neighborhood watch

Chapter 1: glocks and virtual puppies

   
December 26, 2008, 3: 00 p.m.

A sex offender is scheduled to move into the house next to mine. We received a flyer warning us about this impending change yesterday. The flyer was jammed into the space between the front door handle and frame. At the top it said: "Florida Department of Law Enforcement – Sexual Offender/Predator Flyer."

I saw a housekeeper leave from the side door this morning when my husband got back from doing errands. She looked like a regular housekeeper, not a sex offender housekeeper. I told my husband this, rather dryly, and he kissed my cheek and said that there was a car in the driveway but it didn't look like a sex offender car either. I gave him the deadest stare I could manage, the deadpan to what could possibly be his humor but which I am afraid is, more likely, his good and compassionate nature even toward sex offending neighbors.

We have a child and so, I am temporarily relieved to learn that the car he spied in the driveway does not belong to one who preys on children. It is Christmas and sex offenders are leaking through the cracks of good society, even living in neighborhoods where houses are $500,000 and up.

That afternoon, I try to read a collection of Christmas stories I used to find amusing. I stop at the story about a poor Irish boy who is disappointed that he only gets a book in his stocking and that his father is a drunk. My ability to engage in fictions about others' misfortuntes has been stripped away by my awareness of our actual proximity to violence. I find myself wondering what the sex offender will do this afternoon, what life will be from his perspective over the next couple of days.

Does a sex offender, fresh from his offenses, move to a neighborhood to get a break? Does he just want to close his shutters and sit alone in his barely furnished house, the floors newly polished by the housekeeper, the shadows of what he has done moving along in the corners of his empty rooms, silent as long as he ignores them? The flyer announcing his arrival gave his weight, provided a picture. He has a big neck, no hair. He appears to be someone who would lumber as he walks. And for some reason, I picture him with a wife, but I don't know why. And how is it that one begins molesting children? Was he dissatisfied with his wife? Was she dissatisfied with him? Did they stop having sex? He is not attractive.

My husband and son eat the lunch they picked up at our favorite Tex-Mex restaurant. I can't eat. It is the day after Christmas and my husband and child are going on a campout. They have just picked up a four-man tent for sale, a post-Christmas Black Friday sale. My husband has borrowed a glock from my brother-in-law, something I made him do because there are wild boars, coyotes, bears, and wintering murderers – regular snowbirds - hiding out in the Florida woods. He got the gun from my brother-in-law Christmas day while we were with family. When I opened our car door after having exchanged niceties with the society people my family pride themselves to be, there was a black case on the passenger seat and I didn't recognize it even though I had practically ordered its requisition. I felt out of place, like we were stepping into another era of our lives, or a stepping away from our lives, a falling off.

As we were getting into the car, my husband made shushing noises in case I said something about the gun. My son climbed into the backseat with his hand held video game of virtual puppies, a present he got in place of a gerbil. My husband is not quite ready to tell my son about the gun yet and he stows the heavy polymer case under his seat. When we got home on Christmas day with all of our presents and the glock, I sat on the couch in our study decorated with a hunting dog holding a pheasant and French toile curtains and learned how to fill the magazine and how to hold the gun and to aim, though I did this while it remained unloaded.

And then we read the flyer, and then we slept last night, Lord knows how, though I can only speak for myself on this one. My husband only loses sleep over our marital problems or troubles at work, not over our neighbors, who were unpleasant even before. Yes, we had other neighbors who scared everyone with their long shouting matches that somehow projected themselves out into the neighborhood. A friend of mine said she heard an argument when she was at the pool with her children, more than half a block away. We think, perhaps, the sex offender is related. Our previous neighbors left a rubber plant on their patio which my mother, visiting from out of town, thought was glorious, given how large it was. It always struck me as obscene something overly aggressive, masculine and fleshy.

