Baby Jesus

By Jenny Hatchadorian

As we drove back from our daughter’s two-month check-up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, my husband Aaron and I were primed for an argument. Once again, the pediatrician’s message was that we were bungling things, especially in regard to our daughter’s constipation. “Pear juice hasn’t worked. She won’t drink it,” Aaron said in clipped speech.

“What if we make the bottles with more water?” I offered.

“When it seems like she has to poop, we need to hold her knees up to her belly. It will help, ergonomically. That’s how Baby Jesus designed us.”

Up until this moment, the utterance of Baby Jesus was accompanied by sarcasm, but I could tell by the coldness of his words that he wasn’t joking. Just in case, I clocked him for a smirk, but it only arrived after my second glance.

Baby Jesus first entered my lexicon when I met Aaron’s parents nine years earlier in North Carolina. In advance of the visit, Aaron mentioned his parents had become more conservative since they’d moved from Cleveland, but this didn’t concern me. I was raised by Republicans.

Compared to my fiscally conservative and socially still quite conservative parents, I found Aaron’s parents hopeful, adventurous, and open-minded. They were religious, some would say very, especially his mother who possessed the zeal of a converted Catholic, but as long Aaron and I were on the same page, their beliefs were less relevant to me.

After dinner, I grabbed my suitcase and followed Aaron upstairs. Exhausted from teaching, LaGuardia, and smiling so much my cheeks hurt, I half listened as I rolled my suitcase on the ivory carpet. “This is the frog. It stands for ‘finished room over the garage.’ It’s the only guest bedroom with a bathroom,” Aaron pointed to a large, sunken room. He walked further down the hallway and gestured to a bedroom with a twin bed and ceiling fan. “This is Denver Broncos. When we moved in, it had Bronco’s trim.”

Then he stopped at a guest bedroom next to a bathroom. “Here’s your room.” He gestured inside. “Jeanene Horses.”

For the moment, I put aside Jeanene and her horses. “My room?”

“Yeah, I’m in Broncos.” He rolled his eyes.

“But we live together.” We shared an apartment in Brooklyn, as we had in Los Angeles.

“It’s just because of Baby Jesus.”

Like Jeanene Horses, he seemed to think the phrase “Baby Jesus” communicated something to me, but it didn’t. “What does that mean?”

Aaron pulled his arms close like a T-rex, made his lips loose and gurgled like a baby. Then he stood on his toes, glared down at me, and said in a high-pitched voice, “You’re not married.” For effect, he twirled his arms and let out a high-pitched, maniacal giggle.

I pursed my lips.

“We’re not married,” he said in his normal voice and wiped drool from his lips.

“I see,” I said. As I wheeled my suitcase into Jeanene Horses, the ivory carpet muffled the sound.

On the last night of my visit, I sat next to Aaron’s mother at dinner. I knew not to discuss politics, but on a personal level she was sweet and curious. Unlike many religious people I’d met, she was open-minded and kind. Against type, she was knowledgeable and well-spoken. Even her obstinance was charming because she wore it with such confidence. Until, like any good heathen, I curled away when she let loose some disparaging comments about gay people and the doozy “I don’t think young people today feel enough shame.”

It was 2011. Shame was everywhere. There were more abortion restrictions than in the previous three decades and several states enacted the strictest voting laws since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I swallowed my rebuttal with my Brussel sprouts, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her comment.

As I ate, I weighed her comment against other family intel. Aaron’s cousin once told me a lengthy story about how she’d briefly joined the Church of Scientology. While she spoke, I tried to focus on her ability to feel a level of rapture and rhapsody I would never feel and not on the fact that Scientology rejected psychiatry, demanded a large amount of its followers’ income, and pushed an expensive list of courses called The Bridge to Total Freedom. In fact, several of Aaron’s family members were prone to spirited, irrational assumptions, but when I brought up his cousin’s involvement with Scientology, Aaron assured me he too was alarmed.

I was an atheist, raised by atheists who were overtly skeptical of organized religion. My family could be impulsive, demanding and capitalist, but we were logical. There were many lawyers among us, and we could distill any argument to a rational motivation. Throughout my life, I’d been repelled by organized religion not only because of everyone the church left out—women, gays, trans people—but also because I couldn’t bear irrational people.

In the 1990s, I grew up as the rare child of divorced parents in a heavily Catholic Cleveland suburb. In middle school, my boyfriend broke up with me because I did not attend Parish School of Religion classes. PSR classes were taught at several local churches and provided catechetical education to kids in public school, but because it was a loosely disciplined after-school activity for thirteen-year-olds, it was also a meat market. Even as a teenager, I knew it was nonsense that I was dumped over PSR. I knew religion was nonsense. Now as a filmmaker and adjunct professor in New York, my distrust of religion had grown. Essentially, I didn’t think I could spend my life with a religious person.

“That sucked what your mom said about gay people,” I whispered to Aaron during a clandestine visit to Denver Broncos.

“Oh, she just thinks they’re defying Baby Jesus,” Aaron said and dismissed my concern with a swipe of the hand.

I’d always cherished the fact that he was the black sheep of the family, but this was the second time he’d mentioned Baby Jesus. I looked at him. Were beliefs and personality innate? Even if buried during his rebellious twenties, later in life would his upbringing rear its ugly head?

He smirked at me. “You know I’m not religious at all, right?”

I dug my toe in the ivory carpet. “Were you ever?”

He shook his head like he was annoyed to answer. “Even in eighth grade, I refused Confirmation. I knew it wasn’t for me.”

In that moment as the two of us stood in Denver Broncos against the wishes of Baby Jesus, his comment was enough. We wrapped up the trip sure we were on the same side of the divide.

•••

Little changed in the next nine years of our relationship. Looking back, those were blissful years where we flouted God-fearing values, had sex for pleasure, teased heteronormative expectations, and bashed the church with abandon.

Occasionally, there were inklings of Aaron’s religious upbringing. When a performance class at our Los Angeles film school planned a visit to a Baptist church in South Central LA, Aaron refused to go. The professor thought the vocal stylings of this particular Baptist preacher were affecting, winsome, and authentic, but Aaron wouldn’t bite. “I’m not comfortable laughing at people in church,” he said.

“That’s not what the field trip is about,” I said with a half smile. I was excited to use the word “field trip” at the age of twenty-five, while at the same time I related a genuine sentiment. If anyone laughed, the alternative but deadly serious professor would have reprimanded them, but the notion of attending church for anything other than worship pulled at Aaron’s heart strings.

Concerned, I turned to my trusty astrology book. I preferred this book because it listed horoscopes not by month, but by day, and it grounded its descriptions in personality traits. As I turned to Aaron’s page, I knew this route wasn’t entirely logical, but I needed guidance and I’d rather have it from the occult than white men in robes who stood behind podiums. Unfortunately for me, spirituality was all over Aaron’s page. The meditation for his birthday, The Day of Inner Fervor, was See God in everything. Notable passages of his horoscope included Belief is an important theme in the lives of December 10 people. Devotional types, they pray at the altar of character, wisdom, morality. The final sentence was the kicker: They may put their faith in God, the Universe, scientific laws or in a moving Spirit behind all things, but they generally put their faith somewhere.

To calm myself, I chose to believe Aaron put his faith in art. He had a BFA in photography, nearly an MFA in filmmaking, and he worked as a producer on film sets and as an artistic director for a record label. He had such a blind devotion to artmaking that he put up with many things I would not. On set, he spent fourteen hours a day on the Canadian border in below-zero temperatures and bathed in an outdoor shower in November. He wrote emails at 4 a.m., and he drove three hours to buy an actor a Peloton, all in the name of art.

I, too, worked in the arts, although sometimes begrudgingly. I occasionally fantasized about having a more stable or lucrative career, but Aaron couldn’t fathom it. He didn’t see the point, even when we were so broke. After years of supporting us in reality TV, he’d pulled the plug on his stable job when we’d saved enough for a sandwich. Aaron and I also diverged in how we categorized artists. I thought an artist was someone who exhibited work, while Aaron thought an artist was someone who saw the world through an aesthetic lens … which sounded awfully … spiritual. So, he was spiritual, that wasn’t bad. His faith was in art, I told myself as I settled under the sheets at night.

•••

Suddenly, when Aaron became a dad, Baby Jesus was uttered not with sarcasm, but as a salve during intimate moments and a solution in times of stress.

As new parents, our anxiety was completely intertwined with the frequency and texture of our daughter’s excrement. We had graduate degrees, we were award-winning filmmakers and writers. We had slowly, steadfastly crafted the lives we wanted—but everything we held dear was at the whim of our daughter’s poop. When she was backed up, she wouldn’t play, sleep, or sit. She screamed, fussed, and was inconsolable, and our lives came to a screeching halt.

Generally, after a day and a half without a poop, we began to troubleshoot. At our disposal, we had a variety of strategies our pediatrician encouraged, and some he allowed with reservation. Judging when to utilize the emergency measures was obviously a fraught decision. When the lack of shit hit the fan, it was no surprise that Aaron tended toward abstinence, or divine intervention. As the vessel who carried our daughter, her screams pierced not only my ears, but my uterus and soul, or maybe I was just a wimp. I preferred to use everything in the medicine bag until the turd left the building.

During a particularly long bout without a poop where we followed Aaron’s method of doing nothing, our daughter clung to us and whimpered for the better part of three days. When the moment finally presented itself and our daughter passed a boulder so well-packed, she screamed in pain, I shouted over her cries, “I told you we should have used the mineral oil.”

“That’s not how Baby Jesus made assholes!” Aaron screamed. There was not a smirk before, after, or anywhere in the vicinity of his comment.

Our warring perspectives were probably not helped by the fact that our daughter was born in February 2020, a few weeks before the Covid-19 lockdown. We suffered not only the isolation of new parents, but the seclusion of the pandemic.

At night, we were relegated to our movie projector. Like any two people, our tastes diverged, and we were both filmmakers, so obviously we argued about movies. I was a film professor who could handle more academic material, while Aaron’s taste drifted commercial. In the past, we’d disagreed over Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which he considered romantic, while I found it depressing that the hero only loved the heroine when she was disguised as another woman. I’d put off watching It’s a Wonderful Life until my mid-thirties because I sensed it was… well… Catholic. When I finally saw it per Aaron’s suggestion, he cried at the movie’s sense of love and sacrifice, while I thought it was blaringly disheartening that Jimmy Stewart never left his dying small town and instead lapsed into depression and alcoholism.

Once Aaron became a father, his taste skewed in a direction I could not grasp. Over his former preference for stand-up, horror, and boundary-pushing foreign films, he chose family movies. Weeks after our daughter was born, we streamed the TV show Virgin River about a woman who finds love in a small town, followed by both the original and remake of the maternal suburban The Stepford Wives, before landing firmly in the 1950s with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This riveting piece of cinema culminated with Elizabeth Taylor lying that she was pregnant to please her extended family. This was not the impetus to the story; it was the end. In the final frame, Director Richard Brooks winked at the audience with a kaleidoscopic fade on a long kiss between Elizabeth Taylor and her husband suggesting that maybe, finally, she’d just do what everyone wanted and get pregnant. After that hot mess, Aaron and I settled for less confrontational content, but, even ironically, there are only so many times a film professor can watch the Hallmark Channel.

A chilly spell at the end of April caused me to bring out our daughter’s stroller sleeping bag. With her zipped in the bassinet, I walked laps in Prospect Park amongst socially distanced crowds. After the genius move of not discussing whether we should have a child before I became pregnant, Aaron and I followed that up with the winning decision of not reviewing how we would raise our daughter. In forty-degree rain, I was desperate to talk to other urbanites. All I needed was a quick jab or poke at religion, but even with a mask on, no one would come near me.

As I pushed the stroller back toward our apartment, I was sympathetic toward my husband, to a point. For me, everything changed a year ago when I became pregnant. For him, things didn’t really shift until two months ago when our daughter was born. The entire time my body ached and ballooned, I mourned the loss of my childless life, but I also promised myself that not everything would change.

When I returned home, Aaron stood in the kitchen and unwrapped a cardboard box that had arrived in the mail. On my walk, I’d concluded that a pandemic not only prompted isolation, but fostered beliefs of the less sound mind. Maybe my logical husband had fallen victim to the mental toll of the pandemic. As I set our sleeping daughter in her crib, I approached him with extra compassion.

He pulled the last piece of bubble tape off what was clearly his childhood advent calendar. The calendar that hung in my childhood home was fluffy and bright with candy canes, mittens, and snowflakes. This austere, biblical calendar featured a wooden baby cradle, an ornate urn, and a goblet to drink Baby Jesus’s blood. I was mortified. Also, it was April. I took a deep breath and remembered my sentiment of compassion, but my gaze narrowed on the urn. “What’s with the urn? Whose ashes are in it?”

He shot me a glance.

I smiled, willing warmth into my face, if not my words.

“It’s not an urn. It’s a jar of frankincense, or perhaps myrrh. It’s one of the wise men’s gifts. See?” He pointed to the nativity scene at the top of the calendar.

“It’s April.”

“It’s homey.” He walked to the sink. As he fetched a glass of water, he added, “It’s good for her to become familiar with the iconography.”

“The iconography?” I blurted out.

He nodded as he drank. My compassion left the room, so I did, too.

The next day, I woke from a nap in our railroad apartment to hear Aaron bouncing our daughter on his knee in the next room. “Baby Jesus made these toes, these legs, this belly,” he sang. He kissed each body part after he named it. It was cute. Cute, and troubling. I rolled over, acquiescing that Jesus was in the house.

•••

Two months later we were forced out of New York. Moving during the pandemic was no treat, magnified by the fact that Aaron found work well off the beaten path in Bozeman, Montana. Days before our car transport service arrived, the company tripled the price, so we decided Aaron would drive, and I would fly cross-country with an infant and a cat.

Alone in the apartment, I took care of our daughter and cleared the wreckage of our presence. The day before our flight, Aaron called.

“Hey!” I said, sidetracked with the list of things I had to do before I turned in our keys.

He merely breathed into the phone.

“Honey? Hello? Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“South Dakota.”

“Good, you’re almost there.”

“I think I should turn around.”

“What? No. Why?”

“I don’t know about you flying alone.”

“I can do it. It’s fine.” Four months postpartum, taking two flights with an infant and a cat was not a walk in the park, but I could do it.

“What if they take the baby?” he asked in short speech.

“Who?”

“TSA.”

My glance darted around our empty apartment and landed on a wall mirror—here on the heels of Baby Jesus was the spirited irrationality. I looked at myself in the mirror. “TSA is not going to steal our daughter.”

“You don’t have her birth certificate,” he said.

This was true. His family had planned a trip to Ireland, so we’d sent away for her passport. Still, TSA was not going to take the baby. “I have other documents. You just miss her, but she’s doing great. She pooped today. Actually, she pooped twice. Soft and large.”

There was a time when news of our daughter’s silky excrement was enough to elevate Aaron to a state of euphoria. This was not one of those times.

He sighed into the phone.

“Stay the course, honey. It would take longer to get back here. You wouldn’t make it before our flight,” I said as the tires of our basement-level Prius C hummed into the phone. It was his third day on the road, and my heart went out to him. “It’s crazy to drive alone for that long. It messes with your head. You’re almost there. We’ll be there tomorrow, and we’ll meet you.”

“Not if it’s up to TSA…” he muttered.

“Remember, she has my name. That’s why I’m flying with her. It’s cleaner, logistically. Plus, we didn’t steal her, so it’s all good.”

“They don’t know that.”

“Honey.” I bit my lip. “TSA is not going to take the baby. It’s a domestic flight. They’re not even going to check for identification.”

He seemed to mull over my words. As I counted the dust bunnies on the adjacent wall, I prayed that I got through to him. If I put my faith anywhere, it was in my husband.

Right now, he was probably cruising on a desolate stretch of I-90. Sioux Falls was at one end of the state, but it was a long six hours until The Badlands, Black Hills National Forest, and Rapid City at the other end. In between, there wasn’t much more than a raw sun and an occasional shopping center, or maybe a field of sunflowers. After three days of fast food, lumpy motel beds or—if I knew Aaron correctly, reclining in the driver’s seat at a truck stop—he was wan, uninspired, and sprouting acne. Alone in the car, he went without A/C in late June to save gas. With his t-shirt and the driver’s seat coated in back sweat, he drove, feeling the strain and uncertainty of another move while missing his wife and daughter.

I could handle a spiritual man but not an irrational one. Aaron was logical; he was under the stress of becoming a new parent and moving across the country during a pandemic. He was living proof that personality was not innate. Nurture triumphed over nature. Aaron knew the TSA did not steal babies; he was rational. In his long, slow breaths that permeated the line, I could hear his brain working it out this very moment.

Then his breath quickened right before he wailed, “But … what if they take the baby?!”

•••

JENNY HATCHADORIAN has been published by Story Club Magazine, Role Reboot, and Little Old Lady. Her comedic essay New Family won Story Club Cleveland’s Audience Award. She is working on a book of comedic essays titled Midwestern Witch. Follow her on Instagram @hatchadorianhere or Twitter @hatchadorian

The COVID Swamp

By Michele Coppola

My mother and I have shared a hospital room on my birthday twice in our lives. The first time we were joined by an umbilical cord. The second time, fifty-seven years later, by the coronavirus.

