YAWP: A Collection of Short Stories

Power

January 3, 2019

God knew he was lying through his teeth.

He was a devout man, there was no doubt about that, but every time he clutched wooden beads in his fist and turned to face heaven, he could not help but wonder if he should feel shameful. Every morning that the name of some idiot from that forsaken desert passed his lips, they sobbed, lamenting about something or other in the front row. The church was littered with sinners: grievous, vile excuses for Christians. He instinctively recoiled when their pale, clammy hands tried to touch him, yet he could not disguise his pleasure at their neediness. He revered the sight of a grown man cowering at his feet; pleas for forgiveness spilling from his mouth like communion. The women entertained him; their foreheads touched the dirt of the floor before their eyes met his. He liked how they looked: so fatalistic.

He liked the way his own stupid wife blinked those black, cow eyes at him when he unlaced his boots; slowly, like a toad. She was round and spotted like one, eyeballs popping out of her head. Her throat often convulsed as if she were gasping for air, a movement that repulsed him. If he ever caught a fly in his palm, he promised himself he would pinch it between two fingers and drop it in her mouth.

On many mornings before he left their home–one of the most lavish and opulent in their laughable little town–he would barely say a single word to the nervous thing. She would sit there in her perpetual apron and stockings, twitching her fingers and opening her mouth to divulge a variety of stored pleasantries.

He supposed that in the eyes of those who called him Father and Son, he was right-minded and honest. He held his wife's hand at obligatory social events and wore black and white stripes as the church commanded. The simple people of the town did not know enough to think otherwise. Yet still he wondered whether he would meet weeping and gnashing of teeth. Much of what he preached in the halls of the Lord rang hollow in his ears. It was not God's hand in his own that he felt when he spoke, but rather a weight that settled in his chest. He pitied the sheep who coalesced in the pews for his sermons, listening to the lies that danced on his tongue in langorious bounds. It was there, as he deliberated the matter of lies, that he found he was of little faith.

It was there, as his hands flew above his head in dizzying circles, a conductor moving in brilliant time, that when he roared the word of God, he wrote new scripture. He wove words together that weren't those of Isaiah or Saul.

He spoke of terrible deeds and the worst of humankind.

Their faces turned to his like flowers towards the sun, his wife a dull blotch of color among them. The poor sheep; unaware of the rope their shepherd had turned around them; unaware of the sharp teeth and nails hidden behind a book and sensible grin. He would have laughed at their simple faces, but the sound would have broke the spell he held over them. He felt a flush rise in his cheeks.

His tales were rooted in those of the Bible, to be sure, but he knew the lies he told did not seek redemption in the son of God. He swept his hands, palms turned down, over the crowd as if annointing each head with new devotion, one at a time. He warned of new sins of man that lay within each other. Anyone was susceptible. Anyone could be next.

And if you were the next to sin, he breathed, God would call upon his righteous man to cast him out.

The silence was deafening. No one spoke. No one muttered a contradiction or turned their head in disbelief. They were bewitched by his omninous speech; his thinly-veiled threat scarcely crossing their minds. He had planted a seed.