But my impressions are probably shaded by memories of the former neighbors screaming at one another, their curses penetrating our walls, the late night sound of the buzz saw and my fertile imaginings of what kind of shop he had built in his garage, the hammering at midnight and my husband's going over at my pleading to ask him to stop. When our neighbor came to our house to ask me about something one day - I can't remember what it was now - his pupils were piercing pinpricks. I knew little about drugs, but if I were to pick out the eyes of a user, I may describe something like what I saw in him, his vacant skittery almost colorless irises.

When I told my husband about his visit and my certainty that he was stoned, he said the man was just a man who was disappointed in life and it almost felt as if my husband were describing himself. This conversation took place between us about the time when my engagement ring was indefinitely sequestered at the jeweler's. I had it removed because it was cutting off the circulation in my finger but I could not bring myself, at that point, to make a decision about it either, if the next version of it should look just the same. I just knew I wanted it off.

Chapter 2: A dangerous book for boys


December 26, evening

I walk the dog. I now feel less safe than my husband and son are where wild alligators and panthers and boars roam freely and sometimes attack. I notice my neighbor's porch light is on but there are no lights on inside and there is no car in the driveway. Still, I wish I had kept the glock. My husband has a nature that makes me feel safe all the time and that makes anyplace he is home. I do not have that talent, and know it. My son asks for my husband the minute I pick him up from school and asks throughout the afternoon while my husband is finishing cases at the hospital.

I am not jealous of this, somehow. I know that we each give him something he needs. I am the parent he calls for at bedtime. I sing him songs I have sung to him since he was a baby. I make sure he hugs me and I say something reassuring to him, that I love him, that I am proud of him, and sometimes, that he is the best thing I've ever done in my life. When the ring was at the jewelers and my husband and I were fighting like curs, I could almost never said the last thing without a catch in my voice. But things have worked out. The diamonds were reset in a white gold band that is more comfortable for my hand and my husband presented the new rings to me for Christmas. I think this is how my son can happily sit up in a tent and read from a book, an activity he has seldom pursued at home. Things are better now.

My husband called from their campout. He thinks he left the gas stove at home and wants me to look around to confirm this. He can't find it in the backback or the car. He wanted to do a "real campout" with my son and he sounds deflated. I cannot find the stove at home, but we talk through his options, including rigging the coathangers from a tree from which he will dangle the cooking pot and over a fire beneath. Given my husband's reluctance to try something that might not work as the darkness advances, he decides he should make use of the cabin on the hunting grounds.

He seems happier, as if he needed my endorsement of this sub-purist arrangement. I speak to my son who is ten and he is excited about the reconstituted beef stroganoff and double chocolate cheesecake he is about to eat. He has been sitting up in the new four person tent with a flashlight reading a book he got for Christmas: A Dangerous Book for Boys. He tells me in the voice that is still young and sweet that he is learning how to make go-carts and rockets and guns. The transformation is complete, then. They have done something that is "all boy/all man."

I watch a movie about a man who tries to get a new start in life after having been in prison. As a young boy, he was complicit in the murder of a girl. After his release, he is hunted by the slain child's relatives. They are not satisfied.

On Christmas Eve I watched a movie about a kid who gets in trouble in school and has to survive three months' house arrest and who, because of his boredom, makes an unwelcome discovery: His neighbor is a serial killer. I felt church-resistant that night and we sat and watched movies instead. I couldn't bear the hustle and bustle of trying to get ready for church, trying to look nice, find a parking place, deal with locating a seat. There is so much that feels contrived, the necessary niceties, the forced joviality.

At one o'clock, I nudge my arthritic dog up the stairs and go to bed. I am tossing and turning, I know it. I have had too much pizza and the bed never feels as restful without my husband. I drift to sleep and am occasionally awakened. Is that a noise on the stairs? Did something scratch at my window? But my bedroom is on the second story and nothing but insects would be able to gain purchase on the clapboard exterior.

Chapter 3: Pink stroller alert

December 27, 2008 8:00 a.m.

I think I hear pounding at the door while I am still in bed, but it is understandable that I should imagine this sound, as sometimes my husband leaves his deadbolt key at home and I've been wakened, after he leaves early to buy us coffee, by his pounding at the door, often followed by a call from his cell phone that he has been locked out. I stop to listen and there is no more pounding and no one calls. I remember the porch light at the sex offender's house the night before. I look out of my bedroom window to see if I detect any movement or the presence of any new items other than the rubber plant. Nothing. I imagine what it will be like the first time I see a light on inside.