I left my cool green bubble of Portland, Oregon, on the morning of June 30, 2020. [Note: the Before Vaccine era. —ed.] I was coronavirus negative. I arrived in steamy Orlando, Florida, that night, and within four days was feverish, nauseous, and had a vicious cough that punched out my solar plexus like a prize fighter.

There’s no way I would have traveled during this pandemic unless someone was dying. That someone was my eighty-one-year-old father, who was deteriorating quickly in the nursing home where he’d been convalescing since a bad fall a couple of weeks earlier.

Nine days after my arrival, the man who gave me his eyes and smart mouth was rushed to the emergency room when he was found unresponsive. I raced my mother to the hospital, where they attempted to keep us out due to the spike in coronavirus infections in the area.

“My father is NOT going to die alone!” I yelled at the hospital administrator. I saw the security guards pass a look between them. I had the virus; I was sure of it. I knew they suspected it, as the sweat dripped down the side of my flushed, masked face. “My parents…they’ve been married sixty years. Please.”

In the end, the administrator relented. My mother, brother, sister-in-law, and I got to stroke my dad’s pale, waxy cheek, tell him we loved him, and that it was okay for him to go.

Three days after my father died, my mother and I were both on oxygen, bunkmates in a hospital room trading Jell-o.

•••

I finally landed in that hospital room after calling 911 when I nearly passed out trying to lift myself up from the couch. The cough had not relented, and I hadn’t eaten in two days. The paramedics who came to get me at my mother’s house had been there the night before to transport my mom, and they recognized me.

“Your turn, huh?” One of them asked jovially. I shook my head and tried to choke out some words. They had me loaded with tubes up my nose within minutes.

“Oxygen sat 84. Temp 103.3,” I heard one of them call out.

I was in the ER hallway for about an hour before they wheeled me into a curtained cubicle. One of the ambulance paramedics came inside, asked me if I was ok, then sat down beside me.

“Are you a person of faith?” he asked.

“No,” I said, with as much force as my oxygen-starved voice could muster.

His eyes widened and he sat back. That obviously wasn’t an answer he heard much. “Well. Would you mind if I prayed with you anyway?”

I had just enough strength for an eye roll. “If you feel like you gotta, go ahead,” I gasped out.

The paramedic took my hand and sincerely prayed for God to watch over me so I could one day “find my faith and be a witness for his grace.”

He should have asked God for an open hospital bed. The likelihood of finding one in Florida at that moment was as non-existent as me becoming a sister-wife.

I spent sixteen sleepless hours on that painful ER gurney while I waited, dragging an oxygen canister with me when I had to pee while trying to hold a breezy hospital toga closed. The clothes I’d arrived in were wadded in a plastic bag, rank with fever sweat.

At some point during those endless hours, I got a call on my cell from a hospital social worker who didn’t realize I was just downstairs. She informed me that my mother—who was still on oxygen, disoriented, and using a bedpan—was, nevertheless, well enough to go home.

I told her that there was no one available to care for my mother because my brother lives four hours north and I was now hospitalized, downstairs in her hospital, with COVID-19.

“Oh, how awful,” she said with practiced sympathy. “But you’ve got to figure something out because we need the bed. Maybe you could hire full-time care? I’ll send down some information for companies who do that.”

“And how much do you estimate home care would cost?” I asked.

“My guess would be in the neighborhood of $1700 a week,” she said, as if it were anywhere close to a reasonable number.

I wanted to cry, but the truth is I hadn’t shed a tear since my father died. The shock of his death, the need to stay upright to care for my collapsed mother, and the sudden reality of my own illness—it was all packed tight, damming up the river of grief behind my eyes. And now while struggling to breathe myself, I had to figure out what to do with a barely functional parent.

It was my brother, normally the chill King of Confrontation Avoidance, who came to the rescue.

“We’re not gonna pay $1700 to have someone do what y’all should be doing,” he thundered at the social worker when he got her on the phone. “Why can’t you put my mom and my sister together in a room? They’ve got the same thing!”

Something else of note that happened that night: After spending the better part of the last thirty years resenting my younger sibling for never visiting me in Oregon, I forgave him.

•••

My mother has only awakened twice since I joined her in the room: once to acknowledge my arrival and once to be taken to the bathroom. Months later she will tell me she remembers very little about being in the hospital at all, and it is no surprise.

Other than the muffled chaos on the other side of the closed hospital room door, everything is hushed. Except my brain, which is an out-of-control Tilt-A-Whirl.

I have COVID.

I might die.

No, I am not going to die. Stop being stupid.

My dad is dead. I will never see him again.

Oh God, am I going to end up on a ventilator?

When will I be able to take a shower?

I have COVID.

Do my dogs think I am never coming home?

I am a statistic.

Am I going to die?

I have COVID.

The IV fluid machine beeps when my oxygen level dips, which is often. It is not comforting. I turn on the TV and see Florida’s beefy, blue-blazered governor bloviating that his state—which has some of the highest rates of infection in the nation—is handling the pandemic just fine.

“We’ve got a health system that’s working,” he says. “Anyone who needs a bed can get one.”

The nurse assistant who came in to empty our trash cans looks up at the TV and shakes her head.

“We just need to turn this whole thing over to Jesus,” she sighs.

•••

Three times a day I must remind the ever-changing aides to cut up my mom’s food and help her eat. Her hands are frozen with stress-induced arthritis, and she sleeps twenty-two hours a day. This is the woman they wanted to send home because they needed the bed for sicker people. I am furious all over again.

But it is not the fault of the hands-on hospital staff. They are, to a one, helpful and kind—zipped head-to-toe in PPE jumpsuits, industrial blue Oompa Loompas with exhausted eyes behind shiny plastic face guards.

My guess is that the doctors are equally fatigued, but I wouldn’t know for sure because you rarely see one. I’ve requested an audience with a physician every day since I was admitted so I can get some clarity on my mother’s condition as well as my own.

Finally on Day 3, a harried doctor arrives and informs me that in addition to COVID-19, we both have pneumonia. My mother is also on pain medication for her acute arthritis and is being treated for a severe bladder infection, which in elderly people often causes confusion and disorientation.

“But actually,” says the doctor, “you’re sicker with COVID than she is. When you came in your fever was higher and the scans showed more lung inflammation.” He says I will probably be there for several days and not to be surprised if it gets worse before it gets better.

My husband is back in Oregon, and we have agreed for his safety and my peace of mind he will stay there. My cell is dead, so he passed along my hospital room phone number to my best friend, who is frantic with worry.

Her voice breaks and wavers at the end of our conversation, and as is her way, she cuts right to the chase. “Please don’t die, okay?”

•••

Day 4 in the hospital is my birthday. Since COVID-19 wasn’t able to take down my hedonistic sense of taste and smell, I order pasta for dinner—and for the first time since I arrived here, a dessert.

I am informed by an apologetic kitchen staffer that I can have pasta or dessert, but not both, as the attending physician has put me on a modified diabetic eating plan. I opt for the pasta. Then I order a meal for my mother, who is barely eating. She is getting chocolate cake for dessert.

Like much of the rest of the western world, COVID-19 hates fat people. The TV news spouts statistics showing that in addition to people over sixty-five, the patients most likely to develop serious complications from the virus are those with obesity and its BFFs high blood pressure and diabetes.

That would be me. Both my blood pressure and blood sugar are well controlled with medication and exercise, but I’m under no illusions about what carrying around so much extra weight at my age means for my health. Unlike many self-designated social media health experts and internet trolls, however, I don’t believe I deserve to die from COVID-19 because I’m fat.

But my weight is likely part of the reason I’m lying in a hospital room next to my faded southern beauty of a mother, who sleeps open-mouthed and corpse-like, in the mechanical bed next to mine.

She looks like a week-old cut rose, the petals and leaves all browning at the edges. I love her so much.

•••

Why is it that so many health crises seem to happen on the toilet? That’s where my mom collapsed at two a.m. the night she was brought here, and it’s now where I am starting to panic because I am unable to stand up.

My head has been a helium balloon all day, my oxygen levels rarely above 95. A respiratory therapist came in to consult earlier and after he turned up the levels on the O₂ concentrator, I started to feel a little better.

Or at least I did until right now, when I tried to get up from the commode. I’m swimmy and damp with sweat. My lungs will barely inflate.

By the time I make it back to the bed ten steps away, clinging to the wall, I’m gasping and almost in tears. The sweat has cooled and I’m shivering but too exhausted to pull the sheet up. Panic is frantically knocking, knocking and I grip the mattress with both hands. My mother has slept through all of this.

I try to force my lungs to take a deep breath and I choke. The edges of my vision darken, my heart flutters. I am terrified that if I call a nurse, they will put me on a ventilator. I am equally terrified that if I don’t call, my brain will start to die from lack of oxygen.

I am fat, middle-aged, not rich, and not beautiful. My only worth and value to the world is, and has been, my sharp, creative brain. If I lose that I am a useless blob.

My insecurities are pathetic and not rational. But they make me hit the call button and save my own life.

•••

Two days after I thought I was going to die, I am discharged from the hospital at ten p.m. with portable oxygen. My mother will stay in the hospital for another few days until a bed opens up in a COVID-19 rehab facility, because she is going to need more care than I can give her right now.

I end up spending three extra hours at the hospital after the doctor officially releases me because I must arrange a ride back to my mother’s house fifteen minutes away. As a COVID-19 patient, rideshares and taxis are out, and an ambulance would charge $300 a mile.

Eventually it is Heidi, one of my mom’s dearest neighborhood friends, who dons a mask and gloves and comes to get me. Heidi has also been braving my mom’s virus-drenched house to feed the cat and bring in the mail. She is an angel in cropped pants and my hero.

When I get back to the house I collapse on the couch and remain there, hooked to an oxygen tank—and in the same dank clothes I was wearing when I was taken to the hospital a week prior—for the next three days. My hair is greasy, my skin slimy, my nostrils raw from the oxygen tubes. I stare at the decaying flowers with still-jaunty bows sitting all around the house, sent after my father passed.

Oh, right. My dad is dead. My gut lurches.

The next morning it takes me a half hour to get up and go to the bathroom. Any movement leaves me breathless and swaying. Days slide into nights. The house landline phone rings and rings and rings. I know people are worried but talking leaves me dizzy and exhausted.

After a few days I start picking up the phone. “No, there’s nothing you can do. Thanks,” I repeat, over and over and over to people who wouldn’t come near me even if they were close by.

One of my North Carolina cousins from my mom’s side of the family calls. Her mouth-full-of-marbles voice is thick with concern and for once, I am truly thankful she is the type who prefers talking to listening. Towards the end of our conversation, she asks if she can play me a hymn on the piano over the phone. A sweet gesture from a pure heart.

“No thanks. I just need a nap right now,” I rasp.

“Well, we’ll be prayin’ for ya,” she says.

•••

On the fourth day I finally disconnect from the oxygen tank (I have named it O2D2) to take a shower. Afterwards, I stand in the stall in a daze, dripping. With only a towel covering me, I make it to the couch and sit there, tubes in nose, bare butt on microfiber, for several hours.

It occurs to me how alone I am. Had I passed out trying to scrub my pits, when would someone have found me? I refuse to let my healthy brother and sister-in-law near me, and only a few of the Necco-wafer-colored houses nearby are occupied because the snowbirds vacate this swamp in summer. So if a COVID survivor falls in the shower and there’s no one to hear, does she make the news?

Flipping through TV channels, I see a report that the coronavirus death toll is over 150,000. Trump says that the U.S. is handling things very well, much better than most other places, whatever that means.

The house phone rings. It is a medical assistant from a local clinic twenty-five miles away where nearly three weeks ago, after calling around for hours, I had finally managed to get my mother and me tested for COVID-19. At that time there were no rapid tests and results were taking a minimum of ten days.

The medical assistant is apologetic. “I’m calling to let you know that both you and Shelby Coppola’s tests came back positive,” she says.

“Well, that would explain why my mom’s in the hospital and there’s oxygen up my nose,” I say.

•••

A six-legged, cicada-type insect takes up residence on the front door about two weeks after I am released from the hospital. It is the size of a toddler and looks like some sort of plague-house marker from the underworld.

I say hello to it when I finally leave the house to get my mom’s mail at the box across the street.

It is late July now, and the central Florida morning air has all the breathability of moist, day-old underwear. I make it to the mailbox and back but require a half-hour session with O2D2 to recover.

I soon learn that the plague cicada has indeed come to warn of an impending condition nearly as distressing as the coronavirus itself: the antibiotic-resistant, I-eat-Monistat-For-Breakfast Yeast Infection.

Like most COVID-19 patients, my treatment included large doses of steroids. This can spike blood sugar, which then makes you susceptible to severe yeast infections. I am unable to walk upright and peeing makes me scream. The infection then spreads to my backside and all elimination becomes torture.

When it’s obvious that the first course of yeast infection antibiotics prescribed via teledoc isn’t going to work, I drive to an urgent care clinic to see a doctor in person. The small waiting room is packed full of masked, coughing patients sitting just a few feet apart and I am informed that even though I have an appointment, there is a three-hour wait.

So I sit in the car for those hours, reading news on my phone and, when the thick stickiness of the late morning becomes too much for my weakened lungs, I run the air conditioner. Two hundred fifty-three more people died from the virus yesterday in Florida, the highest one-day death total so far in the pandemic. Governor Blue Blazer is annoyed that the media is focused on deaths rather than falling infection rates.

I am focused on breathing while I wait, and on the chronic queasiness I know is the result of worrying about my mother. I cannot stop thinking about her, desperately lonely and grieving in a spartan rehab center. By the time she comes home she will have been locked in—wearing nothing but a hospital gown and socks—for 22 days. She has no one for company except the attendants who bring her meals and whomever she can reach on her cell phone.

I feel incredibly guilty that I was not well enough to care for her and spare her that.

The second course of antibiotics from the urgent clinic doctor finally works, and a few days later I am no longer petrified when I feel the need to urinate. Most of all, I can now breathe, deep and full. Deep and full.

The plague cicada disappeared a few days later.

•••

I’m not sure what day it is, but I observe that all the houses in my mom’s subdivision have their garbage bins out, so I go around and pick up all the dead flowers, collect the other household trash, and take it to the curb. The next-door neighbor sees me, waves, and walks up the driveway. But only so far.

“How’s your mom doing?” she asks.

“She’s as well as she can be, considering,” I say, shading my eyes from the relentless sun. “We hope she can come home in the next few days, once she gets a second negative COVID test.”

“We were all sorry to hear about your dad,” she says kindly. “I know he’d been sick for a long time. What happened?”

“Heart failure and sepsis.”

The neighbor nods. “Yeah, but I bet they listed COVID on his death certificate. They’re doing that now to make the hospitals more money.”

I look at her and shake my head. “Sorry, but I don’t believe that,” I say. “And no—his death certificate had heart failure and sepsis on it. That’s all.”

She pauses a moment. “Well. I know it’s going on other places. You let your mom know we’re thinking of her and lifting you all up to the Lord.”

“I’ll do that,” I say.

•••

My husband Facetimes me, eager to show me how his worry and stress have manifested into a garage so clean and well-organized we can now fit my car inside. He also mentions that the hospital bills have started to roll in at home.

“Over five thousand bucks for your day-and-a-half in the emergency room—that’s before you even got to a real bed,” he tells me. “Let’s hear it for good insurance.”

Remembering the miasma of panic, near-suffocation and back pain I felt during that endless day and night in the ER puts my privilege into stark relief. Until now, I had the luxury of suffering through that without even giving a thought as to how we would pay for all this.

That realization almost makes me cry. Almost. But the truth is that except for the night my dad passed away, I still haven’t shed tears about anything. I think maybe my overwhelmed brain is using denial to cope, and that scares me a bit.

What also scares me is that my mom is coming home soon and I have no idea what kind of shape she’ll be in. I know she is still not walking well and her emotional state has deteriorated. She’s also not eating much but it’s mostly because she hates the food at the rehab center.

“Yesterday they brought me something that looked like diarrhea on a tortilla,” she complains.

“Well, tell them to bring you something else,” I suggest.

“I did. I had a couple of bites of a sandwich. It wasn’t good either. But the girl who brought it was sweet and it was so nice to have someone to talk to,” she says, and starts to cry.

•••

A month later, my family boards a small fishing boat to take my father’s ashes out to sea, per his wishes. My mother has been out of rehab for a few weeks and she’s shaky, but steady enough.

I seem to have bounced back pretty well. I don’t know it yet, but soon I’m going to start losing my hair—which infectious disease expert Alyssa Milano has already informed the world is an after-effect of COVID. Right now, though, it’s getting tangled in the late afternoon breeze as we speed out into Tampa Bay.

Once we are the required three miles from shore, the captain cuts the motor. We all share some memories about my dad, and my mom reads a poem she wrote for him on their forty-fifth anniversary. We play Sinatra’s “My Way”, and my brother chokes up as he pours my dad’s cremains into the choppy, jade-green water.

The rest of us throw flowers in the stream of ashes, which sparkle a little as they sink, then disappear. I didn’t realize ashes would sparkle. On another day I might roll my eyes at the thought, but today I let myself believe that those sparkles are my dad saying goodbye.

I also realize that I am finally crying, a salty stream down my cheeks and neck.

