DRECK

LINDA PARKER BOIKE

SPELUNKING GOD'S BUNKER, JUST LIKE WHEN WE WERE SMALL

            Sometimes we missed the church, however that could be! I think it was Jane's idea, always reminiscing, romanticizing. The stained glass is a given. You can’t look up and not be amazed, when hammered— especially amazed. Noon mass sun shooting through blue raspberry blinds, pretty, bright white dove in the middle. The glow makes the wide room dark and dull till I refocus my attention on the big man downstairs, Father at the pulpit.
            It was Derrick's idea to pregame the mass. An angel choir of support came from Eric, me, Shane, and Jane eventually. She had to convince herself that their irony levels would in fact be off the charts.
            Stumbling over each other in a further back pew, our big hats and coats, like people from the past. My moms old church friends wouldn’t recognize a Suzy that looks as ratty as I today!
            I’m a girl standing on her own shoulders in her own trench coat.
            I still wobble like a 3 kid scaffolding sneaking in to see a scary movie.
            We didn’t stay for it all. The music disagreed with our ears, and the standing and sitting, and standing again disagreed with our bowels. The man had said words for sure.
            We couldn’t of course leave without eating a hunk of the hunk hanging up there.
            For a moment, everyone in mass was a vampire cannibal… if they mean what they say when they talk of body and blood. We got in the single file line for one sip each, to top off our altered state, a cold golden chalice sip. One after another of us standing off to the side, closing our tabs—Jane last, at the priest’s stingy free sample stand. We stumbled away during the part where everyone started acting abnormally neighborly, shaking hands like it's the start of a barbeque.
            Leaving out the lobby, a clump of bodies, I held my cargo close and tried not to clank together me and Derrick’s separate empty bottles of red in my bag.
            I saw the sidewalk as white as the dove for a few flashes, before I saw my new god—my favorite god so far, the ladybug that landed on my hand at the bus station.
            “Here” Shane says soft, but the words echo and his hand and the glass hang beside my head for a time. I scanned the gaudy flower wallpaper Shane's mom chose a few months before. Not Nancy’s finest work. My eyes met his. I do so love that Shane knows well my curiosity face.
            “Mango” he says, hanging over. His hand on my shoulder briefly as I gulp and walk over to the couches where Derrick and Jane are overlapping cozily, like the clothing on my messy floor at home.
            Shane runs hot, and he wears little short shorts he got in high school still. He picks up everyone’s glasses, and we all bitched about how spent we were. Eric, always looking for correlation, said it was because we didn’t follow the Catholic Way; 1 sip for 1 bite of bread, gesturing to the bottles propped up in a seat of their own.
            I can’t wait till I'm old enough to go to the bars, I think. I’ll always keep a loaf close, and bless it accidentally when I hear a friend sneeze.
            I’ll lug the body down the street, oh the people I’ll feed! I want to be generous to the people I meet.
                        They’ll be lined up round the block for my better sourced baguette.
            Eric on about another theory that’s not worth repeating. Our recovery afternoon turns to evening.

North Carolina, born and raised. Nocturnal. Undiscovered playwrite. Mother to many creatures.