I slip on my jeans from the night before and one of the many shirts draped over the back of the antique chair beside the bed. My dog needs to be coaxed back down the stairs. On our morning walk I think about Jesus' lesson about the good Samaritan and his answer to the wise young man's question: "But who is our neighbor?" Surely Jesus was not asking anyone to be overly solicitous to child molesters. I have a good answer for Jesus: People who harm children like that should have a millstone tied around their necks and drowned. He did say something about using the millstone drowning as punishment for misleading children. Perhaps he would apply this to child molestors. I can't imagine why Jesus would bother to hairsplit.

I want a gun. I have been thinking about this long before borrowing the glock. I have imagined a hole I will have someone carve in the drywall right beside my side of the bed, a hole for the gun with a secret door so my son will not find it. Upon entry into our bedroom, an intruder will be shot on sight, by me, my hands clasped around the revolver which is small enough to fit into a purse. They say you just as readily end up shooting the ones you love by accident as anyone who is intruding, but I don't believe them. This is just propaganda to keep women from getting guns.

I make a full pot of coffee and sit down to my computer. My tasks are big today: a book review whose deadline is fast approaching covering a work that does not easily lend itself to facile analysis; a story whose ending I inadvertently shortcutted by resorting to magical realism; a children's story as per my son's request, a story about an evil wizard named Joe who encounters a good wizard named Bob and is redeemed by this encounter. I sit down to my dining room table where I write, a table given me by my mother. It is French country and cluttered with Christmas decorations and Christmas plates, but from here I have a view of the street and a partial view of my neighbor's house.

I sit down and read over what I have written for the review. Through the open window, I spy an older man walking by on the sidewalk across the street, pushing a bright pink stroller. I stand up, almost hopefully, to look out of the window of the front door. Is this my man? Is this my neighbor? He is stooped slightly, the way I imagined the man to be and walks with a slow gait for his legs are heavy and perhaps arthritic. The incongruency of the bright pink stroller is an alert of sorts, but there are several elderly and middle aged people as well whom I sometimes see pushing their lap dogs in these things as if they were babies.

Beside the stroller trot dogs with brown hair hangs down from their tiny bodies. Both are outfitted with decorative collars. The man sits down to rest on a bench under the large oak tree. The bench faces the waterway that divides houses from offices.

In a few minutes the man will stand up. Will he process down the slope of the sidewalk and cross the street to the house next door? Will he take his place as the neighborhood sex offender? He stands and continues around the waterway with the pink stroller and the dogs. I am disappointed. He was old and doty and I do not think it would be hard to handle him. I recheck the description on the flyer: 5'8", 260 lbs, 3/6/1960. I am a large woman and not intimidated by size, but the birthdate worries me, close enough to my own to mean he could be young enough still, young enough for the creative, energetic juices necessary for crime, for violence.

My husband and child just called. They made it through the night camping out in their woods. They are going to do some target practice with the glock.

  
Chapter 4: Christmas hangover

  
December 28, 2008, 10:00 p.m.

They have returned and I listen to the stories. As it turns out, there was only a microwave in the cabin at the hunt club, and it was still in the box and on the floor somewhere. The property is owned by a few guys, and they do almost nothing there other than call turkeys in the spring and shoot unsuspecting deer who feed at designated locations.

My husband and child cook the camping food with the gas burner they left behind on their over-night. They use the aluminum cooking kit they purchased at the camping store, unfolding it and screwing in the handles, placing it over the tiny blue flame.

If it would have been me, I would have at least heated the water in the microwave. I would not have waited fifteen minutes for a little gas burner to get a pot of water boiling. But my husband believes in following through and my son looks on in fascination as the tiny bubbles form. When it boils, his father will help him pour the hot water into a tin bowl that contains the dehydrated meal.