My mom sees me wiping away the tears and rubs my back, the way only mothers know how to do. “I can’t believe he’s gone, either,” she says. “I just can’t believe it.”

I shake my head. “You know mom, I’m devastated about dad. But I think I’m really crying ’cause I’m just so relieved we got to do this for him. I mean, we’re breathing. We made it.”

“Don’t ever tell me prayer doesn’t work,” she says, squeezing my hand.

The captain starts the motor and turns the boat for shore. We all look up and squint into the dissolving sun.

•••

MICHELE COPPOLA is a former radio personality who now works as a professional copywriter and freelancer. Her work has appeared previously in Full Grown People, The Oregonian, Spot Magazine, and various literary journals. She lives in Portland, OR with three senior rescue dogs and a stray she married named Bryon.

In the Language of My Former People

Photo by M.Peinado/Flickr

By Leah Elliott

One day, my mother’s name appears in my inbox. I open a message announcing that my parents have been called to be missionaries in the Philippines. I cringe, sigh, and think, I’m sorry, as I picture my parents—oh so pious and paternalistic—carrying out the Lord’s holy work of perpetuating colonialism in the Philippines.

I close my eyes. Truly, sincerely, I’m sorry.

•••

I was a Mormon, the earnest, orthodox, devout, faithful, believing kind.

On my father’s side, my ancestors were some of the very first members of what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were among those who knew Joseph Smith and those who walked across the plains with Brigham Young to settle Utah. My mother was a convert from Florida. In 1966, at the height of the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, my mother’s big act of rebellion was to stand up to her pastor and defend her decision to leave the Southern Baptist Church to join the Mormon Church. In 1968, she gave up a scholarship at a state university and instead enrolled at Brigham Young University. By the time she was nineteen, she and my dad were married. My oldest sister was born before their first anniversary, and there would be no ebb to the procreating for the next twenty years.

Mormonism made up the fabric of my childhood. It saturated my days with its regimen of six a.m. daily family scripture study; morning and evening family prayer; blessings on meals; individual prayers; individual scripture study; a weekly three-hour church bloc; midweek church activities; monthly fasting and bearing of testimonies; obedience to the Word of Wisdom, meaning abstention from alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine; observance of the Sabbath, in the form of refraining from activities deemed too raucous or worldly; General Conference, Stake Conference, ward conference, youth conference; temple preparation, missionary preparation, celestial-marriage-to-a-returned-missionary-for-time-and-all-eternity preparation; seminary; modesty in dress; Book-of-Mormon distance for dancing partners; avoiding even the appearance of evil; being in the world but not of the world; absolutely no sex ever, of any kind, not ever, not even with yourself, never, not ever until after you’re married, and then only with your opposite-sex spouse, and even then nothing too kinky .

Not one wisp of my life escaped Mormonism’s touch.

By the time I was twenty-five years old, my mounting disillusionment with Church culture and unsatisfactory answers to doctrinal and historical questions led me to leave the Church.

That year was the first time I tasted alcohol.

My experience of Mormonism was more harrowing than not, something I think of having survived and something I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to distance myself from.

Still, the tendrils of it follow me everywhere. It comes up frustratingly early with new acquaintances. When the answers to common getting-to-know-you questions are responses such as “I have ten siblings,” and “My parents live in Utah,” you can’t really plausibly deny ever having had anything to do with Mormonism.

I’m not especially proud of having been a Mormon. It was an unchosen identity, assigned to me at birth like gender, one that I earnestly tried to fill but ultimately found ill-fitting and had to drop. I get tired of being defined in terms of what I’ve chosen not to be, and my most painful life experiences aren’t really what I want to talk about with people I’ve just met. I’ve settled on a response for the inevitable, “Are you Mormon?” question: “I was raised that way, and my parents are, but I’m not anymore.” All of which is true, and none of which conveys any of the actual truth of the experience.

I usually ignore Facebook friend requests from people I don’t know, but if all my ex-Mormon friends show up as our friends in common, I accept the request. I know what it means to have been Mormon, and to go through the never-ending process of becoming not-Mormon. I know there’s a story of loss, grief, betrayal, disillusionment, and abuse. I know they’ve lost friends, and not uncommonly, have become estranged from at least some of their family. I know that, regardless of where they fall on the gender and sexuality spectrums, they’ve dealt with intense shame over their sexuality. I know they’ve had to learn how to reorient themselves to a world they were taught to remain aloof and unspotted from. Those within the Church regard you as fallen, deceived, succumbed to the influence of Satan, but life in The World is foreign.

Every former Mormon who sincerely believed the One True Church narrative, who had a testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel, as they say, has come to a point of realization that this Thing that they have based every aspect of their lives on is not what they thought it was. The sheer terror of being thrust into freefall when your entire worldview collapses, the enormity of the gaping maw of the “So now what?” that you are left with, is impossible to explain to someone who has never been through it, and needs no explanation for someone who has.

•••

There are lots of names for people who leave the Church: ex-Mormon, Jack Mormon, former Mormon, recovering Mormon, anti-Mormon, or (my personal favorite) Mormon Alumni.

But still “Mormon,” all of them.

I had a Sunday School lesson when I was about four years old. It was an object lesson, a Mormon favorite. Our teacher gave us each a fresh sheet of clean, white paper and told us to crumple it up as small as we could. We were excited at being instructed to do something we’d normally be scolded for, and the room erupted with the noise of crackling paper. After a minute or so, our teacher reversed her instructions: Try to make the paper as it was before you crumpled it. Of course we couldn’t. And that was the point of the lesson, which was on consequences: Some things just can’t be undone.

I can be not-Mormon, but not never-has-been-Mormon.

In 2009, four years into my journey out of Mormonism, I arrived at a brief period of atheism and started a blog, which I titled “The Whore of All the Earth.” The Bible mentions the whore of Babylon, but “the whore of all the earth” is a phrase from the Book of Mormon, unique to Mormonism. I chose the title, in part, because I knew it would serve as a homing signal to other ex-Mormons. It was me trying to snap my fingers and catch their eye across a crowded room: “Yo! Yo! Over here! I’m one of you!”

And it worked. I blogged my way into an online community of others who had left the Church, people who got it in a way that never-were-Mormons can’t. But after a couple of years, I got burnt out on hearing “this was my awful experience of Mormonism” stories, weary of talking about Mormonism in general. There were reasons why I left, after all. So I withdrew from the ex-Mormon blogosphere.

•••

I constantly jot down random thoughts that go through my head. Sometimes these scribbles become the building blocks of poems. Sometimes lines of scripture come to my mind, and then I have to Google to see whether it’s from the Bible or from one of the books exclusive to the Mormon canon. In my upbringing, “scripture” was an umbrella category. There wasn’t much need to pay attention to whether a passage being quoted was from the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, or the Bible, because all carried equal authoritative weight.

If a line I’ve jotted turns out to be from the Bible, I’ll go ahead and use it in a poem, but not if it’s from one of the Mormon scriptures. For one reason, relatively few people would recognize the allusion. For another, most of the time I wish I could just excise this past of mine.

One night, I was scribbling away, when this mash-up of the Mormon children’s song “I Am a Child of God” and the Velvet Underground’s “Jesus” started working its way through my head. I noticed how similar the melodic and formal structures are, and even some of the words, and the delicious chromaticism that happens if you start the chorus of “I am a Child of God,” then swap out the line “Help me find the way” with the melody and words of the line “Help me find my proper place” from “Jesus.”

Aw, man, this is genius! I thought. Who could I share this with who would possibly appreciate how genius this is? There are approximately nine million Mormons in North America, or about 1.5% of the total population. I don’t have statistics for the number of Velvet Underground fans in that same area, but let’s assume that they’re a similarly narrow segment of the population. We can deduce that there probably isn’t a lot of overlap between these two groups. I felt a wistful twitch at the corners of my mouth as I realized that I might be the only person who would appreciate how cool the mash-up was. For the first time, I wanted to use something from Mormonism to make art. The problem wasn’t needing to hide having been a Mormon; the problem was that no one would get it.

But then I thought of other writers who allude to a non-mainstream heritage. Joy Harjo, for example, has used the names of Native ceremonial dances in her poems. There’s a little asterisk and footnote for those unfamiliar, and it’s not an issue.

I had another thought I’d never had before: Maybe having been a Mormon could be a thing that made me unique in a positive way, instead of just making me a weirdo.

I was in high school the first time I realized, We’re one of those weird religions! It was 1996 and Mike Wallace interviewed Gordon B. Hinckley, who had recently become the president of the Church, for a segment of 60 Minutes. This was long before Mitt Romney and The Book of Mormon on Broadway. At that time, it was a Big Deal for Mormons to see anything about One of Us on “real” TV, and Very Big Deal for our prophet to be talking a real newsman. My whole family gathered around to watch it. What I remember most is the image displayed behind the talking head who introduced the segment: “MORMONS” in huge banner letters.

I didn’t have a name then for what I was seeing, but I recognized it: sensationalism. I witnessed myself being portrayed as Other.

So I knew that being Mormon had made me weird, but might I want to claim this heritage after all, perhaps the way secular Jews claim theirs? Or the way my queer friends now embrace and celebrate identities for which others once mocked and shamed them?

But this wasn’t like that. Although Mormons are a minority in most parts of the United States, and in broader American culture, where I grew up, in a region north of the Grand Canyon known as the Arizona Strip, we were the majority, and often we were real jerks about it. And I’m the one who finds this identity shameful, a thing to be hidden and denied.

Still, it’s been more than a decade since I left. Most of its sting and noxious fumes have dissipated for me. Mormonism has become a thing I can manipulate and examine with a degree of detachment that I didn’t have when I first left. Maybe that heritage could be a source and a perspective that informs my work instead of something I’m always trying to run from. Maybe I could begin to integrate it.

I mentally played the rest of “I Am a Child of God” in my head:

I am a child of God

And He has sent me here,

Has given me an earthly home

With parents kind and dear.

I noticed that that last line always plays in my head as, “With parents kine dandeer.”

Then I realized why this must be, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up, the way it would if you suddenly sensed that there was someone hiding in the closet behind you, watching you.

I knew this song before I even really knew language.

•••

During a solo road trip soon after, I was singing through hymns that I hadn’t sung in years, mining them for material, interesting ideas or turns of phrase. I sang the chorus of “Praise to the Man,” a hymn in honor of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith:

Hail to the prophet,

Ascended to heaven!

Traitors and tyrants

now fight him in vain!

Mingling with Gods he can plan for his brethren!

Death cannot conquer the hero again!

I burst out laughing as I spotted the resemblance to the self-aggrandizement of a certain commander-in-chief. I texted the lines to one of my brothers, with the comment, “Joseph Smith started a religion, a fantastic religion, incredible, the best, tremendous, you’re gonna love it, believe me!”

Alluding to Smith’s clandestine marriages to dozens of women, some as young as fourteen, others already married to other men, my brother texted back: “When you’re a prophet, they let you do it.”

Joseph Smith was just a silly old megalomaniac conman. I had a living example of his type to compare him against now, and somehow that took most of the menace, and all of the validity, out of him and this whole enterprise that he’d started.

I wiped tears out of my eyes. Of course I’d known that it wasn’t my fault I was born into generations of Mormons, but that was when I knew, in the way that’s the real beginning of healing for a survivor of abuse: It wasn’t my fault.

The culpability for Mormonism’s ills fell from my shoulders. The weight of the need I constantly feel to say, “I’m sorry,” for having been a Mormon was gone. I need no longer bear the sins of my fathers.

•••

Just as Trump was taking office, I unexpectedly found myself adding Civics to my community college teaching course load. I’d never taught the topic, so I was doing a lot of reading every week to prepare for classes. The daily headlines seemed to me the natural result of the history I was reading: a country founded on corruption, oppression, racism, imperialism, and crony capitalism just as far back as the historical eye could see. And the parallels and connections between the corruption in Washington, D.C., and the corruption in Salt Lake City were about to start popping up all over my consciousness.

I read an article about a Mormon Maori man’s unsuccessful efforts to prevent the Church from demolishing a Church-owned school near Hamilton, New Zealand. The school had been an important center to the Mormon and non-Mormon community there, but it was near a Mormon temple, around which the Church was now undertaking an expensive real estate development. Like so many imperialists and capitalists before them, the Church dismissed the concerns of the local community to make way for its business venture and to increase the allure of its temple.

Speaking of its developments near its Philadelphia temple, the Church’s senior real estate manager claimed that “the church is sensitive to what can be developed next to its temple” and always wants to have something “very compatible to the sacred nature of it.” I wondered, was he perhaps conflating “sacred” and “lucrative”?

I thought of downtown Salt Lake City, which the Church has groomed to function as its Mormonland theme park. The Church controls the experience by means of varying subtlety, from signs discouraging giving to panhandlers, to paying the retail stores at the recently-built, upscale Church-owned City Creek Center to stay closed on Sundays. Temple Square and its accompanying visitors’ centers and museums are all free, but visitors spend money in Church-owned businesses downtown, and if they convert, they become tithe-payers.

When it was completed in 1972, the Church Office Building was the tallest building in downtown Salt Lake City, almost twice as tall as the adjacent temple in Temple Square. No nefarious outside entity or city ordinance created a building that dwarfs their temple; they chose that themselves. The building that they claim is their most sacred edifice is literally in the shadow of the building devoted to their administrative and financial affairs.

Among other rites, Mormon temples are where sealing ordinances take place; only in the temple can members receive the rites that guarantee that they’ll be with their families for eternity. Members must pay ten percent of their income to the Church for the privilege of being worthy to enter the temple to receive these rites. All of these funds go to Salt Lake City before being disbursed locally. In addition to tithing and other offerings collected from members, the Church has various for-profit business and real estate holdings, many of them near their temples.

The Church has not publicly disclosed its finances since 1959. I have two thoughts about this. First, I don’t trust anyone with a lot of money who isn’t willing to be transparent about where they get it. Second, what would I expect from a church founded by Donald Trump’s early nineteenth-century counterpart?

During the first few years after I left, I’d been able to see the Church as misguided but well-intentioned. I still thought this was true of most individual Mormons, but the Church as an institution was looking to me like just as corrupt a sham as ever there was and entrenched in the larger systems of corruption and oppression in the United States.

One Sunday morning, an article on the backstory of the publication of Silent Spring came up in my news feed. As I sipped my coffee, I read that Ezra Taft Benson, who simultaneously filled the roles of Latter-day Saint Apostle and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Eisenhower, and who would lead the Church as prophet, seer, and revelator from 1985-1994, had written that Rachel Carson was “probably a communist” because he couldn’t conceive of any other reason “why a spinster with no children was so worried about genetics.”

I went searching for more context and turned up some other facts. This man whom I had called “prophet” through the bulk of my childhood had authored a pamphlet titled “Civil Rights, Tool of Communist Deception.” Then during his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, he had brought us industrial agriculture and factory farms with his insistence that farmers “get big, or get out,” and had attempted to silence the woman who sparked the environmental protection movement, on the grounds that she had a vagina whence no babies had come.

I was indignant. I took it personally, because between the two of them, where I saw myself was in Rachel Carson: a woman intellectual, a writer, a lover and defender of the natural world, and not a Mormon. I wanted to tell the dead man off on our behalf.

You went after Rachel Carson?! You fucking clown! Guess what? Rachel Carson was right. What the hell kind of prophet are you? You’re ridiculous! You’ve got no fucking clothes! Let me just blow away your remaining shreds of credibility there.

I went back to my coffee and Sunday reading.

I’m not afraid of you anymore, so just get out of my closet, and go on now.

•••

Can you ever really divorce the parts of yourself that you don’t want? Can you pick and choose what you’re made of?

I’ve got plains-crossing, polygamy-practicing ancestors. I was born under the covenant, one of eleven children to parents kine dandeer who met at the B-Y-motherfucking-U. Except for the part where I reject all their doctrine and terminate my membership, I’m as legit as it gets. If there’s a minority culture I could definitely claim I’m entitled to appropriate, it’s Mormonism. But did I want to?

I started compiling a list of uniquely Mormon phrases that I found aesthetically or conceptually interesting. I could almost feel my neurons firing with connections, ideas, possibilities of all the things I could craft out of these words. The title of a volume that Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird edited of writing by Native women came to my mind: Reinventing the Enemy’s Language. Yes. That’s what I would do. I would not claim Mormon as my identity, but I would take that crumpled paper for my art.

A stupor of thought,

a son of perdition,

the brother of Jared,

the City of Enoch,

a stripling warrior,

an eight-cow wife,

health in the navel,

marrow in the bones,

strength in the loins and in the sinews,

popcorn popping on the apricot tree,

and Saints and angels sing…

Take it! Take it all!

•••

LEAH ELLIOTT is a writer, poet, teacher, and journeyer. She lives in North Carolina with her partner, children, and stepchildren. You can find poetry, social media links, and other good stuff at her website: www.leahielliott.com.

How I Came to Believe in The Ally I Can’t See

By Eze Paul Ihenetu

He burst through the door of my bedroom, pulling me from blissful sleep. Startled, shirtless, harried, and vulnerable—I still thought of myself as new to New York—I turned to face my intruder. The shirtless man with the scar above his left eye was my roommate of the past five months. His face was as animated as it had ever been. “Hey, Eze,” he said. “You need to get up. Some crazy shit is happening right now!”

