Hysteric giggling preceded. “I have lived miracles?”
My faith was a joke. Jesus was insane.
Looking side to side as if taking in the artwork of the landscape, the man said, “I have not been in this garden before. I imagine it must be quite beautiful in the sun.”
Not that it was relevant, but it would be. There were fountains and flowers and little streams about, a façade to hide the ugliness of what lingered all over the grounds. “I didn’t mean to come here.”
“But here you came all the same. You cried out for home and slipped from one place to another. What does that say about you that home is at the feet of that thing?”
Ugly truth. I’d had enough ugliness for one night. “It says that I am—”
“Confused,” Jesus, still holding out a hand to me, interceded. “Young. That’s all you are. Please, I need you to take another step away from the demon.”
“Why?”
“Because you are cutting into your wrist and you don’t even feel the pain. All it would take is a few drops of you to worm his way deeper, and he possessed you long enough.” His eyes pointed down to where my hanging fingers suddenly felt warm and icy all at once. “Don’t you think?”
I was bleeding all over the grass, and not just a few drops. My nails had rounded into sharp little moonlight-white talons, and I had dug one in enough that bits of my torn muscle fibers were hanging from the corner of a claw. “Jesus!”
Tripping over my feet, that red dress, my panic, I put far more than a few steps between the head and my body—feeling a strain, almost to the point of a snap, between my mind and the mind of the monster who still played with me.
“This isn’t funny!” No scream ever would be loud enough to trumpet that. Arm mending, my blood soaking into the dirt, and I was once again the laughing stock.
Those soft eyes turned toward the head, a frown turning a compassionate countenance into one of sadness. “But still, he laughs.”
A grotesque cackle I could suddenly hear clear as a bell in my head. I could feel it on my skin. The papery dryness of a mummy possessing my body, and it tore my mind to shreds.
Hands to my ears, I screamed, “How can you stand it?”
“God is with me.” It was then I noticed the threadbare cassock. A pauper’s clothing, similar to what he wore as the old man at the wedding.
My dress was all the more garish beside it. “God has never been with me.”
“Has he not? The tree branch that broke so you could be free of the noose? The snowfall after you’d been harmed by the lecher, a dust of pure white covering your tracks so you might find your way home to safety?”
I’d had enough of men of God, of the complete lunacy around me. “Then why was I hung by a priest? Why was I raped for walking home from work?”
It was as if I finally asked the right question. The man gave a breath of relief. “So that we could have this moment in a lovely garden, enjoying the view.”
Chapter Nineteen
Pearl
Interlaced so tightly around in my grip that my fingers began to swell, the rosary grew red with my dripping blood. Cracked beads, a bent cross, the man depicted suffering upon it standing before me with his hand still outstretched.
A stranger to me, nothing like the vision I had clung to. As if he understood, as if he had witnessed this revelation more times than he could count, he crooked his fingers.
I filled them.
I filled that open palm with the lie of religion, abandoning my rosary and my blood-soaked utter stupidity in those waiting fingers.
Bead by bead, the string I used to say my prayers pooled in his palm. Red, damaged, but still beautiful. He let me look for as long as I could bear. And then, as if reading his mind, he closed his palm and tucked the last vestment of my flagging faith away.
“How can you stand living with the lie?”
He didn’t seem to mind that my blood smeared his hand and clothing. Offering an elbow as if to suggest we might take a stroll through nightmares, he said, “I tell everyone the truth. No one listens. So I speak as this man or that man. I speak as I always have. I call for compassion. But my father’s world is so unbalanced. It only reflects what he’s become. There are the good parts. There are the entertaining parts. There are the parts that love his son and his creations. And then there is the famished monster. Who eats, and eats, and kills. Who devours everything in his path all while searching for you.”
The only thing I had anchoring me to this world, the one thing that had pulled me from the crypt, I knew was too good to be true and too ugly to be anything but beautiful in my eyes. “I’m not his wife or his soul. I can barely keep up with his chaos. I wasn’t his sister or his queen in a past life. I was a waitress desperate to stay in the sun, who was afraid he would realize I needed him, that he did not need me, and that he will never really love me, considering what I am.”
Gesturing toward the path, he led me away from the head and past the scattering undead, saying, “Who are you to say what you are and what you are not?”
Excuse me? I was myself talking to a pretend demigod. Acknowledging that should have split me in