And maybe that's why I can imagine a world where people are not so generous while my husband still imagines a very pure place where most people, if given the chance, would behave in the way that would do the most justice to their best intentions. No one is beyond redemption in his worldview, where in mine, most of us have been doomed since birth.

December 29, 2008, 9:30 a.m.

Nothing, nothing still. I am beginning to get comfortable again. I am the most relaxed I have been since getting the child molester flyer and I no longer think about moving away from this house and/or getting a gun. I'm a little bit depressed, as a matter of fact, as if I worked myself up for nothing.

As I sit here at what was once my mother's dining table, I see the man with the pink stroller walk by again. His dogs are going ballistic and I stand up to see what's going on. A woman is passing on the opposite side of the street holding the leashes of several dogs and the man's little brown dogs are squeaking and trembling with unabated enthusiasm.

I have begun the wizard story, the one I will write for my son. I am working on the review. I am skipping church, again, though I have promised myself and promised my husband that tonight I will attend communion. All is dull and flat and worn.


Chapter 4: The leveling effects of the flesh

January 5, 2009, 8:47 a.m.

My husband has not taken the glock back to my brother-in-law. Now it seems no more threatening than the cups of pencils and the stationary organizer. The high excitement of the beginning is frazzling out into nothing. The two galvanizing objects of this narrative diary – a sex offender and a gun – will soon turn to red herrings, or worse, cheap ploys, if I do not begin a far-fetched invention. I have cut myself off from book discussion chat rooms and chat rooms in which fellow writers talk about what they're writing. This is so I can figure out what to do. I had counted on my neighbor to follow through so I'd have something to write about.

I saw a black garden hose curled up by the sex offender's garage when we were coming back from a party a few nights ago. That's a new hose, I said to my husband. No it's not, he said. He is growing tired of my observations. I had not seen the hose there before, I could swear by it. Why had I not noticed it, ever?

I wonder if the man is hiding someone deep in the house. The blinds remain shut. There are no lights on at night. Somehow it would be worse not to see him than see him full out, in his sex offender clothes, which likely would be clothes for warm weather since it is often warm here, even at Christmas. It is hard to look ominous or mysterious in clothes suited for Florida, especially if you are a white person. You are too revealed in your weather-appropriate clothes and there you are in your bulges and whiteness and if you're fat, like myself and my sex offending neighbor, you can look either one of two ways: angry or foolish, or both in alternating succession, and sometimes you get angry because you know you look foolish. If I could see him in his foolish clothes with his foolish, white body, a body not too dissimilar than my own in its heft and volume although probably dissimilar in its weight distribution, I could at least know that his body in its sad flesh had somehow become a source of disappointment and this would be something I could relate to. A way out of my fear.

When they cut my wedding rings off at the jewelers, I cried. I didn't know why I cried. Was it because my finger was literally in jeapordy as the tiny saw spun mere millimeters from my bulging flesh? Was it because it had quite simply come to this: My denial about my body was at an end? Was it because for the first time I was having severe doubts about my marriage? Was it that I never wanted a wedding band on my finger again? Was it that my finger was misshapen like those National Geographic photos of women who have disfigured themselves with tribal jewelry and the jeweler had to instruct me how to treat my finger over the weeks ahead, plunging it into ice, rubbing it, praying I had not done permanent damage?

How is it that a man becomes a sex offender? How is it that one's life comes to this? How is it that denial is so deep and the conscience so tucked away that someone gains pleasure from hurting an innocent? It is not about hurt then, it is about selfish desire, perhaps. It is about a desire as thoughtless and compulsive as eating a bag of chips, a package of cookies, half a pizza. Is that what it is, then?

My man with the pink stroller does not disappoint. He walks by as I am writing all of this. He looks sprightly and happier than usual, more handsome. The difference – it is obvious – is the presence of his wife. She strides out in front of him, her short cropped hair bouncing, her confident strides carrying her neat compact body down the sidewalk. My man wears a cap and an expensive looking black golf shirt and his gait is easier.

