Fiction

My Tummy Hurts

6/6/2013

I.

I am four years old and my tummy hurts.

My belly button sits in the center of a circle of pain. At first I thought the pain was in me because I couldn't poopoo. That has been a problem in the past for me. I would hold it in and hold it in and hold it in (I have a very strong will, you see), and eventually the poopoo would stay put by itself for a very long time.

I know now that this is called constipation, and it is not a good thing. It hurts and makes my middle feel as hard a tree trunk until the poopoo finally comes out, and then all is better.

This tummy fire is not that. My poopoo comes out, but still I hurt. Still the circle of pain with my belly button in the middle burns and burns and burns.

I tell my parents, and they look at me with frown faces and stroke my head and feed me sweetened cream from our goat and tell me that sometimes our thoughts make fires in our tummies.

I listen to them. I empty my mind of all thoughts and pray. When I do this, I feel the good warmth prayer always brings me. I see the dancing lights in the sky that call back to me in words I can't understand but think I used to know. I feel my heart become one with the center of the earth. I sense my mind encircle every star shining through my window in the night.

But still my tummy burns. The pain will not be pushed away. Instead it pushes itself into my prayers. It pushes itself into my prayers like a strong man who will not be tied up, a wild man who tears the ropes that bind him and forces his way into a house so he can rob its owner of its riches.

The pain breaks in and plunders me, and I wake up not knowing that I had fallen asleep in the first place. I do not feel rested. I feel as if all night I have done battle in my sleep.

My tummy hurts, and it won't stop, so my parents take me to my Auntie Liz. She is very wise and very old, but she usually doesn't do much with me. She just lets me play and watches what I do. She asks me to draw pictures, to just draw what I am thinking and feeling in the moment, and I do it for her.

I draw pictures that are crazy and extreme and not in agreement with one another. It is like I draw daytime and then I snap my fingers and draw night. It is all very confusing and split-headed.

I draw human hearts pierced by arrows. I draw tall buildings falling on screaming people below. I draw sheep stripped not only of their wool, but also of their skin.

Yet I also draw family dinners with people laughing at jokes whose funniness never fades. I draw great crowds of people dancing alongside the speaking lights in the sky I see when I pray. I draw a father and a son hugging so tightly that it is hard to tell where the son's arms end and the father's arms begin.

These are the things I mean to draw, but I don't know if this is what my Auntie sees in my drawings. I do not know if my artwork communicates my pain to her. I am only a child, after all.

But I think the art probably speaks rightly to her because I am a good drawer. When I doodle with a stick in the dirt during recess at school, the other kids almost always gather and stare in silence at my drawings.

And, even more than this, when Auntie sees my drawings, she picks me up and cradles me like a little baby in her arms. She holds me desperately against her breast, and I let her, even though I am not a baby.

She holds me and rocks me and says, "Oh, Josh, oh Josh, oh, Sweet Boy. Peace. Peace be with you, Baby. The pure in heart shall see God. The pure in heart shall see God. Oh, Josh, oh Josh, oh My Love."

In the waves of her motion and emotion, I forget my tummy fire for a few moments. It doesn't last.

II.

Even at the age of four I spend a lot of with my Father in his workshop out behind our house. I am sly, and so he doesn't notice often, but I spend more time watching his face as he leans in over his craft than I spend paying attention to the small tasks to which he asks me to attend.

Father is sanding the rough spots smooth on a great wooden entry door for a very wealthy client. The door is one of a set of ten, each door unique and custom-made. Each one demands much time and great skill from Father. The price of the rare wood the client demands for each door boggles my mind.

I say, "Father, each of these ten doors is very expensive, and you are making ten before the client even pays for one. I'm worried. What if the client's heart becomes hard toward you, and he does not pay all of what he owes?"

"Son, Master Bartholomew will pay me a portion each month until a year is past, and then all will have been paid in full. Fear not, Son. Fear not."

"I trust you, Father. I trust you. I just worry. That’s all." This is what I say to him.

And then he smiles and says to me, "Such a mind you have. Already pondering the perils of business and credit. And of faithfulness and risk."