Daniel was prone to embellishment and hyperbole. So, I assumed that the “crazy shit” he was hyped about would eventually become much ado about nothing.

I was in no mood to begin the day. Cursing him underneath my breath, I turned away from my roommate. Daniel, still hyper and insistent, would remain undaunted. He parked himself at the foot of my bed and yelled down at me. “Why are you going back to fucking sleep right now? Get up man! The towers are burning down! The fucking towers are burning!”

I was a recent transplant—I’d arrived in the spring of 2001—and still somewhat impaired by exhaustion. I didn’t understand what Daniel meant when he said that the towers were burning down. Daniel, a Brooklyn native, was standing in the common room in front of the television, completely rapt by what was being broadcast on the screen. The tops of two buildings were engulfed by massive flames, and thick, black smoke was snaking its way toward the sky. I thought that he might have been enraptured by a television movie, that is until a banner flashed across the bottom of the television screen that read: Breaking news: World Trade Center Disaster. And then came the video of the two airplanes hurling themselves into the façades of the World Trade Center buildings, followed by reporting from a catatonic news anchor. This was definitely not a movie.

The two of us ran up the hallway stairs until we reached the roof of our East Williamsburg apartment complex. The sky was a clear blue except for the area above lower Manhattan, which had been blanketed with the fearsome black smoke. As we watched the billowing smoke clouds spread more of their pernicious hate across the sky, Daniel posed the question that was like a blinking light inside of my brain: “Is the world ending?”

•••

The September 11^th attacks would not prove to be the end of everything, though it did presage the end of something precious that I was unable to put into words.

The world would go on for Daniel, for me, and for everyone else that remained alive in the new world. Daniel was still thinking about securing a license to drive trucks while concocting more nefarious schemes to make money. I’d accepted a job as an actor with a traveling theatre troupe a few days before the attacks had taken place and had received assurances from the theatre director that the show would go on. I thought it was serendipitous timing that I’d been offered the theatre tour a few days before the terrorists attacked the city. For the air that I had been breathing in the wake of the attacks was a miasma of rage, charred metal, and burning bodies, an extremely toxic mixture that was affecting my psychological health. Spending an extended time away from New York City, where breathing in the noxious mixture was a regular thing became necessary.

I exited the city a few weeks after September 11^th, one of five passengers of a cream colored van and trailer, relieved and grateful to be leaving a city that was still twisted from the wounds that had been inflicted upon it by terrible men. I was eager for the adventures that lay ahead on the open road, though somewhat peeved that Daniel insisted that I continue to pay rent even though I would not be living in the apartment for the next two months. I hoped things would improve for the city while I was gone.

•••

I returned to our apartment building on December 15^th, feeling shrunken and skinny after having walked a few blocks in the bitter cold. The cold was made worse by my worried mind. Repeated attempts to contact Daniel a few hours before had proven unsuccessful.

I scanned the windows of my apartment for signs of activity. There was nothing. No lights. No music. Nothing. It was night, but it was still early, and for there to be no sign of life inside at this time was unusual. I knocked three times on the metal door. No answer. I knocked again, harder this time. Still no answer. Freezing and frustrated, I took a few steps backwards, looked up and screamed his name: “Daniel!”

“Hey,” said a voice, startling me.

I wheeled around to meet the voice. A burly and bearded man, an employee of the adjoining bread factory, was walking toward me. “Are you looking for the guy who lived on the second floor? Daniel?”

Lived? Did he say lived?

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I am.”

“He doesn’t live there anymore and you can’t go in there,” the bread factory worker told me. “Dude got murdered a few days ago. The place is a crime scene.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.”

“Yep.”

And in that instant, a once inviting home morphed into a sinister structure. I backed away from the apartment slowly and quietly, so as not to disturb the demons that were at rest inside.

•••

On the subway, I thought, “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” Though exhausted after three months of traveling and powering through shows with my theatre group, I should have been able to bask in the glow of a monumental accomplishment: I had established myself as a paid New York City actor. But I’d returned to a building complex that had been locked and sealed by the New York City police, a place that was no longer my home.

Where can I go?

It was the question that I had to ask myself after hours of riding the subway train, hunched over in my seat, still reeling from the news of my roommate’s untimely demise—I was reeling for myself as much as I was for my roommate. Besides the clothes that I was wearing, the suitcase that rested on my shins contained everything in this world that I could call mine at the moment. And it was a very small suitcase. Compounding the shock at my roommate’s unexpected passing was the explanation for why Daniel was no longer alive: murder.

•••

I called the police station a week after I’d found lodging at an upper Manhattan hostel facility. My reasons for calling the flatfoots were not quite so honorable, though. Reaching out to the police—something that I hoped that I never have to do—had not been a byproduct of my suspicions of what happened with my roommate, although I did have an inkling as to why he’d been murdered in cold blood.

What I needed was access to the apartment so that I could retrieve the property that I’d left behind. My computer, headshots, and some of the other things that remained in the apartment were essential components of my nascent acting career.

The cop on the other end of the line seemed to perk up at hearing my reason for calling and said, “Why don’t you come on down to the precinct so that we can talk about a few things? After we talk some, we’ll go to the apartment and pick up your belongings.”

After hanging up, perspiration attached my clothes to my body, blood drained from my face, and my stomach felt hollow—my normal reaction to fear. With that call to the police precinct, I’d enmeshed myself in an open murder case, a real big ball of shit turds! And for what? A couple hundred two-year-old head shots, an obsolete computer, and some other things that were replaceable? I was so hesitant to enter any kind of police station because I believed that it was the place where my current vulnerabilities—young and black, homeless, and alone—would be amplified.

Unable to quell my combustible emotions, I took a walk down Broadway, taking in the cool air to clear my head of poisonous thoughts. When the cloud containing these thoughts cleared after a mile or so of walking, I set my mind on visiting the station house the next day.

•••

After entering the police station, the realization hit me that I was probably within the vicinity of a few human cages.

I was received by two detectives. One of them was a white male, middle aged and balding, dressed in a short white short-sleeve shirt and black tie, a grizzled veteran of the Brooklyn police department. The other was younger, black and better looking, had all of his hair, and sported a slight mustache.

I sat facing the older detective, who proceeded with his harrowing rendition of what had taken place in my apartment while I was on the road.

On a cold night in December, two men rang the doorbell to the apartment building in which Daniel and I had lived, announcing their presence. Daniel made his way to the window overlooking the avenue below, looked down to the street, and recognized the faces of his eventual killers. And so, thinking that he was safe because he knew his assailants, he had permitted the visitors entry into the apartment building. As soon as the killers crossed the threshold of the apartment building, they stopped for a few moments to collect themselves in the dark, then covered their faces with black ski masks. The assailants sprinted up the stairs that led to the apartment, shoved their way through the door with guns drawn, bound and gagged the new residents who were visiting from the apartment one floor up, and then proceeded to torture Daniel while making demands for the money that he owed for drug sales. When it became clear that Daniel would not be able to meet their demands, the assailants forced him down on his knees, shot him twice in the head, and ended his life. He was only twenty-seven years old when he was killed, a baby boy cut down in the prime of his existence.

I was quite shaken. Both the detectives were able to easily ascertain that, and they gave me some time and space to process everything that I’d just heard.

Although I’d lived in that apartment with Daniel for five short months, I knew that he’d been involved in questionable activities involving drugs and drug dealers. Some of the dealers would spend some late nights over at the apartment, laughing and inhaling smoke from gargantuan blunt cigarettes while conducting business in the common room, keeping me awake as I attempted to sleep in the adjoining bedroom.

The most frequent visitor was a guy named Jesus, a temperamental, rotund man of impressive height who wore glasses and sprouted a thin beard on his face. His body type and temperament had been diametrically opposed to that of Daniel, who had been skinny, balding, clean shaven, slight, shifty, and calm while alive. Daniel and Jesus mostly got along despite their many dissimilarities, except for those times when Jesus felt that he’d been “disrespected” by Daniel.

A particular instance came to my mind. Jesus and I were alone in the common room—the only time he and I were alone in my apartment. He fumed as he recounted the story of how Daniel, while being taxied around Brooklyn by Jesus, shed crumbs from a pastry that he’d been eating in Jesus’s car. Jesus remembered Daniel breaking into laughter after he’d chided him for his offense. And then Jesus’s face went beet red as he said, “It’s the ultimate sign of disrespect. Dropping crumbs in another man’s car, right? You wouldn’t like it if someone dropped crumbs in your car and then laughed if you asked that person to clean that shit up?”

“Of course, you’re right,” I said. “I wouldn’t want anyone shedding crumbs in my car and then laughing about it.” I inhaled a breath, for I had transported myself back to the memory of when I returned home from job hunting one afternoon and caught Daniel rifling through the contents of my duffel bag. I was a brand new tenant at the time, and not in the mood for another apartment search, so I shrugged off this disturbing discovery, taking Daniel at his word that he just wanted to make sure that he could trust me, the new guy. “But I don’t know. Maybe he just doesn’t understand that what he did was offensive. Or maybe he thought that since you guys are friends that you would let things slide a bit.”

Then came the explosion. “No, fuck that! I fucking asked him, and he should have taken me seriously. I ain’t got to take that kind of shit from him!”

“You’re right,” I said, waving my hands in surrender. “He should’ve known better.”

The detective seemed to be zeroing in on Jesus as a prime suspect for Daniel’s murder. I was more than eager to answer any and all of the questions that led to the hardening of the detective’s suspicions about the guy. Jesus’s professed trade was that of a professional bounty hunter. Bounty hunters use guns to accomplish their work, and I assumed that Jesus owned a significant stash of weapons. I also knew that if the detectives suspected that Jesus was involved in the murder of my roommate, then I could also be in immediate danger. And I would definitely feel safer if the police were able to capture the man who could potentially commit an act of violence against me. So, I cooperated with the police in every way possible.

But you know how the cops can be. Suspicion of others runs in their blood, even in the case of an individual—a person who was not in town at the time of the murder—who had voluntarily agreed to come down to the station to aid their investigation. The grizzled veteran wanted to know more about the drug sales, which were things that I hardly knew anything about.

He raised an eyebrow at my insistence that I had no knowledge of any actual transactions taking place and said, “A murder at your apartment. Lots of visitors coming over at all hours of the night, and you don’t know anything about any deals that might have went down at your place?”

Fear spread through me, increasing my blood pressure and the intensity of my subsequent breaths. I could hear my pulse pounding on the inside of my ears. My intuition began to whisper. “They’re going to try to keep you in here. Be careful what you say!”

I’d been away from my childhood home for only seven months, and in that time, I’d had to wrestle with the reality of a terrorist attack, the murder of a roommate, and the subsequent bout with homelessness that followed that murder. There was no way I was going to be able to accommodate having to spend a significant amount of time in a police station where cops and criminals roamed, thousands of miles away from home and family, and in a city that I barely knew. I was going to have to smack the nose of the dog that was clamping its jaws. “Look. I don’t know anything about any drugs deals. I have never sold drugs and I never will. You need to find Jesus. He is the one you need to talk to about all of this!”

And when he became resigned to the fact that my story was not likely to change, the bulldog would eventually release his hold on me.

•••

The younger detective took my back to my apartment and allowed me to enter. My heart broke upon first glance at what the apartment had become, the scene of a horrific and terrible crime.

Before it had been defiled and ransacked, this unit had the look of a warehouse that had been converted into a makeshift art studio; an impressionist painting encompassed the entirety of the living room wall. Daniel and I had lived harmoniously with two young actresses in happier days.

Daniel was the native New Yorker, the man with all of these connections to all of the cool and interesting people. These people often graced the apartment with their presence when parties great and rambunctious, small and intimate, were held. He’d even allowed me to tend bar at one of his house parties, even though I knew nothing of bartending. The actresses—both of whom had moved out of the apartment before the murder—and I were grateful to have been within Daniel’s orbit.

But Daniel was gone now, an unfortunate casualty of a world that is often very cruel and unforgiving, and life was moving on without him. His apartment looked as if a tornado had ripped through it, and Daniel’s dried blood was smeared along the wall behind his desk. I swallowed the urge to hurl at the sight of the blood and continued ahead, wading through the wreckage in the search for my things. The detective’s pattern of movement through the apartment would match my own.

When we arrived in what had once been my bedroom, the detective informed me of Daniel’s older brother, who lived in a more affluent area of the Brooklyn borough. “He has kept your computer for you,” the detective said. “You should go and talk to him.”

He wrote the number of the brother on the back of his card and handed to me. I let out an audible sigh. I was going to have to talk with Daniel’s older brother now? That was certain to be another unpleasant, although necessary, thing that I was going to have to do.

•••

As I approached the L train station with what possessions I was able to grab in hand, I heard a voice from behind calling my name. Heart pounding, I twisted my head around to meet the call and saw that the black detective was jogging in my direction, carrying photographs in his right hand. My headshots! “You forgot these,” he said handing the photos me. “Good luck to you.”

“Thank you,” I said, grateful for the gesture.

It was then that the anxiety and fear began give way to an incipient faith. There was a reason why I had been spared the fate that had befallen my unfortunate roommate. The serendipitous timing of the theatre tour spoke to something larger at work in my favor: I had an ally of the invisible kind, protecting me.

So I was going to be all right, just like the city of New York was going to be. We would both persevere. I’d just have to get through meeting with Daniel’s brother before I could begin to pick up the pieces of a shattered life. It wasn’t fair I had to start again from the bottom, but I was young, energetic, ambitious, and too brave and sure of myself to travel back home with my tail between my legs. Surviving at the hostel for the next few weeks before I embarked on my next tour of the United States of America wouldn’t be too difficult. And after touring, I would return to New York City with the wind beneath my sails, ready for the next stage of my journey.

•••

EZE IHENETU is a hospital worker and freelance writer living in Denver, Colorado. Once a teacher and an actor, Eze is confident that writing will be the last stop on his long professional journey. He is currently working on a memoir about his time as an elementary school teacher. You can reach him on twitter at @Eihenetu.

Read more FGP essays by Eze Ihenetu.

Cleansing

By Stephen J. Lyons

Easter Sunday and the spring rains so desperately needed in this dry Western town finally arrive. I’m on the phone with my former wife but I’m barely paying attention to the conversation, which revolves around our usual battleground topics of marital dissolution: child custody, past due bills, whose lawyer possesses the worst etiquette (we will eventually agree it’s a tie), and the two questions that never go away after a divorce: Who is responsible for this wreck? Who hurts the most?

Out the kitchen window of this listing wood-frame house that holds the dusty apartment where my nine-year-old daughter and I live, I watch the low spots in the dirty alley turn to mud puddles and the mountain maples come to life with the raucous chorus of Bohemian waxwings. I can feel my parched soul crack and fill with a texture resembling wet earth. What’s happening to me? Why can’t I muster my usual anger?

I have no idea where my wife of eight years is but I hear music and laughter in the background. “Hey, are you listening?” she asks urgently, sensing that our conversational rules are shifting to unfamiliar ground. I’m here but I’m not here, is what I’d like to say.

How can I begin to tell her about this cleansing rain? Would it make sense to explain that a personal resurrection is sweeping in with this weather front from Alaska on this holiest of Christian days? That after two dismal years my old self—the more hopeful one before the split—is returning with each precious drop of moisture? The drought is ending. Blossoms. I crave blossoms. I no longer want to be angry. “Hello? Hello? Where are you!?” she yells.

This crawling on all fours out of the cellar of anger into the warm light of sanity was the most painful and personal journey I had ever undertaken. Nothing I’ve experienced is more violent than divorce. Nothing compares to the disappointment of pulling the plug on the most intimate of relationships. Nothing is more gut wrenching than trying to explain to your child why their mother and father will not be living together. Nothing in my life had made me so angry.

We lived then in a small western town with a skyline of grain elevators, church steeples, and steep, wheat-covered hills. Apples and plum trees shaded our yard. We grew vegetables and lipstick-red tulips. I built our daughter a swing that hung from the sturdiest of oaks. Train whistles and bird song punctuated the dry air. I could depend on pheasants calling in March, lilacs blooming in April, and the deep, erasing snows of December. I could never have imagined an unhappy ending to such a life, and that faith would provide a new beginning.

My journey began with a simple request to God, a prayer from an agnostic, who considered the ritual of organized religion too constraining and who, instead, attended “church” alone in old growth cedar cathedrals and red rock temples. “Please restore peace,” I prayed. “Please give my daughter strength. Please give me strength. And, while you are at it, where can I find a good lawyer?”

When I closed my eyes and recited my newfound litany of prayers, I imagined addressing a person stronger than me, someone able to endure endless days and nights of tension, mistrust, disappointment, and abuse. Someone possessing a magical arrangement of words or a secret phone number to call to reach a certain someone who could rescue a drowning family.

At night, when I couldn’t sleep (which was most nights), I imagined and then, over time, felt the hand of this stronger man gently stroking my head, almost like a parent. Amazingly, he said to me, “You are safe. Rest now—there’s nothing else you can do tonight.”