After they pass, a cardinal perches in my silk poinsettia hanging basket. I see him from where I sit at my mother's table. I can't believe the artificial foliage in my hanging basket fool him. Maybe he simply feels the attraction to a like color, the red silk petals. He turns to the side before flying away, the crown of his head a brilliant red and his coral beak outlined in black, like the burnt edge of a wood on fire.

January 9, 2009, 2:05 p.m.

I'm finishing this writing project. I have seen no sign of a sex offender. It is possible that he closets himself away in the house all day, the shutters closed, and keeps the car in the garage. Even though we live in a neighborhood in which houses are so close we can see each others' movements when curtains are drawn apart, it has been impossible for me to verify that the rooms next door are most definitely absent of human life. It is also impossible to deny a slight irritation at the closed blinds, as tight as teeth. Why were my expectations frustrated? But even more disturbing is to wonder why I now long for the fulfillment of my fears.

My man with the pink stroller walked by this morning sans wife. She must work or volunteer during the week. He looked ordinary again, and not as handsome. The love he felt for her had transformed him on that glorious Saturday I saw the cardinal.

I will never want a gun in the house again once the glock is finally gone. Hopefully it will go out this day, along with the Christmas tree. I will also not bother to put extra curtains up as I had planned to do. I will cover my windows with what is minimally necessary to keep the sun from damaging my furniture, but I wish to look out, into the darkness, into the sunrise, into hanging plants that fool innocent birds. There is nothing extraordinary about me or my circumstances. I have no special power or distinction. The other day I recognized I might be doing my child harm by not going to church. I always knew this, but I am beginning to feel the edges of guilt. I prayed last night, after I had sung him his goodnight songs, that I would have the strength to do what is right.

neighborhood watch by Meg Sefton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

kindle happenings

A good Wednesday morning to you! I wanted to let you know if you received a certain email from Amazon saying that my account had been deactivated or my blog didn't follow the rules of something - and I wish they would separate out these things - that this is a temporary glitch to be ignored. True, I pulled out for a moment from Kindle when I was uncertain about how involvement in a short story blog will affect my ability to be published in other venues. If you will notice, the two stories currently on my blog have been published and publishing credits are duly noted and for the most part, this may be the wisest course.

But you may have received a note that read something like this. (I received this note too because of course, I subscribe to my own blog.)

"Hello from Amazon.com,

We are writing this to inform you that either the publisher for Among the Broken has stopped providing  Among the Broken to Amazon or the content of the blog no longer satisfies Amazons code of ethics and responsible publishing and therefore we are unable to deliver any further issues or updates. If you are in your 14-day free trial period, you will not be charged for your subscription. If you are past your free trial period, you will not be charged or will be refunded for the period you did not receive Among the Broken.

You can search for availability of this  publication in the Kindle store at a later time.

If you have any questions, please visit http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport or contact our Kindle customer service team at 1-866-321-8851.

Thank you for subscribing to the Kindle Edition of Among the Broken.

Best regards,
The Amazon Kindle Team

Note: this e-mail was sent from a notification-only e-mail address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply directly to this message."


So, not to worry! I'm still here!

I do things like check my Amazon ranking for Kindle products and I guess sometime after this note went out "Among the Broken" slipped precipitously from the mid 80,000s to 244,000, something like that. Sure as true "writer" I'm not supposed to pay attention to stuff like that, but I'm human. (I was so proud of myself when the blog went to 9,000 at some point among the Kindle products. Again, I'm showing my true colors here! Oh well.)

I'll be back with a story in due time.

Meg

Deborah

(First appeared in Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression, vol. 2, issue 1)
   

When Curtis walked into the library straight up to your desk and your high forehead bent over a reference slip he knew what he was getting, being a man of few illusions. He wanted help with something simple but hard and this called for straightforward zeal. To demonstrate this, he wore black jeans, t-shirt, shoes. He needed a disciple, strong and true. He was not a man who would waste his efforts on some woman who had too much to lose by loving him. He had a cross with a wheel on it that weighed one hundred pounds. Would someone follow him and wipe the sweat off of his brow and refresh him with drink while he hauled it through town? He was going out to the places where women sold their bodies. Your Filipino boss who wore the flower on her dress twitched her bottom between the stacks. You left your desk to follow Jesus. Curtis had all the fire as in days of old when your father stood from the pulpit and the power and the glory showed and a tingling went over your skin like gooseflesh, except when this preacher was done he wheeled his cross to a hotel room and kissed you like you were his water. He laid you out and you were sure. He left the cross in your room. You were pure and intact. Dreams of white drifted down. A dress like snow, a crown of flowers.