Father begins to settle back into his work, but then he stops, gestures to the window where a pigeon is resting on the sill, and asks, "Son, do you see that bird?"

I tell him that I do. I tell him there is no way I could not see it. I smile and tell him that I'm afraid it may poop on Master Bartholomew's expensive door. He laughs, but he insists on pursuing his lesson nonetheless.

"But do you see what the bird means, Son? You see so much, but do you see what it means? It is provided for by The Lord. The bird can't use a hammer or cut a clean line, but it has what it needs. And you think The Lord's going to leave us - leave you - high and dry? I mean, please, Son. Please. No chance of that."

I blush. I know he is not cross with me. He is, in fact, joking with me like I was with him. But Father is also teaching me, and I know he teaches truth. Yet my tummy still burns as Father, thoroughly pleased with his wit and wisdom, turns back to his wood.

I watch my Father work, and I know he loves me, but I also see how caring for me is a responsibility that weighs heavy upon him. I see this as clearly as I see the bird. I feel this awful truth as powerfully as I sense his love for me. The weight of me is a mill stone tied around his neck.

I watch my Father, and it is hard to capture in words, but I can hear his heart speak its secrets to me, secrets I think I should never know. But I do know them. I hear his heart, not by a trick of the mind or the power of a dark magic, but by the force of my observation.

Father can saw open a block of wood with skilled hands that are steady and true. Although I struggle to give even the slightest control to a saw as it cuts through wood, I can open Father’s soul cleanly and almost without effort. This makes me afraid sometimes.

Once, while Father was teaching me to hammer a nail, I opened his sould and paid too much attention to his heart as it worried after me. I did not pay enough attention to my work. I hit my thumb and it crunched and bled. I watched my blood mix with the blonde skin of the stripped wood, and the colors overwhelmed me. I felt my pain and Father's pain for me rolled into one. I fainted and was glad that I did.

Father’s eyes are on the wood, but his heart is still on me. He is thinking about my teeth. I have sloppy, vulnerable, and malformed teeth. He has strong teeth -- even and white and unbroken. He is worried for me and for the pain I will face because of my teeth and because of other more powerful things that lurk around the corners of a future I can't yet see. And neither can he.

A sharp bite from my tummy catches me unaware, and I let out a low moan. Father hears it. He looks up at me. He grimaces in a way that matches my own face. Then he puts down his tools, walks over to me, takes my hands in his, and kneels before me so that our eyes are on an equal level.

He looks into my eyes, looks away for a moment, bashfully I think, and then his eyes return to mine. He says, "Son, you are a pearl of great price to me. I would sell all I have, give all that I am, for you. Do you believe this?"

"Yes."

"Good. Very good."

The fire in my tummy cools for a moment. I forget it for a while. And this is good, very good.

III.

It is night and I am in my bed praying for sleep to descend and obliterate me.

I hear a voice within my head speaking to me. The voice says that I worry too much (as if I didn't know this already). The voice tells me that when I worry I release this liquid called hydrochloric acid within me. The voice tells me that this acid works with a small monster in my tummy called a pylori. The voice tells me that the acid and the monster work together to eat the flesh within my belly. The voice tells me that the acid makes a wound that will fester and bleed and stab me from within. The voice tells me that I am silly and stupid and should just stop worrying.

I tell the voice that telling me not to worry is like telling me not to think of a purple sheep. I tell the voice that if you tell me not to think of a purple sheep, I will of course think of a purple sheep. I tell the voice to talk to me of love because love douses the fire, if only for a little while.

The voice tells me that this is not the path a young man of my stature should take to deal with his problems. The voice tells me that it will show me the way for a powerful person like me to win a lasting peace. The voice tells me it is happy to show me the way, if I am simply willing to let him teach me.

Instead I decide to stare out the window of my room and watch the stars and wait for them to sing. And, finally, they do. And, finally, sleep falls and claims me.

IV.