Why I turned to this god (or God) remains a mystery. Perhaps I was like so many incarcerated felons who, when the cell doors finally slam shut, when all plea bargains have been exhausted, and now, in need of a new direction (or a favorable parole decision), they were instantly “born again.” An empty cell can bring about miraculous discoveries, but so can hours spent alone with a tragedy that is, in no small part, your own responsibility.

But I wasn’t born again. When it came to matters of religion I was barely conceived. Still, during this intense period of anger, I was not so arrogant and self-contained as to ignore that, in addition to a good attorney, I needed a spiritual guide that could indeed control my anger and anxiety. So, along with negotiating the messy unraveling of a matrimonial quilt, talking to God also became part of my daily routine.

As exhilarating as anger can be, the flame it produces is too hot to maintain for the long term. The intense heat soon exhausts the available supply of oxygen. For a brief, important period of time, I used the energy from that appealing orb of white heat, and my mind was keen and elastic, able to deal with the twist and turns of a divorce. But that same power supply faltered when I looked into the eyes of my daughter who simply needed a father to teach her to ride a bicycle, or help her with her homework, or just wash her hair. Normalcy was what she craved.

God was with me at work as I tried to lose and distract my mind in the deadlines of a magazine editorship. He hiked with me in the nearby forest of white pine and tamarack; he gave me the strength to prepare dinner when I was too tired to boil water. He led me to supporting friends and healing counselors. And I’m convinced that he kept my anger at a legal simmer when my inclination was quite honestly otherwise.

At times that I’ll never be proud of, the anger returned, like sparks flaring up weeks after a forest fire is contained. But the shovel of time extinguished the smoldering ashes and with each passing year I forgot what it was that had kept me so angry for so long.

My favorite quote regarding faith is by Soren Kierkegaard, who said, “Faith is walking as far as the light and taking one more step.” He could have been speaking about marriage, too, or driving a car on a busy freeway or simply asking a stranger for directions. Even though this explanation sounds simplistic I can’t ignore it: I prayed, peace was restored, the rains came, and God remains with me, no doubt in preparation for the next inevitable crisis. I keep seeing the light and “taking one more step.”

•••

The sun peeks through for just a second. A “sucker hole” is what the locals call this temporary, teasing ray of light. But off to the horizon a solid bank of clouds is coming in from the Pacific. It will be days before the rain stops. I’m still on the phone with my ex-wife, who asks. “Well, are you there?”

“Yes,” I reply. “I’m still here. I’m just watching the sky.”

•••

STEPHEN J. LYONS is the author of four books of essays and journalism, most recently, Going Driftless: Life Lessons from the Heartland for Unraveling Times. He is two-time recipient of a fellowship in prose writing from the Illinois Arts Council and his work has been published in more than a dozen anthologies, as well as Newsweek, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Sun, High Country News, Psychotherapy Networker, Salon, Audubon, USA Today, and dozens more. He has reviewed books for a number of newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star Tribune. He received a Notable Essay mention in The Best American Essays of 2016.

This Is My Blood

By Linda L. Crowe

I gave blood for the first time at age fifty-four. I’d wanted to give before then, but at less than one-hundred-ten pounds—the minimum weight required to donate blood—I was too scrawny.

I came from a blood-donating family; both my parents were periodic blood donors. They went about it faithfully, though without fanfare. They felt the same way about giving blood as they did about voting. It was a privilege—as well as a duty—of citizenship. When he hit his fifties, my father had to give it up. He’d faint, or come close to it, after his appointment with the needle because of his low blood pressure. My mother gave blood well into her later years. My sister and her husband both donate when the bloodmobile rolls around.

Over the years, I’d attempted to slip past Checkpoint Charlie, always to no avail. Once, in South Carolina, I even wore my steel-toed boots at the weigh-in, but the nurse—she must have worked in a prison at one time— was on to my tricks. She slapped a consolation sticker (I Tried to Give Blood Today!) on my chest and marched me back outside.

As middle age crept up on me, so did my weight. One fine day, I stood on the scale and looked down. One hundred ten. Opportunity presented itself in the form of a sign at my former church: Blood Drive Here This Thursday. 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The Methodists: “Open hearts, open minds, open doors.” Open veins, too, it would seem.

When separated into its components (red blood cells, plasma, platelets, and cryoprecipitate), one pint of blood can save three lives. The goal for this church on this day was thirty pints. Or, potentially, ninety souls.

•••

How appropriate that my first blood donation would happen at a Methodist Church. My father came from a long line of Methodists. His grandparents were Methodists in Sweden before they immigrated to Massachusetts in the late 1800s. Daddy attended a Methodist Church Camp as a boy during the Great Depression. Even his middle name was Wesley, after John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church.

My parents met at the Methodist Church in Hopewell where my mother sang soprano in the choir. I was christened there as a baby, attended before my earliest memories. I was married there when I was thirty-seven. But by the time I turned eight or ten, Mom no longer sang in the choir. She and Daddy attended only sporadically, making special appearances on Boy Scout Sunday, when Dad’s scout troop marched the flag in, or if I played my flute for a special hymn. Sometimes, not even then. By the time of their divorce when I was nineteen, my father was an absentee on the membership roles, and my mother was a self-declared atheist.

Except for a brief time in college, and despite my parents’ religious apathy, I’d gone to a Methodist church all my life, even attending as a girl when my parents had stopped. I was a pious little thing back then, though I’m not sure where it came from. I loved the hymns, the advent wreaths, the Easter cantatas. But after all those years, did I still buy the whole bit about the magic baby, forgiveness, resurrection, life after death? For that matter, did I ever?

When I lived in South Carolina in the early 1990s, I attended a tiny rural Methodist church. One Sunday in May, a young college-aged woman stood up to testify. “If a man came in this church right this minute with a gun and threatened to kill anyone who was a Christian, I would stand up and say, Jesus Christ is my risen Lord and Savior.” She continued in her heavy southern accent. “And I wouldn’t be afraid because I believe in life after death.”

Wow, I thought. I wanted to have that kind of faith. It would make things so much simpler. Maybe I just needed to try harder. Pray more. Just keep showing up. Which is how I arrived at Nelson UMC in 1996, after I married and moved to Nelson County. I liked this small church immediately. The choir seemed overjoyed to have another alto. The congregation took on meaningful projects. The men worked on Habitat houses. The women knitted prayer shawls for cancer patients. The members of the church collected school supplies, coats, mosquito nets for communities in need both near and far. Most of the congregation seemed heavily biased in favor the Virginia Tech Hokies (always a good thing in my book). I had found a new church home.

When my mother died in 2008, I took what I intended to be a temporary leave of absence from church. She’d lived two hours away in Hopewell and during her six-month illness, I traveled down there a couple of times a week. Combined with my more-than-full-time job, I was away from home a lot. Sunday had become the only day I had to relax at home with my husband, do laundry, help him with projects, maybe cook supper.

During this time, I missed seeing people in church, and I missed singing in the choir. But Nelson is a small county. I ran into folks in the grocery store, the library, the farmer’s market. “When are you coming back to church?” they’d ask. “When things settle down,” I told them. I would return to Sunday morning worship when things got less hectic.

Worship. Who was I kidding? When you sing in the choir, you don’t have time to actually worship. Right off the bat, you’re looking at the bulletin to see what hymns you’ll be singing that morning, then marking them in your hymnal. Even during the pastoral prayer, you can’t really concentrate because you don’t know exactly when it’s going to end and when it does, you’ve got to chime in with the Choral Response. Will it be the three-fold or the seven-fold Amen? You lean over to whisper to your fellow alto, trying not to make a spectacle of yourself, but because you’re sitting right up front near the altar, you’re doing just that.

There were other problems for me as well. In my mind, a lot of what came after Christ’s life, and always in the name of Christ, didn’t seem consistent with Christ’s message of acceptance, tolerance, and non-violence. In the Methodist church for example, homosexuals are welcome in the congregation, but not in the pulpit. With all the starving and homeless people in the world, why the focus on homosexuality? The Bible makes some references to it for sure, but it is even more clear on topics like adultery and killing, as in Thou Shalt Not. Methodists’ open minds, it seemed, opened only so far.

When we sang “Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War. With the Cross of Jesus, Going on Before,” I used to wonder, “Why not Marching as to Peace?” After September 11 and the wars that followed, I couldn’t sing that hymn anymore. I would stand with my hymnal in hand and not even mouth the words. I could barely stomach it when the minister read Psalm 137, ending with “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” Jesus must get himself stinky drunk when he sees the twisted ways we’ve interpreted the Bible. Thou Shalt Not Kill. Were there some exception clauses that I missed along the way?

My Sunday school teachers taught me that Jesus is love. The ministers all along the way explained that when Jesus died, he became part of the Holy Trinity— the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. God is omniscient, they said, and omnipotent to boot. I thought about the on-going world condition that included genocide, poverty, and violence. If God was all-knowing and all-powerful, I reasoned, then he wasn’t all good.

I did not return to church immediately following Mom’s death in June of 2008. Dad’s Alzheimer’s had worsened, my sister and I had moved him into an assisted living facility, and I was on the road more than ever. Yet the following Christmas Eve, I attempted a re-entry.

I’d always loved the quiet excitement of the midnight service. Candles lit, poinsettias on the altar, the evergreen scent of the Advent tree. But now a large projection screen hung from behind the altar. Suddenly something like a comet swirled across the screen as though from another planet, and at the end of the tail lay a baby in a manger, as a large deep voice boomed, “And Unto You is Born This Night, in the City of David, A Savior, Who is Christ the Lord.”

“Christ in a bucket!” my mother used to swear when exasperated. Christ on a comet, I thought now. It was too much. I slipped out the back door before the end of the service and drove back through the night toward home.

Life is full of inconsistencies, but here was the real question for me. Could I worship someone or something I wasn’t sure I believed in to begin with? Christian faith. After a lifetime of looking for it, practicing it, even faking it, I had to admit it. I just didn’t have it. What I did have finally was the required poundage, and now another cross beckoned. The Red Cross.

•••

It was raining when I arrived at the fellowship hall to donate blood. The workers were still setting up, and three or four donors were ahead of me as I filed past the greeting table manned by church volunteers. “Given before?” asked a friendly-faced man I didn’t know.

“This is my first time,” I said.

“Good!” said Dawn, a woman from the church I’d always liked. “You’re mine!” She peeled off a sticker and wrote the number 1 on it. She handed me some reading material, and I took my place in a row of seats to wait.

I looked around. This fellowship hall had been built since I’d last worshipped here. Gleaming acrylic floors replaced dull tiles. Brass chandeliers brightened the room, providing cheerful contrast to the gloom outdoors. Though they’d been stashed away for today, I could picture the folding tables and chairs that usually filled this space; could almost smell the fried chicken, garden vegetable side dishes, and vanilla-wafered banana pudding that adorned the counter during the many covered dish dinners I’d enjoyed here over the years. Now this busy place prepared to give sustenance of another kind.

Sanford Shepard, a rising senior at Nelson County High School was seated in a chair beside me, tapping away on his iPhone. He was a babe in arms when I’d first come to this church, seventeen years ago.

“How did your soccer season turn out?” I asked. His picture had been in the paper more than once that spring.

“We lost 2 to 1 in the regional semi-finals,” he said. “Lost to a Northern Virginia school though, so that’s not too bad.”

“Not bad at all,” I agreed. Little Nelson County High School had just graduated one hundred seventy seniors. The Northern Virginia school would probably graduate ten times that number. Then I asked something else that was on my mind. “Have you given blood before?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said politely, then returned to his phone.

I was impressed. You can start donating blood when you’re sixteen years old, with a parents’ permission. Here he was, maybe seventeen, with multiple pints under his belt.

The Dalai Lama says that kindness is his religion. I’ve been giving that a try, but constant kindness is harder than it sounds. The Bible, the Buddhists, even the Boy Scouts entreat us to be pure in thought, word, and deed. As difficult as it is to constantly do good deeds, that’s the easiest one of the three. Followed by words. I curse and sometimes take the Lord’s name in vain. Even when I try not to, I slip up. If someone swerves into my lane, the first thing out of my mouth is “shit,” which may well be the last thing out of my mouth someday.

But thoughts? How is it possible to maintain integrity in thought? I’m working on it, but it seems an insurmountable task. Mostly I’m thankful that people aren’t mind readers. I remind myself that each day offers a new opportunity to make a new start. To work harder. To try to be better. Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight.

For me, it was one step at a time. One thought at a time, one word at a time. And in that fellowship hall, I’d joined others who were doing their good deed for the day.

After a bit, a uniformed woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties, and who sounded exactly like Whitney Houston when she spoke, led me behind a small curtained enclosure for a “mini-physical.” If I passed it, I could advance to a questionnaire. If that went well, I’d “get the chair.”

I passed the physical—great temp, super blood pressure—but nearly balked at the finger prick. I hated those things worse than I hated needles. It’s practically impossible to sit calmly while someone jabs something sharp into your oh-so-sensitive fingertip. You never know exactly when they’re going to do it, so you try not to anticipate it and pull back, but you do anyway. It’s just dreadful.

I thought of my son, who needed surgery on his arm when he fell off a ladder. And of my other son, who climbs tall trees with chain saws. I thought of my nephew who recently joined the Marines at a time when the nation is at war. And of his brother, who joined the police force at a time when Virginians have never been more armed and dangerous. It is better to give than to receive.

I survived the finger prick.

I breezed through the questionnaire, which contained everything from where I’ve lived over the years (might I have been exposed to Mad Cow disease in England?) to questions about my sex life. I was escorted to a comfortable lounge chair. Whitney Houston swabbed my left arm with brown liquid, waited thirty seconds, then did it again. This time she made Van Gogh swirls until the crook of my elbow looked like an abstract painting, suitable for framing. “My artwork,” she said with a Mona Lisa smile.

I dreaded what came next, that horror of a needle. I made myself look elsewhere.

Elsewhere happened to be where young Sanford reclined, blood flowing from his athletic arm to a bag, nearly full. A boy’s blood.

All the ways young men can and do lose their blood— often in great quantities— flooded my mind. Car crashes, athletic injuries, plain old foolishness. I saw chainsaws, mortar rounds, bullets. Blood everywhere.

“We got it,” Whitney said, and I watched my own blood fill the clear tubing like tomato juice through a crazy straw.

There is no substitute for human blood, and in the U.S. and Canada, we need a lot of it; one person or another needs blood every three seconds. Patients use 43,000 donated pints each and every day. Shortages of all blood types occur during the summer, and winter holidays.

•••

A few years ago, I dreamed about Jesus. He was the Caucasian Jesus presented to me in childhood, fair-skinned with long reddish-blond hair and beard. He was seated under a tree, beckoning small children to come unto him. I don’t remember what else happened except that when I awoke, there was no doubt in my mind—none—that Jesus Christ was the risen Lord and Savior. I had the feeling that I’d found what I’d searched for all my life. The whole deal, it was all true. I retained this assurance, and with it a feeling of joy, throughout the morning.

Then the doubts began to set in. Jesus wasn’t a white man bedecked in spotless flowing robes. He was a roaming Middle-Eastern man who bore more resemblance to Osama bin Laden than the Jesus of my girlhood. My dream must have been more of an aspiration than a visitation. Had Jesus really taken time out of his busy schedule to appeal to my skepticism? My certainty faded. Did I not have the strength to believe, or was it all in my mind? I prayed for the vision to come again, but it never did. Was it a visitation, or was it just a dream? I didn’t know. But over time, I’ve gained clarity on what it is I do believe.

I believe that there are more people who claim to have spoken directly to God than who actually have. I believe that Jesus is among those who actually have. I believe that his practice of embracing the poor, the sick, those disenfranchised by society, showed us a way to be good in the world. I believe what we do here and now is more important what comes after this life.

And what I was doing here, was giving blood. While my bag filled, I recalled so much time spent in so many hospitals. My mother’s cancer surgery, my father’s heart valve replacement, my husband’s adrenalectomy. Our sons, our friends, our families. All those operations. All that blood lost and replaced. It was always there and I rarely gave it a thought.

But I saw it now. My mother and father in a blood mobile in Hopewell. Big city people in line at collection centers. Rural people in country churches. This is my blood, shed for you.

Twenty minutes after I started, I joined other freshly bled people in the recovery area, drinking juice and chatting. Sanford was back with his phone.

I should have asked him how many pints he’s donated in his life thus far. All I knew was that I had some catching up to do. That day, I made a start.

•••

LINDA L. CROWE lives in Nelson County, Virginia, with her husband Kevin, big-hearted dog Tem, and mean-spirited cat Mildred. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Virginia Forests Magazine, Slaughterhouse, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Full Grown People, NPR’s Open Mic, and Studio Potter.

The Stars Are Not for Man

space guy — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Joelle Renstrom

“All the earlier changes your race has known took countless ages. But this is a transformation of the mind, not of the body. By the standards of evolution, it will be cataclysmic… It has already begun.”

—Arthur Clarke, Childhood’s End

On New Year’s Day, I huddled next to a space heater on the porch as snow piled up on the windowsills. It was four p.m., that dead time between day and night. The utter lack of change blanketed everything, much like the snowflakes that dropped from the sky, unhurried and sticking fast, piling up like days, weeks, and years. It had been a year and a half since Dad died, since I moved back to my hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Eighteen months seemed like an arbitrary measure of time; I had been there forever—perhaps I had never left.