***

You were not going back to your work at the library, where the homeless talked about electricity in the air, all around. It was strange how they always used to ask you for books, out of all the librarians there, and to you they spilled out their theories about invisible charges, as if you were some kind of conduit. Maybe your father made you that way when he shot you through with the Spirit and then left you empty or maybe Jesus made you vulnerable. It was the sad people who felt the love in you. You saw them coming, down a long row of books, their clothes slipshod and soiled, eyes darting like fish. No matter how high you piled the books on your desk, they found you and then they got you into the stacks and told you, forced on you, what they believed about the material world, its qualities visible and invisible, its causes and effects, existences and essences, their voices climbing to fever pitch, until you slipped them the thunderstorm book, somewhere between 551.5 and 551.6, the cover a dark sky and lightning bolt. That quelled them as if someone had wrapped them in a restraint.


You would not go back there. The tiny librarian who wore a polyester flower on her dress every day did not know anything about how you witnessed the words of the Holy issued from your father's mouth in a church just down the street. She only knew that you didn't fill out your reference request forms neatly so that the other librarians could read them. She's worked at the library for five years and just took her first vacation last year when the library forced her to. Some of the librarians said she still came in her jeans and did some paperwork but this was hard to imagine – the jeans part, not the part about coming in during a mandatory vacation. Every day you knew her, she wore hose and vinyl pumps and dresses with different patterns on them, sometimes a suit jacket if she had a department head meeting. She stood over you some nights and made you rewrite the reference slips. When she was not looking you slipped away to look up books on the Outer Banks, where your parents retired.


How bitter you have been. How you have despised the thought of your father playing golf with your mother in North Carolina. The indentation in the carpet where he used to stand and say goodbye to his parishioners with you was occupied by someone else every Sunday, someone you had never met. When you were the golden girl, you knew the secret place where your father kept his cup, a cup he would sip out of when everyone bowed to pray, right before the sermon. You used to feel its cool smoothness when you went up to the pulpit to play preacher. Who filled it before the service? Only that person and you knew of its existence. You pretended to sip and there was nothing there. Maybe it was a foretaste of what was to come, that you would get nothing, only air and memories.


Why was it that you held onto these dreams of when you were a girl? Was it because it was the last time you remember Jesus that solidly, as solidly as your father's knobby fingers, and his brown eyes kind and soft? You used to meet the copper Jesus in the columbarium on your lunch break and look for your father's face in the burnished cheek, the hollowed out eyes. Copper Jesus stood, no lap for sitting, and the hand he extended was far smaller than your own. You sat on the stone bench in front of the place where your brother's ashes were kept and wondered how your father could be thinking of his chip shot. You grabbed a knot of flowers from the feet of Jesus and scattered them, roots and all, at the foot of your brother's remains. There was no container for the flowers and you wished he were laid out in the ground, like people used to be. Your father helped design the columbarium and you had complained about the lack of flower holders, although by then it was too late. A redesign would involve a removal of the ashes and hence all kinds of permits and procedures. Perhaps no one had complained of it but you. No wonder no one had been winking at you when they came down the aisle, as a father might his daughter, or a groomsman his bride. You were always such a complainer.

***

On the second day of your discipleship, Curtis offered his mouth to yours. His breath was milky and sweet. You were lying on your back and in the hollow of your neck he placed something metal and small: a tiny silver ring with two hands clasping. More than the promise of marriage, it was a promise that bound you to the God of his mission. He held you like a lover, like Christ loved the church, and yes, you say, yes, yes. No longer were you the golden girl holding the sweaty hand of your father, sweaty from the long exertion in the high pulpit, sweaty when he shook the hands of the parishioners in the narthex.