I look at my mother. We are in the kitchen. Mother is kneading bread on the counter. I watch her press the dough with fingers firm and soft. Their every movement communicates care. She sings a quietly of dreams and God and chains falling away. I watch her knead the bread and think of the way Mother once moved and pressed my own body as she cleaned my backside and sang her freedom songs.

She is young, but her hair is as white as fresh milk. Her hair is not like that of the other young mothers who come in the evening and gather my friends from the back alley where we wrestle, kick balls, and shape small figures out of the mud. The other mothers all possess hair that's as black as raven's wings. Perhaps on one or two of them there is a wisp of gray. But my Mother's hair is a blinding white, a summer cloud rising above her brows.

I asked Mother about her hair once. She told me her hair was like no other young mother's hair because she'd seen things no other mother – young or old – had ever seen. Then she laughed so long and deep that the force of its wave caught me up and I too began to laugh and the fire within my belly stilled, flickered, and faded.

V.

I am almost thirty-four years old. My gut still burns. Like so many other things, I have learned how to bend it to my will, and most of the time it yields to my wishes.

But it does not always respond because its fiery wail is a broken part of my love, and my love is myself. And, even more, it is God. I can translate energy into matter and back again, but still so very often my belly blazes with worry, compassion, and pain. I have learned it can be no other way, and that this is ultimately good.

I am eating dinner with my friends. There are hard things ahead, both for me and for them. But there are also bright and beautiful things. I choose to rest my spirit upon the latter and the searing with me quiets a little.

I look down at the dinner table with the picked-over loaf of bread and the cup of red wine sitting upon it. I think about Mother in her kitchen and Father in his workshop. I think of the history of my people and the future of God. I think of who I am and what I am to do. I take the bread and the cup in my hands and I speak.

My gut hurts as it always has, but still I speak. I speak of love, and the fire is stilled by a greater flame that burns but does not consume.

1 Comment

I Ain't You (Warning! Some Four-Letter Words Below)

4/11/2013

4 Comments

Lois put on the blue blouse, and then she took it off.

“Nowadays that one hugs your belly too tight,” Raymond said. And Lois knew, in a certain way at least, that he was right. There was a bit more to hug than this time last year. So, after two more time-consuming tries and fails, they settled on her green blouse – with a big candy cane pin affixed to the left collar. She insisted on the pin and stood her ground on the issue when Raymond pushed back. It was almost Christmas, after all. She would have her pin.

Then Lois and Raymond debated themselves through three changes of skirts. The first he said was too frumpy. He said it accented something he called the “camel haunched bags” of her hips. Lois felt Raymond was misusing some terminology here, but she wasn’t completely sure what the correct terms were.

The second skirt was too short. Despite Lois’ longing for a goldilocks moment, the third skirt was not just right, but Raymond said it would do. While she’d been stuffing herself into the third skirt, he’d glanced at his watch and noticed they were running late.

Raymond tapped his foot and said in a pointed but jokey way, not too mean mind you, just a forceful way with a touch of bile mixed in, “Fuck, Lois. You’ve done us again like you always do. We’re late. For the Christmas concert. Fuck Lois. Late.”

Raymond had not been concerned about timing and tardiness when Lois had tried to move him along after dinner, but had her entreaties fail because Raymond found his second cigar too powerful a force to resist. He’d not said anything about potential lateness when he watched his alma mater all the way into halftime and lamented the sacrifice of the second half he was making for the good of the church. But now it was…Fuck. Lois. Late.

So they left the house and drove to the church campus. The car was warm and quiet. Raymond and Lois didn’t talk. She could hear the tires crunch random patches of ice and snow.

More than once, Lois ventured a hand up the window and wondered at how miraculously cold the glass felt from the December wind magnified by the speed of the car. It was something she had done since childhood, and it had always amazed her although she knew not why.

That simple action, that light touch, had always sparked dangerous and adventurous imaginings within her. And it did again this night. What would it be like to be on the outside of the car right now, grabbing its side like some action movie star? Could she stand the pain? How long could she hang on? If she let go, what would the moments between release and pavement, the moments of air and free flight, feel like?