I spent some time that day putting together a syllabus for a class I’d be teaching that winter called “The Evolution of Science Fiction.” One the works I most looked forward to teaching was Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End. In the book, a mysterious alien race called the Overlords descends upon earth and eliminates famine, war, and crime, ushering in a utopia. The humans don’t know the Overlords’ ultimate objective, but it becomes clear they’re trying to prompt an evolutionary leap in the human race—a leap that the Overlords themselves cannot make because although they’re technologically superior, they’re otherwise limited, or, as Clarke puts it, “trapped in some evolutionary cul-de-sac.”

“Evolutionary cul-de-sac” described my feelings about Kalamazoo. I’d already lived nineteen years of my life there, and when I went to the grocery store or to work, I ran into people who’d known me since I was a kid. Even though everything was different now, it was hard to escape the powerful orbit of history. On New Year’s Day, my thoughts solidified into a single goal: I needed to leave Kalamazoo. I needed to continue evolving. The stakes were immeasurably higher than the first time I left home, college-bound, still a kid. In a few months, I’d be turning thirty.

I started a blitz, applying to jobs from California to Cairo. I sent out at a dozen applications each week, waiting for the tiniest nudge in any direction. None came.

Toward the middle of February, we started reading Childhood’s End in the science fiction class. Another line echoed ceaselessly in my mind, an admonition from the Overlords: “The stars are not for man.” I seemed to be sending my CVs into a black hole—most of the time I didn’t even get the courtesy of a rejection. Is the universe telling me that the vast expanse out there isn’t for me? I wondered.

The day Arthur Clarke died, I spent hours in my dad’s office, sometimes spinning around slowly in his desk chair. The shelves were almost empty. I hadn’t yet taken down the pictures that showed us the way my dad had seen us: backlit against a campfire, laughing over a board game at the table, stuffing our faces with chocolate while dressed in soggy Halloween costumes. The family on the wall seemed unfamiliar, as though it could have come with the frames. In the third drawer of Dad’s desk, I found a stack of my own poems. I read them all, as though I’d never seen them before. If I concentrated, if I pushed my brain back through the quicksand of time, I could picture who I had been when I wrote them. That person was gone, yet like the family on the wall, she haunted any space still open to the past.

Clarke’s death felt like an omen. The death of a visionary felt to me like the death of a vision—the death of my vision. I’d expected the job search to be rough, but I hadn’t expected to be still entirely unacknowledged almost four months into the process. Unless I went to a random place on a wing and a prayer, I might not go anywhere at all. Come late May, contracts for the next academic year here in Kalamazoo would arrive; what if I signed one after the other after the other? I envisioned another year, or five, or ten, of unlocking the door of Friedmann Hall’s third floor and entering the same hallway that smelled of sneakers and White Out and microwave popcorn. A universe folding under its own weight.

The months rolled by. Kalamazoo was the last place I’d expected to be when I turned thirty. I still had no leads on a job or a new place to live, no indications of the change I’d been pursuing with increasingly frantic abandon. Was it okay that at age thirty, I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going, that I was as clueless as a child? Even though I was back at the starting point of my personal history, I felt way off the map. On my thirtieth birthday, I drove to a cabin in the middle of the woods even though I knew my life and everything I wanted to leave behind would find me in the end.

I shivered under my birthday moon and pulled the drawstrings of my hood until it was a small circle around my face. I thought about how Arthur Clarke gave a clipping of his hair to a company that sent it on a three-week suborbital ride to space and then returned, ready for another mission—perhaps a longer, more permanent one. Clarke’s DNA has and will travel to places he wrote about; theoretically, an alien civilization could reconstruct his genetic code. Either way, the stuff of Arthur Clarke could exist indefinitely and infinitely. Could the idea that one’s DNA can be perpetuated far beyond one’s physical body explain the many times I’ve felt Dad’s presence, sometimes uncannily enough to prompt me to look around?

If they have the ability, the sentient races in Childhood’s End evolve to a transcendent state in which they join an infinite consciousness, the essence of all things—the Brahman. When they do, they transcend reason, corporeality, time, and space. When I first read the book, I wasn’t sure what to make of Clarke’s fusion of spirituality and science fiction. Later in life, he ceased believing in what he called “superstition,” but I found my trajectory to be just the opposite.

What if life and death as we think we know them are only two stages of existing? What if spirits or essences can exist in an infinite number of forms not limited to corporeality or to conventional conceptions of an afterlife? Between what we think of as life and death, there might be countless planes of existence or realms where anyone departed from earth could dwell, neither alive nor dead, in some form unrecognizable or unconceivable to us. What if there are actually seven dimensions, or eleven, or twenty-eight, and what if some of them are places or spaces we go when we die? What if Dad, or Arthur Clarke, lingered in such interstitial spaces, uncategorized and uncategorizable, defying nothingness? What if the sense that he’s around me isn’t just me unable to accept that he’s truly gone—what if it’s me sensing his particle waves, the way one senses that a radio is on in an adjacent room?

•••

After my birthday, I redoubled my efforts to move, keeping in mind Arthur Clarke’s second law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” My dad’s diagnosis and death had thrust me into positions I never would have chosen for myself: caretaker, custodian of information I didn’t want to possess, watcher of death. Everything felt impossible, and in some ways still did. But as I became a person I didn’t want to be in a place I didn’t want to be, I also became something I’d had no need to become before—the architect and guardian of hope.

If the universe gives us what we need, rather than what we want, then the story of my life—or at least my perspective on that story—changes. There had to be a moment that changed everything. There had to be a place to leave, a life to leave, a me to leave in order to go back to Kalamazoo. And there had to be a Kalamazoo to leave in order for me to rebuild and evolve. There had to be a time and place for me to decide to make my life about something other than Dad’s death.

•••

At the end of May, I got an email from Emerson College about an adjunct teaching gig. I booked a ticket to Boston and sent my resume to every college and high school in the city. A week later, I got on a plane and then spent five days lugging a suitcase to job interviews and to apartment showings. I put all my eggs in that basket. One doesn’t make it to the stars by playing it safe.

Dad would have been excited at the prospect of my moving to Boston—he had taken us there on a family vacation when I was nine. I allowed myself a brief fantasy of walking down Massachusetts Avenue with him, past Harvard and MIT, pausing on the bridge to look at the sun glinting off the State House. Whatever place I next inhabited, he would never visit me there. That thought slayed me, but at the same time, I felt curiously liberated. For the first time since he died, I felt like a real person with hopes and dreams and a future that made my stomach buzz with excitement. Was it possible that after all this time dizzying myself with the unanswerable why, Dad’s death could take on meaning if I looked at it as a catalyst for evolution?

Childhood’s End depicts the evolution of children into something beyond human. My evolution wouldn’t be that dramatic, but I had the distinct sense of being catapulted beyond my parents, especially my dad. And ultimately, isn’t that the point? Aren’t our predecessors supposed to pave the way for substantial movement, for progress? I hadn’t merged with the Brahman, but I was no longer the person I had been and was afraid I’d always be.

The day before I moved to Boston, where three part-time jobs and apartment awaited, I finished cleaning out Dad’s office. I boxed up the pictures and slid the nameplate out of the holder. The empty office seemed not to belong to this world, as though it was a place in limbo, waiting to be filled. It wasn’t clinging to my dad, his belongings, or his memory. It was time for Dad to inhabit some other place, and it was time for me to do the same.

On Wednesday nights at the Boston University observatory, I look through telescopes at Venus, Mars, and sometimes Jupiter and Saturn. I imagine Arthur Clarke’s DNA on an endless voyage. As I look at our solar system, a tiny parcel of space, it’s clear that time and space have only as much sway as I allow them. They, like everything else, can be modified and adapted. Arthur Clarke is right—death can beget life, and extinction can be evolution: “There lay the Overmind, whatever it might be, bearing the same relation to man as man bore to amoeba…Now it had drawn into its being everything the human race had ever achieved. This was not tragedy, but fulfillment.”

In this universe, my dad still exists. In this universe, there is room for the me that is six years old, still sitting on my dad’s knee, the me that tangles with the transition between life and death and back again, between then and now, and the me that believes that three dimensions are only the beginning.

•••

JOELLE RENSTROM is a freelance writer based in Somerville, MA. Her collection of essays, Closing the Book: Travels in Life, Loss, and Literature, was published in August; a version of this essay appeared in it. She maintains an award-winning blog, Could This Happen, about the relationship between science and science fiction. Her work has appeared in Slate, Cognoscenti, Guernica, The Toast, and others. She teaches writing with a focus on sci-fi, AI, and space at Boston University.

Testimonial

church — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Allison Green

David arrived at our house in an oversized raincoat. He’d brought a magazine for assistance; it was somewhere in the folds of that big coat. My partner Karen handed him a jelly jar, and we agreed that when he was finished he would put a candle, unlit, in the front window. Karen and I left him to his magazine and walked down the block. The day was pleasant for a Halloween in Seattle. We kicked at dry leaves heaped along the sidewalk and laughed at the strangeness of the situation, how we were waiting for David but trying not to imagine what he was doing, how none of the residents of the neighborhood could have guessed what we were waiting for.

After about fifteen minutes, the candle was in the window. As we went up the walk, I sang that Rocky Horror Picture Show song about a light in the darkness. Karen and I smiled giddily at each other, then stopped smiling so as not to spook David. I tried to act normal as we entered, not avoiding his eyes but not staring either. He was already wearing his coat. From its depths he pulled out the jar, wrapped in a washcloth to keep it warm. We thanked him. He raised his eyebrows and went out the door.

•••

Karen and I had been together twelve years when I finally agreed to have a child. We had been moving around the country for jobs and graduate school since we met in 1985, and finally we had settled back in Seattle, my hometown, with solid jobs, mine at a community college, hers at the public health department. We bought a house. I could think of no more reasons to wait.

I’d never felt an urge to have children, but Karen always had. Still, when I agreed to try, I also agreed to carry the child because of Karen’s health complications. If anything, pregnancy and birth sounded cool to me; dealing with a toddler didn’t. I put one big condition on my agreement: I wanted a known sperm donor, not an anonymous one. He didn’t have to be actively involved in the child’s life, but I wanted to be able to show the child a picture and say, “This is your father.” I was squeamish about putting a stranger’s semen in my body, not for fear of disease—the latest testing procedures seemed reliable—but because I needed to know who I was communing with on a cellular level. I needed to know what he looked like and how he talked, what he cared about and how he treated people.

After spreading the word to our friends, Karen and I found our donor in a writer I’m calling David. He had gone to graduate school with a good friend of mine, Wendy, and wasn’t attached romantically. He was interested in helping us because neither he nor his brother had had children, and they probably never would. Although he didn’t want to parent himself, he liked the idea of his family’s genes continuing on. The situation was complicated by the fact that he was living in California now, not Seattle, but we were willing to pay for his flights up, and he liked the idea of free visits to a city he loved.

David was funny and self-deprecating, which suggested a sweet vulnerability underneath. I liked him immediately and grew to feel a brotherly fondness for him. Although we didn’t have a relationship that allowed for this, I often felt the urge to lay my head on his shoulder and nestle into him.

After discussing expectations, drawing up contracts with lawyers, having medical evaluations, and charting my ovulations for a number of months, we were ready in late-1997 for the first insemination.

David left that Halloween afternoon, and Karen and I sighed, glad to be alone. In the bedroom, I shimmied out of my pants and lay down, feet up on the wall. My doctor had given us a catheter syringe and tubing, and Karen put the syringe in the jar to suck up the semen. We both squinted at the jelly jar. It had been a long time since either of us had seen that liquid. It was oddly translucent, not milky, and there didn’t seem to be much. Karen wrinkled her nose, but I was fascinated. So much intrigue surrounding such a modest substance.

Karen was having trouble getting the semen into the syringe. “Maybe a smaller jar would be better,” she said.

Finally, she got what she could into the syringe, inserted it into the tubing, and pushed the plunger. I felt nothing, not even an ooze. And now I was supposed to wait, feet on the wall, for twenty minutes. Karen sat on the edge of the bed, keeping me company. It was exciting; it was nice. I felt engaged in something purposeful and good.

The next morning I was a wreck.

•••

At the same time that Karen and I were trying to have a baby, I was casting around for a new writing topic and was drawn to the story of my great-great aunt, Ruby Jane Hall Thompson, a woman long dead. She was very large, which had earned her a nickname derived from the town in Idaho where she lived: “Lewiston,” as in “Here comes Lewiston.” It wasn’t a nickname she knew she had; my father told me his uncle used to call her that.

Ruby Jane was a Christian Science practitioner. At first I didn’t know what that meant, but I learned that a practitioner was a kind of faith healer. Christian Scientists, as I understand it, don’t believe that matter exists; our true reality is the spiritual. Believing in God means recognizing the false nature of the material world, including sickness and disease. Practitioners help Christian Scientists pray through their self-induced periods of sickness and back into right alignment with God.

What drew me to Ruby Jane was the idea of being related to a larger-than-life mystic, a western Idaho healer. I imagined Lewiston in the early twentieth century as a desolate, wind-swept town, and I imagined Ruby Jane there exerting her power in one of the few but classic ways available to women: as a kind of witch. My novel would be gothic, magical realist. I began to research Christian Science.

Mary Baker Eddy, it turned out, is the only American woman to have founded an influential religion. Born in 1821, she had health problems throughout her life, and in her ongoing quest for relief, she finally hit on the principles that would inform her famous book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Eddy must have had tremendous determination, skill, and charisma to self-publish this book, teach a growing legion of followers its principles, and start the church in 1879. By 1894 she had erected the church’s first building. By 1908, when she was eighty-seven, she had started the Christian Science Monitor. Thousands of people still attend her church. On Wednesday nights, they gather to tell stories of miraculous healing.

That the church was started by a woman, and that it is peculiarly American, with its focus on optimism and boot-strapping, made it all the more fascinating. My great-great aunt Ruby Jane was born while Eddy was still alive, and the founding mother must have been a thrilling model of what a woman could be. Indeed, the church is quite female-centric; the Lord’s Prayer begins with “Our Father-Mother.” I imagined Ruby Jane as an ancestress of power and wisdom. I would go in search of her.

•••

When the inseminations began, I had been on Prozac for a year. After a decade of attempting to manage my many bouts of anxiety with meditation, hypnosis, exercise, and therapy, I had given in: Give me the drug. It worked, to some extent. Going on Prozac felt like finally taking an aspirin after a life-long headache; suddenly I could see more clearly and function more smoothly. As Karen and I began talking about having a baby, I researched the influence of Prozac on fetuses. Although there was a small risk of damage, many researchers said that the risk of depression was equally bad if not worse, so it was hard to say whether a woman should stop taking the drug. I decided not. Still, sometimes it didn’t seem to be helping.

The morning after insemination, I felt as if I’d mainlined fear and shame. What if the donor is infertile? What if he has HIV after all? What if I get pregnant and it feels like an alien sucking at my insides? Why do Karen and I have to share such an intimate act with a stranger? Why do I have to hold such a humiliating position against the wall? What is this body that used to be mine?

I did everything I knew to reduce the anxiety: writing down my fears, giving myself pep talks, going to yoga, working out. As usual, the tension would take days to dissipate.

Nine days later, I got my period. Maybe we mistimed my ovulation or maybe my cycle was weirdly short that month, but we were using an ovulation predictor kit and monitoring my cervical fluid, although it was often hard to read. One of the challenges of the process was predicting ovulation with enough accuracy to get David on a flight in time to be at our house during the fertility window. He hated to fly, and as the months went by and I didn’t get pregnant, his fear ballooned. He came off the plane each time sweaty and weak, which couldn’t have helped his sperm count.

In December, I made a chart of the logistics: David was arriving on Thursday. Whether the ovulation kit was positive or not, we would have to inseminate. If the kit was positive on Friday, then pregnancy was still possible. If it wasn’t yet positive Saturday, then we had wasted the month. What were we doing? Had my demand that we have a known donor doomed us to fail? Did I really want a child?

•••

One of the terms from Christian Science that captivated me was “malicious animal magnetism.” The idea of “animal magnetism” was around in the nineteenth century, and Eddy added the word “malicious” to the phrase. It’s a way of describing evil, and in Eddy’s theology, evil always comes in the form of bad thoughts, that is, thoughts that contradict or undermine God. Therefore, people’s thoughts can be corrupted by malicious animal magnetism. In her memoir about growing up Christian Scientist, Blue Windows, Barbara Wilson calls malicious animal magnetism the “repressed madness” inevitably created by a church that focuses so relentlessly on the positive. She says Eddy was paranoid about competing healers and used the phrase to refer to their attacks on her.

The idea of evil as something tempting and animalistic somehow makes it less frightening to me; it’s not deliberate but subconscious, a feeling that sweeps one up and makes one do things. It’s the evil wrought by a scared cat, lashing and hissing from a corner. When the fear passes, the cat retracts its claws.

My anxieties seemed like a form of malicious animal magnetism. And like the Eddy cure—which was thinking right thoughts—various authors, doctors, and therapists had suggested that I write down my thoughts when I felt anxious and analyze them. So I did: It was obvious that I was afraid of having a child. But I was also afraid of not having one. And I was afraid that my anxieties about having or not having a child would hound me throughout the entire insemination process. In other words, I was anxious about anxiety. This was ridiculous. Surely it was normal for a woman embarking on a pregnancy to be afraid. I needed to accept the uncertainty of the situation and relax, let the cat retract its claws. Of course, relaxation was easier said than done. Maybe what I needed was a practitioner.

