? And also, what ever became of the little girl who was bitten? Either way, excellent job, I hope to read more of your work soon.
LCDobbs reviewed Version 1 -
Read 100%% of the Item
Great description, great pacing and excellent characters. Keep it up and write some more.
Showing 1 - 6 of 6
Review item
Add to favesCreator
Relevant Links
Item Stats
GENERAL
6 Reviews 3 Comments
Version 1
Latest Activity: about 1 year ago
REVIEW QUEUE
Appeared in Queue: 14 Times
Skipped: 0 Times
Ratings & Rankings