It was silent in the car, but even with just a fraction of her mind oriented toward Raymond, Lois knew his silence did not indicate peace. He fidgeted and checked his watch. He gassed the engine way too fast and then, remembering the conditions, he slowed down dramatically. Over and over he ran through this sequence, never learning from the previous cycle.

And, not unlike the crunch of winter beneath the tires, Raymond’s beneath-the-breath mutterings became a soundtrack to their drive. “Fuck. Lois. Late. Fuck. Lois. Late.”

They reached their church. The parking lot was remarkably full, especially for a Saturday evening event, so they were stuck in the back of the lot. It was their congregation’s annual Christmas Choir Concert. The lights of the sanctuary were blazing through colored glass and beckoning them inside. Snow was falling, just a little, fat flakes taking their time to land during what had suddenly become a windless night.

Lois let herself drink in the rich image of the flakes, light, and architecture as she and Raymond walked toward the front doors. He tugged at her elbow urging her forward. Once, twice, and a third time, her high heels lost purchase on the slick footing of the parking lot. Each time Raymond simultaneously steadied her and pulled her forward.

“Lois, can’t you walk a straight line?” he said.

“But you wanted these shoes, sweetie,” she answered with eyes still fixed on the beautiful image before her.

“Well, hell, sure. But you shouldn’t own a shoe you can’t walk in. I mean, damn.”

They reached the doors and entered the worship hall. How many times had they done this over the years? She tried to do the math in her head as she shook the snow from her shoulders. 32 years times about 47 Sundays a year. Add in another 8 or so special services per year. So, that was another 8 times 32 added to the 32 times 47. Lois couldn’t get to the sum in her head and quickly gave up. It was a bunch.

The music was in full swing. Lois and Raymond were indeed late. The pews were full – a mild surprise to Lois, but the Lord has a penchant for surprises, or at least she’d always believed that this was the case. Here was a smidge of evidence.

As they walked up the center aisle to their customary seats, the choir was mashing through Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, the apex and cliché of all such Christmas concerts.

Then Lois rammed into Raymond’s back. He’d stopped suddenly beside the seats which were, by unspoken rules of tradition and etiquette, theirs – the twelfth pew back from the front, on the right side of the center aisle, the two butt-spots on the cushion closest to the aisle. They always sat there. Everyone knew that this was so.

Lois and Raymond had been members for over thirty years. Half of those years they had given a portion of their hard-won money to the church. And two of those years they had actually tithed – 10% of their income given to their congregation. That 10% had been taken from their after-tax income at Raymond’s insisting. He’d said God understood. You couldn’t control your taxes. He said God understood this and adjusted for it.

But none of that mattered right now. What mattered in the present moment was that there was a man in their seats. To be exact, a man sat in the pew spot right next to the aisle, the place where Raymond sat himself Sunday after Sunday. In Lois’ spot was the man’s backpack – a ghastly, frayed, duct-taped thing with a beaten, Mexican market blanket poking out beyond its half-zipped top.

The man matched his luggage. Lois had been taught to say that this type of man was “from the streets”. And yet here he was, not on the streets, but in their seats. His eyes were crammed shut and he was waving his head from side-to-side like some caricature of Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder. As she watched him, she wondered if he, like them, was blind?

With narrow eyes Lois looked from the choir singing to the mangy invader to the choir and back to this dirty man completely immersed and enveloped in the music of her church’s – and she’d never admit this to anyone – thoroughly unimpressive choir. It all struck Lois as curious. Beyond curious, it was odd. Was he blind, insane, or both? She was in a state of mild shock and awe.

Raymond was reacting differently. He stared at the man as if trying to melt him with some newly-discovered, death-ray power unleashed through his eyes. But the man was oblivious. He’d been carried somewhere else. His eyes were closed, but you could see the sublime transportation in his lips. They were curled up, smiling, pulled back from teeth which, Lois couldn’t help but notice, were arranged into an intense and unsightly overbite.

At this point Raymond started to tap his right foot in aggravation and people in the surrounding pews started to notice the scene even though the choir bellowed on, their musical offering undisturbed and unbroken. It was clear that Raymond didn’t mind the attention of his fellow members. He gestured to them with the upturned, rolling outward flip of the palms that has meant for generations: “Friends, tell me, ‘Who the fuck does this guy think he is?’”