•••

The following June, I skipped insemination to go to Boston on a Christian Science pilgrimage. I saw the Eddy monument in Mount Auburn Cemetery. I listened to a tour guide at the Mother Church talk about why she wore glasses; she wasn’t spiritually advanced enough yet not to use them. I walked through the Mapparium, the stunning, three-story, stained-glass globe made in the 1930s of over six hundred glass panels. I wondered if Ruby Jane had ever seen it.

One afternoon I sat on the outdoor patio of Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, reading the copy of Science and Health I had picked up in a used bookstore. Men played chess nearby, and pigeons strutted beneath the table. According to Eddy, prayer should be silent; loud prayer excites the emotions. Prayer as it is often practiced is not that useful; it tends to make us hypocrites, as we promise God things we can’t or won’t deliver. In any case, God knows our thoughts already.

This conception of prayer sounded sensible. Prayer should be silent, like the silence I was trying to coax out of my body through yoga and meditation. I shouldn’t make promises to be less anxious, just strive to be. One of my yoga teachers said, “You don’t breathe; the world breathes you.” Replace “the world” with “God” and the phrase would mesh with Eddy’s philosophy.

Indeed, it was striking how Eddy’s ideas dovetailed with so many of those made by the books and therapists who had tried to soothe me over the years. In a book on meditation, for example, the author said that he noticed a small lump on his neck and started to worry. The lump had been there for a while, but it wasn’t until he noticed it that he became afraid. In other words, his mind made him afraid, not the lump. Eddy would have concurred. She would have gone further and said the lump didn’t exist. Still, Eddy and this author shared a common solution: Stop thinking about it; think of something else.

I drank my coffee, listening to the chess players smack their timers. Maybe Ruby Jane could help me. Maybe I could conjure her when the fears threatened to overwhelm. Or when I was lying there, feet on the wall, willing the sperm to dance on up to the egg and get introduced. I didn’t have to become a Christian Scientist to recognize the value of positive thinking. Or to mentally rely on my ancestress, the faith healer.

•••

In July, we seemed to have timed the insemination just right. My mucous was stretchy; the ovulation predictor turned a positive shade of blue; David was punctual. But I didn’t get pregnant.

In August we agreed to try one last time. By now we weren’t awkward with each other, even as Karen and I returned from our walk. David could get his part of the job done in nine minutes. We opened the front door, and I joked, “My man!” He passed over the jar.

This time, we all knew that I probably wouldn’t get pregnant with David’s sperm. We smiled tenderly at each other, hugged. We said goodbye. Karen and I went into the bedroom, and I put my heels on the wall. All weekend afterward I cried and moped. It felt as if someone had died. I was sad for us, sad for David, sad for what could have been.

On Wednesday, I got in the car and drove the five hours from Seattle to Lewiston, Idaho. The trip took me through an area of southeastern Washington called the Palouse, a surreal landscape of undulating brown hills that rippled to the horizon. Driving through them was like winding through a maze with no obvious exit. Once I had emerged from them, I confronted the Lewiston Grade.

Lewiston is at the bottom of an abrupt two thousand foot drop from the plateau of eastern Washington to a valley where the Snake and Clearwater Rivers converge. The highway built in the 1970s smoothly descends to the city, but the old highway, called the Lewiston Grade, sweeps back and forth in sixty-four curves, an engineering marvel of its time. Both my parents, who grew up in the region, remember sickening ascents and descents of the old highway, so of course I had to drive into Lewiston that way. The disconcerting series of switchbacks, a trip Ruby Jane must have taken many times, made for an atmospheric entrance to Lewiston.

After checking into my motel, I went to the public library and found Ruby Jane listed as a practitioner in a 1941 phone directory. It gave me her address, and I drove to her house, a modest, two-story structure near the cemetery. The church she attended had been abandoned for a new one in 1965, so I couldn’t see it, but I still wanted to attend a Christian Science service in Lewiston.

I entered the church that evening hesitantly, wearing a dress purchased for the occasion—I didn’t otherwise own one—and hoping not to attract too much attention. A dozen people, mostly women, were sitting in blonde pews. I took a spot in the back. The early evening sun saturated the colors in the glass panes: red, purple, and an earthy, 1960s orange-brown. On the wall hung two quotes, one from Eddy—”Divine love always has met and always will meet all human needs”—and the familiar “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

I had timed my trip to be here for the Wednesday night service, traditionally devoted to testimonies of healing. I wasn’t prepared for the coincidence of the evening’s topic: reproduction. A man sat at a card table in front of the pews and read passages from the Bible and Science and Health, passages which I later learned are chosen by the Mother Church and read at every service on that day throughout the Christian Science world.

One reading expressed the idea that children are not created from matter but from idea/mind. I listened, looking down at the place where my belly would swell if I were pregnant. If Ruby Jane were still alive, and if I had the courage to explain the inseminations to her, she would probably have said that my failures until now had been my fault, that I hadn’t believed enough. It was true that I had trouble believing I would get pregnant; it seemed fantastical that a child could coalesce out of cells swarming in my fallopian tubes. But hadn’t I done all I could, given the circumstances?

The reading went on, contending that parents must take as much or more care planning their children as they would propagating crops or breeding livestock. This language was straight out of the eugenics movement, a popular effort in the early twentieth century to “purify” the human race; it used the cover of science to mask its racist, homophobic, and anti-immigrant intentions. If I had needed some prompt to help me better imagine my great-great aunt’s time, this was it. Ruby Jane had probably believed in eugenics, and she would have been horrified by my request for help with my fertility. Not only was I a lesbian, but the father-to-be was the son of immigrants. Better, she might have said, to let this opportunity pass.

I listened with growing skepticism to the testimonials that followed the readings. One woman got over a headache by reading the Statement of Being. Another said she had been praying about the recent bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. She didn’t like Muslims—Hindus were okay—but she was trying to love universally.

A third woman said her child had felt fine during the week but something strange had appeared on her face. The girl didn’t understand why she couldn’t go outside to play. The mother put her in front of the mirror and said, “Do you want people to see you like that? No? Then you will stay inside until you look the way you want people to see you.” Surely the girl had chicken pox. And surely the mother knew she was contagious but couldn’t admit it. What a twisted way to deny disease.

My romantic obsession with my great-great aunt ended right there. Ruby Jane was probably only as wise as her time and place allowed; we probably wouldn’t have liked each other. At least, we wouldn’t have agreed on much. I had come to Lewiston to learn the truth, and the truth had set me free.

•••

My period arrived that month as usual; I would never get pregnant. I continued to work on a novel inspired by Christian Science, but it would go nowhere, even when I ran across the story of a woman, a contemporary of Eddy’s, who got pregnant when her husband was out of town and claimed Eddy was the father. A lovely twist on lesbian insemination.

Karen and I broke up a year later, for reasons unrelated to the pregnancy attempt. As I tried to understand why I had gone through insemination despite a lack of maternal urges, I came to understand that having a child with David, friend of Wendy, was a way to create an extended family, whether the members of that family were genetically related to me or not; I wanted us bound to each other, loving unconditionally, the way families are supposed to be.

When I considered the pleasures of childrearing, they weren’t what most mothers probably think of first: the cuddling, the joyful giggling, the birthday glee. Rather, I was thinking of a community of relatives and friends joined by the connections among our children. I imagined sharing coffee with other parents while our children ran in and out; imagined barbecues and croquet games and badminton; imagined roving holiday feasts. What I was remembering was the community my parents had made at a midwestern university when my father was on tenure track there. The most fun I ever had was darting through the parties of drunken academics, like the summer party where the associate dean roasted a sheep in his backyard or the winter party where the anthropologist taught me to fold wonton skins. That is, it wasn’t a child I wanted but a community, and my insistence on a known donor was related to that desire.

My obsession with Ruby Jane was related, too, to a desire for connection, one that stretched back through time and ancestry. She represented a visionary woman, someone on whom I could call for strength and clarity. But ultimately, I realized that whatever genetics we had in common, we probably didn’t have much else.

Some years after my last insemination attempt, Wendy called one June afternoon to say the baby had almost arrived. I raced to the hospital and ran into the room just a few minutes before Eva’s little head and gangly body emerged. The midwife handed Eva to Wendy’s husband, and we all smiled, breathless and awestruck. Every year thereafter, I have been invited to Eva’s birthday party. And the children run in and out, and the adults drink wine, and the party goes on well into the evening.

•••

ALLISON GREEN is the author of a memoir, The Ghosts Who Travel with Me (Ooligan), and a novel, Half-Moon Scar (St. Martin’s). Her essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Utne Reader, Calyx, The Common, and other publications. Web site: allisongreen.org.

The Lack of Confidence Man

By Lad Tobin

From the second I read the subject line of the email—“More Information Regarding Your Apartment Check-In!”—I felt queasy. Having spent weeks looking for a one-month rental in New York and only finding places that were booked, bleak, or insanely expensive, I’d gotten used to the idea that our plan wasn’t going to work. But then, just minutes after requesting information about a beautiful apartment I found on craigslist, Gibbson’s response popped into my inbox:

Hello tobin! i am so glad to hear from you that you would love to take my apartment! I will be more than happy to keep and maintain the place for you on your arrival. The cost for a month will be $3000 and i am willingly and ready to give you discount of $600 so you are require to pay the sum of only $2400. You are require 50% of the total fund ($1200) to secure the dates you have chosen also a security deposit of $200. You are require to pay $1200 + security deposit of $200 = $1400 the total fund to pay to secure and book the dates for you will be $1400. The apartment is much available so you will need to give me more information with the exact date that you will be checking in so that i can book the date for you to avoid other people to book for the same date, i do not like disappointment so i will be more than happy to know the exact date for check in so that i can keep and retain the place for you and your wife. Here is the link for more information or pictures https://post.craigslist.org/manage/1275981629/368jey.

I will be glad to hear from you asap. Regards Jeff Gibbson

This was way too much information for me to take in all at once: we already have the apartment? We’re getting a discount? But we need to send the deposit right away so no one else books it first?

Part of my queasiness was sticker shock: after all, $2400 for a single month’s rental was a lot of money and I am more than capable of feeling buyer’s remorse even before I buy; still, we knew from the start that this “small-towners spend a month in the big city” experience was not going to come cheap. No, there was something besides the cost that was making me feel like I was being pulled into a bad dream.

And that’s when I had to confront an uncomfortable question: was I really so petty (or, worse, so prejudiced) that I was bothered by a few uses of non-standard English, by the fact that this Mr. Jeff Gibbson was clearly a non-native speaker of English? Even while I knew that this might be what was bothering me, I deeply hoped it wasn’t. After all, I was by temperament, politics, and occupation (I teach college students how to write) conditioned to be sympathetic and open to struggling writers, including non-standard speakers of English and so I knew it would be illogical, un-PC, and flat-out unfair to draw any negative impressions or inferences about someone’s character based on a couple of unusual idioms. I could painfully imagine how well—or how poorly—I could write my own version of that same letter in my pitiful, supposedly “reading comprehension” French (“Bonjour, Gibbson, Je suis tres joyeux…”).

But there was more than an inelegant turn of phrase that made me nervous about Gibbson’s note; there was also his unsettling eagerness. I knew from all my fruitless searching that there was a seller’s market for what Gibbson had to offer, so why was he so amped up about my interest and so eager to close the deal right away? There was his almost spell-inducing listing and repetition of prices and numbers. And, still more disconcerting, there was his assumption that my request for info about availability and rates was actually a commitment: “i am so glad to hear from you that you would love to take my apartment.” I was certainly interested in his place or I wouldn’t have written him, but what’s love got to do with it? And why had he already moved on to the details of our check in?

All of this seemed to add up to a not-so-subliminal message: act right away or you will lose out. Even the supposedly reassuring phrase—“the apartment is much available”—seemed intended (from the rest of the sentence and paragraph) to convey the very opposite—the idea that the apartment was not much available but was, in fact, in much demand and, therefore, required an immediate commitment and deposit.

And, finally, there was that ominous-sounding phrase—“i do not like disappointment.” Wasn’t that a wise guy’s understated way of saying “Disappoint me at your own risk; I’m not messing around here”?

•••

Here are two facts about me: one, I have almost never been conned or even pushed into a bad deal. Two, I walk around the world with my own little personal homeland security advisory system and—like the government’s post 9/11 Homeland Security Advisement System which keeps its terror warning constantly high, even in the absence of any known or immediate threat—I normally run somewhere between yellow and orange. In other words, skepticism is my default mode; introduce the slightest bit of suspicious behavior and I start trending towards red alert. For all of my life I’ve connected those facts. I’ve believed that I never get conned because I’m always on guard, always reading between the lines, always fearing that every subtext has a sub-subtext. Determined to avoid the double pain of a material loss followed by a how-could-I-have-been-so-stupid? blow to my ego, I’ve always reacted to every offer that sounds good by telling myself that it sounds too good to be true.

•••

Clicking on the link to Gibbson’s apartment for maybe the fiftieth time that night, I saw that he had just added a new link: “More pictures of apartment.” Looking at one of the additional shots, I had a sudden sense of déjà vu: I was certain I had seen that photo before. And, in fact, it only took me a few minutes of scanning through my bookmarks to find that very photo in an ad for an apartment on a website that advertised short-term home rentals. But weirdest of all, except for the photos and the opening line—“An elegant apartment in a top New York neighborhood”—nothing from this ad matched up with the craigslist ad. The owner was listed not as Jeff Gibbson, but as Jack Marsh; the apartment, according to the availability calendar, was already rented for the entire fall; and there was nothing about any $600 discount.

So whose apartment was this, anyway? I decided to email Gibbson to see if he could clear things up:

Hello Jeff. Thanks for sending me that information about your apartment. I am interested but I have a few questions: First, I saw an ad for the same apartment on another website and on that website it says that the apartment is already rented for September. It gives the owner’s name as Jack Marsh. Are you renting the apartment from him? And do you have his permission to sublet it to someone else? If so, could I speak with him, too? Finally, if I came to New York in the next few days, could you show me the apartment? I look forward to hearing from you soon.

This time, Gibbson didn’t answer right away; in fact, this time he didn’t answer at all. Not wanting to lose the apartment, I decided to email Marsh directly. Within the hour, my phone rang. “Hello, Jack Marsh here. You emailed me?”

He was calling to say that the apartment I had seen online was already rented but that he had another apartment which was available for September. He gave me the address of the link so I could look at it while we talked. This available apartment —“we call it ‘The Miller,’” Marsh said, “because the playwright Arthur Miller, you know, from Death of a Salesman, he once lived in it”—looked nice enough. The problem was that the Gibbson apartment looked much nicer and had, off the living room, a beautiful, little terrace with two appealingly-angled Adirondacks chair and a little wooden table where we could place our hot coffee or glasses of red wine while we read novels and the Sunday Times. I realized that I wasn’t ready to give that up.

“But is the bigger one available as a sublet?”

“No. I never allow subletters.”

“Well, I think your other apartment might be available as a sublet; I saw it advertised on another website for September rental.”

“It must have been an old ad.”

“No, I saw it yesterday. And actually I’ve been emailing with the guy who placed the ad.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly confused. Then, just a beat later, he said “Oh” again. But this time he didn’t sound confused it all; he sounded like he just figured something out. “The ad you saw? It’s is a scam; it was put on craigslist by a con artist pretending that my apartment is his.”

“But he had all those pictures of the apartment.”

“Yeah; they just copy ’em. It’s simple enough for them to do. Hey, could you send me the link so I can email craigslist and get his ad taken down?” Clearly this whole experience was easier for Mr. Marsh to shrug off than it was for me.

“Wait, so the reason his email sounds so different than his craigslist’s ad is that he used your words in his ad but he used his own words in his email?”

I was still a little shocked at how easily I’d almost been fooled and still a little heartbroken that we apparently weren’t going to get the terrace or the discount.

Still, the smaller apartment looked nice enough online and nice enough in person, too, when, after I took the train the next day down from my home in Maine to New York, Mr. Marsh showed me around. In fact, after the Gibbson debacle, it was enormously reassuring to deal with the ultra-professional Mr. Marsh. No strong pressure to take the apartment from him; in fact, he was in all ways the anti-Gibbson. As he walked me to the door, I said that I was almost certain we’d take it but that I wanted to go home to talk and think about it with my wife. Could he hold it for a few days while we decided?

He smiled and shrugged. “Well, I can’t officially hold it: my policy is always to rent it to whoever puts down a deposit first. But I haven’t even advertised it much yet for September so it should still be available once you decide.” Feeling reassured, I was halfway out the door when Mr. Marsh said in an offhanded way, “Except I guess I should mention one other thing: the tenant in there now, he has a friend he’s been trying to talk into taking the place after he leaves. So I guess the sooner you tell me, the better, since I’d hate to have you call and be disappointed.”

