Concerning the Prayer

  Kevin glanced around nervously, making sure he wouldn’t be overheard. “Being God, you should know who I am, so we can forgo the formalities,” he began. His own voice startled him. Damned that he should analyze it now but he felt too plaintive. This was his moment after all. “So you also know what I currently think about you. So. Here’s your chance. Here’s your big moment to change my mind. Go on. I’m open.”
  His eyes dropped to the floor. Silence was reverent without his contribution. “But you never speak, do you. That’s the problem, isn’t it? That you refuse to move a hand in this world, stop all this shit you set in motion? Catch the falling sparrow. You start knocking humanity like Dominos and then you aren’t supposed to be responsible for what your name gets applied to. And I’m supposed to accept that just because you know when the sparrow falls? Where’s the sense in that?
  “Ivy says we’re here to be interconnected. That we require it. So where does that leave me? Did you think of that before you started this? Or are some of us just decided the chamber pot from the start? Is that the question-- is it that you don’t really give a shit, or some of us are just the freaking rejects so you can grade on the curve? Some of us you can slap around, and that’s okay because you’re God and you can do that. Your ineffable plan.”
  His vision was starting to waver with ambivalent tears, struggling to keep them in, struggling to let it out, the desperation to plow ahead stronger than any addictive hunger he had ever felt. Not caring who heard him now – the world had faded away but for a scarred boy and an alabaster representation of a broken, dolorous God.
  “Our needs and wants may not amount to much in your cosmic worldview but they weren't so much to ask for from this end. At least a simple explanation of Why? Why the hell you kept me alive for THIS?! Huh?”
  He raised his eyes to look Christ in his, and a saline film revealed a detail he hadn’t noticed: Christ’s ribs were showing. And not simply that, the artist had sculpted his icon with flesh draped like ragged belts, shorn away and oozing. It was graphic, almost sacrilegious in a church. And Kevin realized his hand was reaching to the scars on his own back.

Concerning the Icon

  Up to the front resolutely, passing a scattering of the devout lighting tea candles or on their knees in abased introspection. Ahead was suspended the faded form of a man, hidden by darkness of time, of light, and men. Ahead was the form of responsibility. Here was, in icon, his destiny.
  Polished alabaster, faded, pitted, browned through time and stained by the smoke of the very sacraments of his worship, the crucifix hung over a gilded altar, haloed by a bronze corona like the Bethlehem star had exploded, shimmering in the half-light. Kevin paused before the sculpture, the flickering candles shifting the emotion of the Christ’s face as surely as it had when he’d first hung there.
  The human mind, Kevin reflected, has a curious way of glossing over the shocking, horrible moment it just beheld, burying it as if it cannot exist if it falls outside of the prosaic; you catch ghosts, and weep for reasons you’re not exactly sure of triggered by simple melodies or resonating poetry, but have to force it back into the significance it deserves.
  Maybe a lifetime of excoriation had brought him to a point of a spectator, but even now he looked at this symbol of the most horrifying event in history, an execution practice unparalleled in pain in cruelty, and was amused at its use as scenery, passed by but for pangs of angst or invocation to serenity. It was Good Friday. The one night this horror is hallowed. And here he feels alone.
  And yet, here was the pull of gravity. Here he was drawn from the vestibule’s event horizon to the very singularity where hung the Christ. It was as though every moment in his life was a raindrop spiraling down the pane, slowly gathering into this pool at the end. This is where it all stopped, regardless of the conclusion, here was the fulcrum.

Concerning the Altar

   Not sure why he scaled the steps, pitted with lagoons of water black in the absence of light. Some compulsion yearning in him to see this spiritual Bastille apart from the representation in his father. Perhaps a desire, sunken deep below, for absolution – to have revealed, one way or another, truth. Or maybe validation, the manifestation proven all he had known it was. He didn’t know, couldn’t bring himself to analyze, just watched himself walk in.
  The vestibule passed wordlessly behind, rattling of ancient radiators in the doorway unwieldy before the vastness of the sanctuary before him. Most of the hall was in shadow, spun like puppets from the candles that were tonight’s only light. Some, in clusters, had seduced patrons to kneel before them, Aim-a-Flames clutched reverently in folded hands.
  Kevin felt like an unexpected cough in a library, like any moment now God would notice he was standing there and object. He took a breath and willed himself down the worn carpet of the center aisle, fingertips brushing the chipped walnut pew arms in a ritual many before him had undertaken just as unconsciously, an anchor from the vanishing point spiraling into the presence of God.
  The altar began to melt into a shape from the gyrating shadows, and for a moment he hesitated; he was an intruder in the house of God, coming to bandy words and raise a finger as if he expected an answer. Then a chunk of memory bobbed to the surface: his father, face sclerotic as usual, jerking his arm painfully and screaming about reverence. Kevin clenched his teeth at the image. Screw it. God had a lot he should answer for.

Concerning The Church

  It’s disheartening that when you’ve made up your mind to ask a woman to run away with you, she’s not there to ask.
  The other waitress at Café du Monde had to trade days, she said, and no she had no idea where Ivy was. Neither did the phone rhythmically purring, until Kevin finally hung up in dismay.
  Not really knowing why or to where, maybe because he felt he had nowhere to really go, Kevin started walking down wet pavement and moist air, through the park full of yuppies jogging and walking dogs, and found himself, on Good Friday, as the light was fading into a dark purple bruise, outside of St. Michael's.

Concerning the Apartment

  Sounds of tenement. Somewhere in the building a wailing baby, cutting through the drone of phlegmatic ludicrousness of day-time TV talk shows. He let the door click closed, waiting on the threshold of more than a soured doormat, listening to a woman trying to hush the child, breathing in the stale must and searing Mexican spice, the actinic ammonia of cat urine, the old garbage and city air slithering through cracked windows.
  Then he took the wooden stairs, through the front door and into a another world hallowed by raindrops, and sodden leaves, and fallen insects.