Then Raymond touched the man. He didn’t strike him. No, nothing like that. Raymond tapped him on the left shoulder three times – ping, ping, ping. But it didn’t matter. The choral hallelujahs kept flowing and the dirty man kept drinking them in and letting them bear him away.

With his failure, Raymond started to shake, just a little. He began to vibrate with swelling rage. Lois watched it all in slow-motion, as did the ten people closest to the drama. Raymond’s face and neck took on a twinge of crimson and then, with each added moment of the stranger’s bliss and the ongoing exile of Raymond’s ass from its rightful spot, Raymond became more and more red.

And then Raymond reached a point where he very clearly reminded Lois of one of those thermometer-shaped signs that help an organization’s members keep track of their progress on a fundraising goal. Their church had had one two years ago when it was time to raise funds to freshen up the fellowship hall. You know the kind. Each week the red rises a little higher toward the top of the gauge and then, at last, when the monetary goal is surmounted, the thermometer blows.

That was her husband. His red was moving quickly, inexorably toward his top, toward bursting. And when it did, when he did, the outcome would not be a mission trip to Haiti for the youth group or a new storage shed for the Boy Scouts. It would be an eruption, a paroxysm of rage.

Still the dirty man swayed. Still her husband reddened and went rigid. And then, as if sensing something was about to happen, the stranger came to and looked to his left, looked at Raymond and at her and back to Raymond.

It was in that very moment Raymond died. His heart exploded. He grabbed his chest, arched his back, retched forward, shrieked, and fell to the ground right there in the center aisle of the worship sanctuary. And then a wave of chaos broke over them all.

Some people ducked and others got up to run. The choir shut down instantaneously. A few of its members started down the steps toward them. They were people for whom shock elicits the sacred desire to care. But overall the situation was chaos, as anyone would rightfully expect it to be.

Though alive, Lois was as frozen as her husband. She was frozen by the unreality of it all. She had just run into Raymond’s sturdy back and now he was collapsed and curled up before her. She could feel the weight of his inert body upon the tops of her shoes.

Powered by some instinct, her eyes focused not on her husband but on the stranger. Moving quickly, the man in from the street leaned over her husband’s body, practically went nose to nose with him, and blew a great, breathy whisper into his face. What the man said, Lois could not decipher.

Then the stranger rose up and moved clear of Raymond’s body just as the first responders from the choir reached Raymond and the crowd started to press in. Everyone except Lois was focused on Raymond. The man was forgotten. He moved through the crowd unmolested and made his way for the doors. Then he was gone.

Raymond’s body shook. Lois felt him seize and shake through the feet on which his body had rested in its first moments of death. It wasn’t the people touching him, jostling him, trying to coax him back to the land of the living that shook him. Lois knew this intuitively. Raymond’s body shook as if someone had employed upon him an invisible set of those paddles she’d seen TV doctors wield so often.

Then Raymond sucked in a breath so great it seemed as if he were trying to inhale them all, church building included. On the equally grand exhale, Raymond provided a dazed and primal commentary for all to hear. “FFFFUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK.,” he voiced atop his first breath after returning from whatever other dimension he’d so briefly just visited. But now he lived, again. This much was clear.

In that moment, it all clicked for Lois. It all fell into place, great tumblers of meaning all finding their respective slots, unlocking a door, and revealing something awesome and unpleasant. In that moment she understood, she understood everything, and she was not having it. Any of it.

And so it was with rebellion and anger that Lois wriggled her feet free of her husband and hustled to the exit door. She didn’t look back. She hit the parking lot, kicked off her heels, and, playing a hunch, turned to the right and started to run.

Sprinting, gasping, her stocking feet screaming and possibly bleeding, Lois finally saw him, the stranger, the man of the street, up ahead of her walking beside the road in the deep night. Somewhere Lois discovered another gear in her ancient engine of a body and continued after him faster still.