•••

I’ve got next-to-no interest in run-of-the-mill hucksters—the car salesman trying to talk me into undercoating the undercoating, the Jehovah’s Witness wanting only a small donation to save my soul—but for some reason, I am captivated by the Nigerian princesses who email me from their hospital beds or prison cells or hospital beds in a prison cell to tell me that their dying wish is to make me the recipient of three million Euros if I will only agree to be the executor of their entire fortunes that otherwise would go unclaimed since all of their families have been banished or murdered, or murdered and then banished.

In fact, the more complicated and creative the scam, the more preposterous and chutzpah-laden the pitch, the more likely I am to give the scammer my grudging respect. How else to explain why, twenty years after the fact, I still find myself thinking about the time that my wife and I once agreed to tour a time-share complex in exchange for a nineteen-inch color TV, two free airline tickets to Hawaii, or a “secret prize worth over $500”? The tour turned out to be less awful than we feared—the complex actually looked surprisingly nice—but, by the end, our two young daughters were getting antsy and we were more than ready to collect our gift and hit the road. That’s when we were ushered into a little cubicle in a big room surrounded by many other little cubicles, and the hard sell began.

As the salesman kept dropping the price thousand by thousand, I just kept repeating: “We have absolutely no interest; we just want our free prize.”

But like Sartre’s “No Exit,” we were apparently stuck in a Hell that was other people, or more specifically that was one other person: our ready to fight-to-the-death salesman, Bill. He was clearly determined to keep us there until we opened our checkbook, and we were just as determined to get the TV or tickets without committing a penny.

“Okay,” our Hell-mate finally said, “This is my very last offer.” And he wrote down a figure, folded the paper in half, and slid it across the desk.

Though I made no move to open it, Bill suddenly shouted, “Wait!” and made a theatrical lunge to retrieve the paper. “What did I just do? Let me see!” As he read his own offer, he slapped his forehead with his palm. ”Oh, God, I just screwed up big time! I wrote down the wrong amount by mistake and I just gave you a price $5,000 less than my boss told us we were ever allowed to give anyone, even family. But legally I can’t take the offer back. It’s in writing. Don’t worry. It’s not your problem—it’s mine. You just got a time share that you could turn around tomorrow and sell for a huge profit—and it’s all because I screwed up. I better go tell the boss what I did.”

And before I could repeat my mantra—“We are not buying a time-share today no matter what price you offer”—he was gone. We waited five minutes, ten minutes, but no one came back to our tiny cubicle to give us our tickets or TV. On one side of our cubicle’s walls, I heard a man yelling that he wanted his free gift while, on the other, I could hear a little kid crying. Just as we packed up our own kids and headed toward the door, a different man suddenly scurried in. “Hold on a sec. Johnson just told me about the mistake he made with you—offering you the wrong price. I want you to know that I am going to lose my shirt on this but a deal is a deal. I can fire Johnson for costing me an arm and a leg—and I want you to know that I already have—but, much as I’d like to, I can’t take back his offer. So here’s the deal you got—and I’ve got to live with.” And he handed me a pen and a purchase agreement with the “mistaken” price at the top.

•••

It seemed like a ridiculous theory when it first came up. I was having dinner with my nephew, Sam, and his girlfriend, Isabel, just a couple of hours after looking at Marsh’s apartment, and I was telling them what had happened with the craigslist ad. “That is a pretty good scam,” Sam said, “but you know what would make it a great one? What if Marsh were the guy running the scam and he invented Gibbson in order to make you trust him?”

I laughed it off at the time, but that night, lying in the bed, I found myself wondering, was Sam’s absurdist fantasy completely impossible? After all, I found Marsh through the link on Gibbson’s email. And he was quick to dismiss the scammer and introduce himself as the real thing. Wasn’t that the oldest trick in the confidence man’s book? As in: be careful; there are con artists out there but you can trust ME. And hadn’t he sucked me in with the oldest move in the history of advertising: the old bait-and-switch? I wrote him because I was interested in the first apartment, the nicer apartment, and then was told (predictably?) that it was long gone but that he had another he could rent me. Hadn’t he buttered me up with the soft sell—“I’m not even advertising the place right now”—and then thrown in that little bomb right at the door about how the tenant’s friend might change his mind and call?

The Arthur Miller angle suddenly seemed fishy, too. Wasn’t it just a little bit unlikely that after not being able to find any apartment at all, the one place that pops up was once occupied by one of America’s greatest playwrights? I couldn’t help but wonder whether Marsh saw my name and return email address, then Googled me to discover that I taught in a university English department, and then invented the Arthur Miller detail just to suck me in further.

I reminded myself that this was nuts, that Marsh had in fact answered the door when I rang the bell and had, in fact, showed me the apartment. But that, I realized, could have been a hoax, too. It was at least possible that the real owner of the building was out of town or at least away for the evening and that Marsh had a key—maybe he was a handy man or a dog walker who was once given access to the building—and had showed me an apartment he didn’t own.

It wasn’t surprising, given my apparently unlimited capacities for skepticism and anxiety, that I found myself deeply unsettled by that possibility. What was surprising, though, was I almost wished it were true. After all, if Marsh were the real con man who, in order to fool me, invented a less trustworthy fake con man, added a made-to-order story about the apartment’s role in American literary history, and then gave me the tour posing as the apartment’s owner, we weren’t just talking Arthur Miller; we were talking Mamet. Glengarry Glen Ross Mamet.

•••

The scariest con men aren’t the arm twisters; they’re the ear whisperers, the Iagos, the ones who use our own best and worst traits—generosity, trust, and love, on the one hand; foolishness, grandiosity, and greed on the other—against us. Or worse, they’re the ones who simply seduce us into using ourselves against ourselves. Since the clichés are true—there really is a sucker born every minute and if you build it, they will come – the best con men don’t need to be aggressive; they only need to set an attractive-enough trap … and then wait. One of the keys to the success of Bernie Madoff’s investment scam was that he played so hard to get: his strategy for reeling in wealthy investors was to pretend not to need or even want them. By creating the illusion of exclusivity—members at his country club asked other members to introduce them to Madoff as perspective clients—his services appeared all the more desirable and legitimate.

In a world filled with aggressive, clearly sketchy con men and women, the confident and confidence-inspiring Madoffian con man can have a field day. When we think we’ve finally found that one honest insurance salesman or loan officer, we are all too eager to let down our guard, and we throw ourselves and our money at him or her with gratitude and relief. “I am so happy I found you,” we confide to the last person we should be confiding in, as we reel ourselves in. “You won’t believe the sketchy offers I got from the other guys.”

•••

Back home in Maine, at the island in our kitchen, I read and re-read the invoice for the deposit that Marsh had sent me. My wife and I had already agreed that we’d take the apartment, but with my checkbook open and my pen poised I did what I always do—I began to think through all the possible pros and cons (in both meanings of that word) of renting the apartment. I began to wonder whether I might not be falling into a trap, whether we might not find a better apartment in tomorrow’s ads, whether we should consider spending the month in San Francisco instead.

And that’s when I suddenly remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years. I remembered the time I ran into our neighbor, Joanne, at the supermarket. “Guess what happened to us?” she said. “We got an invitation to tour some condos in a time share complex.” Since the complex she named was the very same one where we’d been given the hard sell in that tiny cubicle, I figured she was about to tell me a similar horror story. “Even though we just went up there because we got this letter telling us we had won some special prize,” Joanne continued, “we ended up buying a time share. They explained that it’s a great investment — we can always sell our week for a big profit anytime we want—and the best part is that once you buy in, you can go there any time you want to use the facilities. They’ve got a pool, a golf course, a great dining room. We’ve been going almost every single weekend. We LOVE it!”

I looked again at the invoice. I took one more deep breath. And I wrote the check.

•••

LAD TOBIN has recently completed a collection of personal essays for which he’s seeking a publisher or agent. Essays from the collection have appeared in The Sun, The Rumpus, Utne Reader, and Fourth Genre. He teaches at Boston College and lives in Kittery Point, Maine. Connect with him on Facebook (lad.tobin) or twitter (@ladtobin).

Read more FGP essays by Lad Tobin.

Growing up Atheist in God’s Favorite City

be ready — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Jenny Poore

The first time I got the instructions for how to avoid burning in hell, I was five.

I sat on my older sister’s bed as one of her friends asked me, “Are you saved? Because if you’re not saved, you’ll never get into heaven and you’ll burn in hell forever and ever. It’s easy to be saved though. Just close your eyes and repeat after me: I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior. Just do that and you won’t burn in hell. See? Easy!”

I looked at her skeptically through half-closed eyes and only mumbled the words, hedging my bets because that’s what children do when told things by older, supposedly wiser people but don’t fully buy it. I was a naturally suspicious kid, I suppose, and her curly perm and blue eye shadow didn’t inspire confidence. Afterwards, she nodded her head and popped her gum loudly, satisfied with her work. My teenage sister, having had enough of me crashing her space, kicked me out of her room and changed the record on the white stereo system I coveted. I clearly remember not understanding what had just happened, but I hung onto the words “Jesus” and “hell,” those two things feeling like the most critical parts of whatever lesson I had just learned.

I grew up in a non-religious family in one of the most religious places in America. Lynchburg, Virginia in the 1980s was an Evangelical Christian mecca that is second only to Utah for the religious devotion of its residents. The disaster smash of the Reagan years and the rise of Evangelical Christianity in the political arena happened literally in my backyard as an influx of thousands moved into my town to be closer to Moral Majority rock star Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church and his freshly minted Liberty University. Our once-quiet street was suddenly three deep with cars on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. When people couldn’t get into the too-packed services, they’d sit parked at our curb and listen on the radio, completely overdressed for their Pintos and Datsuns, smiles plastered on their faces as they sang along to the hymns and nodded to their preacher’s words.

It was impossible to get away from the proselytizing. After-school clubs at friends’ houses always started with bowed heads and a prayer, and random teenagers would ask the status of your soul while you swung on the swings at the playground. As the church grew, it steadily bought up the beautiful old brick houses on my street and filled them with missionaries, families from other towns with five, six, ten kids who were homeschooled and who went door to door passing out small cards with bloody fetuses on them warning of the evils of abortion and whom to a fault could barely read. I never understood why they didn’t have to go to school, but I played with them because we were kids and they were fun and I just always ignored the warnings of what would happen to my eternal soul if I didn’t accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. You get used to being told you’re going to burn in hell. After a while, it’s just static.

But it was a static that itched and was omnipresent. We did not go to church, but everyone we knew did. As I got older, there were lock-ins and youth groups, and Scare Mare, the Thomas Road Baptist Church–sponsored horror house that is still a Halloween tradition in my town. Before it turned overtly political with rooms like The Abortion Room and The Drunk Driving Room, it was actually pretty fun, a generic scary house with strobe lights and people jumping out at you in masks, harmless and spooky and something to do in a town with not a lot to do.

The last room of Scare Mare was always the scariest because it was after you’d left the haunted house completely. Puffed-up young men in polo shirts and crew cuts would line the path back to the parking lot with flashlights repeating in a disturbingly stern unison “Last room of Scare Mare, folks, last room of Scare Mare…” as they ushered you into one in a very long row of musty old army tents. It was always clear that this room was not an option. All attempts to skip it and just go back to your car felt forcibly cut off. I never knew anyone who got away with avoiding this last room even though we always talked about how we were totally not doing that, there’s no way they can make us go in there, the entire time we waited in line.

I was around twelve when my sister and her boyfriend took me with them the first time. As we left the haunted house and were funneled into the ancient army tents, my sister’s boyfriend just kind of shook his head in a “let’s get this over with” fashion and we took our seats in the metal folding chairs. My experience sitting in a church service was wholly limited to the rare Easter Sunday with my grandpa, some light singing and a short service and he’d slip me candy bars he’d sneaked in in his pocket. I was unprepared for the frothy and furious young man who stood at the front of the tent shouting at us and regaling us with the horrors of a forever in the fiery pits. “DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY IN A PLACE LIKE THAT???!!!” He screamed at us, reminding us of the perversions and terror of the haunted house we’d just exited. “IF YOU DON’T ACCEPT JESUS CHRIST AS YOUR SAVIOR, THAT IS YOUR FUTURE!”

He went on and on about pain and death and depravation and was generally terrifying and foamy-mouthed until my sister’s boyfriend, recently home from the Marine Corps, and generally very strong and in-charge looking, spoke up and cut him short mid-sentence. “Hey!” he shouted. “You need to calm down. There’s kids in here.”

Slightly chastened, the lunatic preacher man slowed his roll and transitioned into the final part of the whole experience. “I’d like everyone to close their eyes and bow their heads…” He then gave a much quieter but no less passionate description of heaven and the story of Jesus and how he’d died for us and if you were a grateful and good person you’d just thank him for that by accepting him as your lord and savior so you could spend eternity among the peace and goodness of heaven and be happy forever and thank you for coming to Scare Mare folks, God bless you all, drive home safe.

I’d peeked through my eyes when our heads were supposed to be bowed and seen that, for the most part, everyone was doing as he’d told them to do, but I did spy a few hold-outs like me, others who were sneaking a look and just waiting for their chance to escape. I marveled then at the braveness of my sister’s boyfriend to challenge the preacher. You mean you can do that? You can tell people like that to stop yelling at you? If you can do that, then does that mean we don’t really have to come in here? Do I not have to bow my head even though people are always telling me to? I had questions.

Despite years of being told I’d burn in hell if I didn’t Accept Jesus Christ as My Personal Savior, I never decided to accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior. Even as a kid I saw the fallacy of the whole process. If he’s so nice, why would he send people to burn in fiery pits forever just because of some loophole clearly based on vanity? That never sounded like something a personal savior would expect from you. Beyond that, though, I steadily became aware that there was always a streak of fear and smallness that ran through the hundreds of exchanges I’d had with the True Believers in my life. It was nothing I wanted to be a part of. I can still count on two hands the number of families that consider themselves Christian who actually act in a way that the Christ I’ve read about would be proud of. Two hands in this town of thousands upon thousands of families.

I grew up with what I now know is a siege mentality, this feeling that my universe was occupied by hostile forces who were not only not on my team but who openly and publicly proclaimed that terrible things were going to happen to me and my kind and good-hearted family if we did not jump through their very specific hoop. It’s a terrible thing to be told repeatedly in public and in private and by strangers and friends alike that you are not worthy and will be punished horribly for it. That does something to you down deep; it changes you and others you in a very specific way. I’m not sure at what age exactly that it finally happened, but at some point I embraced this “otherness” and made it my own. I have no religion, I don’t want a religion, and I am completely comfortable telling anyone that.

Home is home. though. That nightmare Halloween house is staged on the grounds of the long-gone cotton mill where my grandfather’s people all worked and lived and raised their babies. The community of Cotton Hill is still a vibrant one, where people share stories of the weaving room and the mill nursery and birthday parties on Carroll Avenue. Our memories are long. Despite the tidal wave of evangelical Christians that poured into my town starting in the eighties, I’ve always been quick to claim ownership. Though so often it seemed like I didn’t fit, here I refused to be run off. “It’s them who don’t fit,” I’d think, “I was here first.” So, like my own parents, I parked my little family right behind Thomas Road Baptist Church where for a long time after old Jerry still preached and dared all comers to try to make me feel less than, try to make my children feel less than, woe unto those who might try.

Walking my eight-year-old son home from school the other day, he said, “Michael asked if I believe in God and I told him no, and he said I was going to burn down there forever.” I looked at him and he was pointing to the ground with a smile on his face. We laughed about it because I have done my best to make my children bullet-proof in this city we live in. I have prepared them so they know that there will be people out there who will tell them mean and untrue things so it doesn’t bother them like it did me when I was small.

“Well, that wasn’t nice of him. But you know it’s not true, and you know he can’t help it. He just doesn’t know any better.” My son smiles and nods at me but he always looks bummed when this happens, because it happens and happens and happens, as it happened to his older sister, too, and it will to his younger sister as well. He is a kind boy and he would never assume awful things to happen to others for no good reason. A god like that makes no sense to him. He figured out the falseness of it long before I did.

Homeschoolers keep their kids out of our public schools because, ostensibly, it’s my children they should be afraid of. My godless, secular humanist children and their evil ways. But I learned a long time ago and I continue to see now that the pressure so often moves in only one direction. I am certain that my children aren’t roaming the halls of their schools shouting, “God is dead! God is dead!” The lack of love and generosity extended to those of different sexual orientations or religious beliefs or other ways of life is still blatant and harmful. But call them out on their unwillingness to just let others live their lives as they choose and you’re persecuting them for their religious beliefs, as if a religion based wholly on the persecution of others is a religion at all.

But not all is lost. Whenever my kids come home and tell me the latest story of how they’re going to burn in hell, I don’t just remind them of the falseness and foolishness of the statement. I also take time to remind them of the Christian families we know who are good and love us and all others without reserve, those who’d never tell us that we’ll burn in hell. It took me a long time to realize that those Christians really are out there, and if I believed in a god, I’d thank him or her for them. Because those are the people who remind us of the possibility of good in a world that so often promises us otherwise. Who remind us to not pick up and throw back the stones we so often find at our very own feet, who would never ever force us into a musty old army tent to shout.

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JENNY POORE writes about parenting, public education, politics, and occasionally things that do not start with the letter “P”. Her work has most recently appeared in xoJane, Mommyish, Dame Magazine, and Role Reboot. You can follow her on Twitter @Jenny_Poore and at her blog, Sometimes There are Stories Here.