You called your parents to tell them the good news. Your mother seemed not to hear. She did not know Curtis, did not recognize an engagement ring without a diamond. She described for you a party on a boat where there had been fire-eaters, magicians, a four-tiered chocolate fountain into which the guests dipped cake and fruit. Your mother, you were sure, had pulled your father into this. She had leaned on him until he no longer pounded on pulpits. It's called retirement she said when you complained, when you said he had a calling to preach the Word. You and your father, she said, with your notions and your dreamy dreams, your unrealistic expectations. You reminded yourself that she had lost a child, and sometimes you excused her. In the weeks after your brother's car crashed into the tree, your mother laid her head down on the spot where your brother had been found. She collected bits of glass and looked for small things that might have flown from the car.


On the day of your wedding, Curtis wore a tuxedo and his mother came too, dressed in soft pink, and so did his father, a man with a flat top, still from Navy days. Your parents did not come. It is all done improperly, most improper, objected your mother in that small mincing way. I love you honey, said your Dad. Then your Mom made him get off the phone. All the librarians were there except the Filipino who was likely adjusting her flower, somewhere in the stacks. Ms. Filipino would never marry, you heard the librarians saying, not if Deborah manages to pull this one off and that woman is trying so hard, twitching her backside around and laughing for the good looking men, taking her glasses off for them as soon as she sees them coming. I mean, Deborah of all people, they said, that forehead and that face, not trying to look good at all and then, boom, like grace, someone whisks her away.


The minister by Lake Eola wore a white robe, just like in your dreams, with a stole of intertwining vines. After you exchanged rings, the minister laid his hands over yours and they were warm and sweaty and his exertions made this more than his blessing on the marriage, but a testimony. Jane, the children's librarian, was baptized in the lake afterwards by her own request and this was proof to the minister that the ceremony had been more than the joining of two hearts but a sign of the Holy. Everyone had cake and sparkling grape juice. You were filled up and warm and sat around talking on the amphitheater stage close by the lake, you and your colleagues never having been close until that day - and now you could call them friends - and then someone got the idea to rent the swans that were really paddle boats with a swan facade and you with your new husband, you paddled around and then when you got to the fountain, you jumped in, your white dress floating around you, your feet slipping free of your shoes and everyone jumped in and you all laughed and floated and lost your shoes as if you were ascending.

***

You took up the cross when Curtis died. Someone avenging the trade of prostitution shot him. You sat in the dim apartment you shared with him for a scant three weeks. You ate the last can of vegetables and then you took the cross to the place where your father had once breathed out the Spirit. On Sunday morning, you wheeled it by the windows so that the parishioners would look out. The cross had a squeaky wheel and was not easy to listen to. You called your parents, the last call you made before your phone service was cut. You told them what you were doing for your Lord, your husband's mission. Your mother complained that you never call early enough, always when they were in bed and yet you were beginning to see what she was about and what she was up against and you told her no matter what, you would always be her daughter. She had been trying to rid herself of you, to be free from pain.


At three months, you could not ignore the change, the cessation of cycles, your growing stomach. Your parents came and you were in their good graces again. It was painfully transparent why: You had fulfilled their desires for a grandchild, but you didn't care anymore about your principles and battles. The hormones and God made you giddy, and you made the Filipino with the flower the godmother. Why not? You knew she will do the right thing by your child. She was so thrilled, she cried and became serious and gave up her twitching. A man finally fell in love with her velvety cheek and the large dark eyes behind her glasses.



You and your parents stood by the baptismal font, along with Angelina, Phillip's godmother. On the other side of a long row of windows where you used to wheel your cross was the columbarium. After the service, you took the cup that was in its secret place behind the pulpit. When no one was looking, you filled it with water from the font, asking God's forgiveness. You poured it on the flowers at the feet of the once ineffectual copper Jesus. Small though he was, he seemed more of a comfort.



Your fire will be a cooling one and in the stone court, your brother will reside in a believer's sleep.







Deborah by Meg Sefton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.