Then it was like everything slowed down in the most frustrating of ways. It was like a dream where you’re swimming for a shore that, no matter how many strokes you make, never comes any closer than the glimmering sliver on the horizon you first spied in your moment of desperation.

The stranger’s steps seemed broader than the circumference of all time and space. Lois could not gain on him. But then the unthinkable happened. He stopped, turned, and faced her.

She reached him. Lois grabbed the shabby edges of his frayed coat. In an odd random moment, Lois realized that he was wearing a “Members Only” jacket. Even she knew that was lame. The stranger wore a jacket so far out of style as to almost be in style once more. What would Raymond think of it? She shook her head. Focus. Lois. Focus. Focus.

Having a hold of him so he couldn’t leave, Lois allowed herself to heave from her running. A little spittle from her mouth founds its way onto his right sleeve. The man saw it but did not seem to mind. Nor did his body language indicate he was in much of a hurry.

She looked at him. And he looked at her. “I know who you are,” Lois said. “And, I know it not because of why you think I know it. I know who you are because of your head-waving, eye-shutted love for our choir’s singing. And our choir sucks. They SUCK! Only You could love their singing.”

The Stranger just continued to look at her. Having come so far, Lois knew she couldn’t chicken out now. She continued on and tried not to think of the magnitude of what she was doing. She tried to keep her voice under control. She did not want to cower. Nor did she want to wail.

She was angry, but how much anger could she get away with given that she talking to whom she was talking to?

“I can’t go back there. I can’t go back to him. I can’t. I won’t. You fixed his heart, that piece of red, beating flab in the middle of his chest. It had beat for 62 years before it stopped dead in the middle of that shitty concert, and now you went and breathed on him. And, his damn heart’ll beat for another 62 years. I bet it. I do.

“But, I don’t bet you fixed his heart, the one that beats at the center of his will, his words, his ice cold touches, and his dead stares.

“I can’t go back…Well, hell, I could. Sure I could.

“After all, you’ve gone to worse places, haven’t you? Far worse places, like that cross you went to, that place you died, that place I remember every time I touch the silver charm ‘round my neck. I could go back. I could. You’ve gone worse places. That I know.

“But, I won’t go back. I love you, I worship you. I follow you. But, I ain’t you. I…Ain’t…You. You gotta take me with you.”

With her last words launched and her defiant vigor spent, Lois slumped to the ground and sat on the shoulder of the road looking up into his eyes. He looked down at her.

Then he reached out his right hand in her direction. His hand was close, but it wasn’t there to help her up. It wasn’t close enough for her to grab unless she started to scramble to her feet on her own.

He held his right hand out toward her with its palm up and facing toward the sky. With swift movements he curled and extended, curled and extended four of his fingers twice. Bam! Bam! The motion was a voiceless “Come! Now!”

Lois lifted herself and took his hand.

Raymond died at the age of 107 exactly 45 years to the day of what his congregation came to call (but never to his face) “The Hallelujah Chorus Incident”. He died in a nursing home. No one was with him when he breathed his last.

When the nurse found his body, Raymond was holding a photo of his long-departed Lois. Everyone knew the story. On that snowy and terrible December night decades before, Lois’ insane confusion and grief over Raymond’s apparent death had driven her into the night never to be seen again.

It was a story lodged deep in the lore of the church and in the fibers of Raymond’s grieving heart. As far as he could tell, there was only a single silver lining to the tragedy. And it was this one little slice of good news Raymond had repeated to himself over and over again through the years.

Lois’ wild and desperate actions bore clear testimony to the fact that Raymond had always been a good husband, indeed a great one, a man able to call forth such a reaction in his woman.

4 Comments

Delayed Gratification

3/26/2013

2 Comments

Maria's parents had been Roman Catholic. And their parents. And their parents. You get the picture.

               But what mattered more was that Maria herself was a Catholic. And she would remain one. It was an indelible, irreplaceable, and in some ways, an irreparable part of her identity.

               Just as non-negotiable in Maria’s guts was the conviction that she was to be a priest. Someday, some way, she was to be someone set aside to shape the word of Christ with her lips, to raise the wafer that the Spirit touched and made His body, the flesh of God fractured to re-create of the world.



               Even now, thirty years later, with the deadening impact of middle age's full fury beginning to weigh upon her, Maria could remember the moment she received her call to the priesthood.

               Although Texans, her family had been poor and Mexican. Her church had been poor and Mexican. Pathetically so, Maria thought as she sat in her Audi as an adult, frozen in traffic, wandering back into memory.

               Their congregation could only afford one large room in which to gather as a community. On Sunday morning the room was, of course, a house of worship arranged for mass. Yet if you had visited that very same space twelve hours earlier, you might find yourself in a bare-bones parlor arranged for a lady's book club, or a simple medical clinic checking the blood pressure of homeless men, or a hall stinking of burnt coffee and people resisting addiction.

               Yet, at some point, in a manner that was in its own way as wondrous as the consecration of the Host, the chairs would be moved and the banners hung. At some point Clark Kent would enter his telephone booth, rip off his shirt and tie, and Superman would emerge. The ugly room would be reborn a sanctuary for Christ's body, a space in which to say mass, a beachhead of Heaven’s invasion of Earth.

               And sometimes on a Saturday afternoon, before the magic of transformation occurred, their cheap all-purpose church hall would become a place for a child's birthday party. Streamers hanging from the altar. Balloons drooping from the walls on either side of the sculpted body of a dead Jesus. This was the stage on which the memory of Maria's call to the priesthood played out.

               Her friend Rosa, the birthday girl, had told Maria at school on Friday that the party would have a piñata. The birthday girl shared the news in a state of high anticipation. Maria received the news with distaste.

               Now Maria liked candy. Sure she did. She was a child after all, and piñatas always ended in an orgy of candy. But it was the getting to that end point which struck her, even at the age of ten, as off-kilter, brutal, and distasteful.

               To that point in Maria’s life all the piñatas with whom she had had dealings were shaped like people. She remembered the first. She couldn't forget it. She had been four.

               Maria had fallen in love with the Disney version of Cinderella. She had already planned her home-made Halloween costume around it, learned the songs, and even reassessed her position on mice.

               In the midst of her Cinderella madness, the four-year-old Maria had walked into a friend's backyard for the girl's birthday party and seen the piñata -- a papier-mâché Cinderella hanging from a tree, lynched, a horror-show vision, at least for Maria. It did not compute. She was supposed to bludgeon her hero, or at least her hero’s effigy? Who does that kind of thing?

               When the moment finally came, and the stick was placed in her hands, Maria didn't opt out, or even let her agony be known. She struck her hero. Even in the moment, Maria knew she did it because she wanted to fit in more than she wanted to avoid the terrible custom. The choice felt like cowardice. The choice felt like sin.

               But before Maria dealt the blow, she hung back to the very end of the line trying to delay the inevitable. This just made it worse in the end. By waiting, by allowing all her classmates to strike Cinderella first, the weak perfunctory blow Maria laid upon Cinderella's guts didn't just glance off with a muted thwack. It broke her. It ripped Cinderella open and spilled her sweets.

               With feigned excitement Maria scrambled for the candy along with the rest of the children hating herself a little as she did so. But alone in her room that night she cried and did not know for years why she’d shed the tears. A nightmare came the next night and once a month from that point forward. It was stupid, but it was also sad and true.

               Six years later Maria walked into Christ's sanctuary morphed into hall for Rosa's birthday with dread. She knew a piñata was waiting for her. She searched it out immediately deciding to get the miserable mystery over with. What would the dreadful piñata be this time?

               Maria located it within seconds. It was just in front of the chancel steps leading up to the altar table which stood just a few feet away. When Maria saw the piñata, she was astonished. More accurately, once she laid eyes on it, she felt physically lighter, she felt unbound and free.

               The piñata was not Cinderella or Snow White, or even Spiderman. It wasn't in the shape of anyone. It was in the form of an artless blob of red, blue, and pink streamers. Was it a star? Was it a flower? What was it? She didn't know and didn't care. What mattered was that this was a piñata she could beat with reckless abandon. Maria volunteered to be the first to take a crack at it.

               Maria took the stick and donned the yellow bandana blindfold. Rosa's father spun her far too many times while he laughed at her growing dizziness. He had always been a bit of a jerk like that, and Maria was woozy, dizzy, and disoriented.

               Still she swung with all her force giddy with joy at having a chance to hit this faceless thing and for once get lost in the violence of an odd custom.

               Maria missed. Completely whiffed. More than that, as a right hander, the ferocity of her swing spun her to the left, toward the crucifix-capped altar. As it did so, the force of her swing threw her to her knees, which caught the sharp corner of a chancel step. The pain forced a cry from her. Still clutching the stick in her right hand, Maria ripped the bandana off with her left and looked up to get her bearings.

               The piñata had been transformed. It was no longer the person-less paper star. It was Christ himself, hanging there, beaten, broken open, spilling. And Maria held the stick.

               Maria was a smart girl, rational and wise. On some level, part of her knew this was silly and not so. She knew that her location and not the form of the piñata had shifted. But, maybe it was the dizziness or her past experiences, but in the moment Maria was in a more primal part of her mind, a part of herself more comfortable with mystery and absurdity.

               In shock at the sight she fell backwards off the step and landed hard on the floor, her head smacking the concrete. But Maria kept her eyes on the Jesus piñata, its face of anguished love looking down into her own with the holy table in between them.

               And then it spoke to her. The mouth did not move. Maria heard no sound. The piñata, the crucifix, Jesus, spoke to her with lights and colors, the combination speaking as clearly to her as words along sound waves.

               The ten year old Maria knew what the Lord said to her as surely as the forty year old Maria knew her Audi cost $47K and that she had been a certified public accountant for 16 years.

               Jesus said to her, "Maria, I AM and I live. I can do all things. I receive killing blows and share sweetness from my wounds. I transform the table of my sorrow into a place of laughter for children. I am the author and perfector of all things. My will shall be done. Be set free. Stand up and serve at my table."

               Then it was over. Maria was tired and sore, her body tight and cramped. She tasted blood from a gash in her tongue.

               There were adults all around her searching her eyes with theirs. She could not see any of her friends. The children were elsewhere. Some of the adults were strangers who wore simple blue shirts and pants. On the strangers’ shirts were printed the letters “E” and “M” and “T.” All the adults looked worried and by looking so made Maria worried when moments before she had not been.

               The crucifix was hanging on the wall as it had for years. Pale and cheap and bleeding what looked like lipstick from its feet and hands and side. The tissue paper blob of a piñata hung there slightly to the right of the altar table with its dying Jesus above it. The piñata was still whole and untouched.

               Lying still upon the naked concrete floor Maria gestured for Rosa's father to come near. He did, although he clearly did not understand why she would first point for him and not her own parents. After he leaned in, Maria pointed to the piñata, and whispered a question in his ear. He nodded and said, “Yes, sure, of course, yes,” and as he did he wondered how scrambled Maria's brains remained.

               Her parents took Maria to a doctor who explained that the accident had caused her to have something called a seizure. Maria's parents told her she had been unconscious, kicking, and writhing for five minutes. Maria took tests and was inserted into funny machines and took special medication until she was fifteen. The medicine made her tired.

               At the age of forty Maria is sure she had a seizure. But, she is also sure she was spoken to. Sometimes, when her children are asleep and she is weary of contemplating the gaping hole in the bed where her former husband once slept, Maria will rise. She will go to her closet, reach to the highest shelf, and take down a box.

               In the box is an artless papier-mâché blob festooned with toilet paper strips of blue and red and pink. Maria will sit on her bed, stroke the antique streamers and know again that she is unbound and free. She will know again the soundless but speaking colors and the truth that nothing is too great for the Lord.

               She will know again that there will come a day when she will stand at the Table as a priest commissioned by the Risen Jesus to break his body and share the sweetness of his salvation. And on the day that this finally comes to pass, Maria will break open this piñata and taste the candy hidden within.

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