Isaiah 66:3-4: Merely slaughtering an ox is like slaying a man; sacrificing a lamb, like breaking a dog’s neck; Bringing a cereal offering, like offering swine’s blood; burning incense, like paying homage to an idol. Since these have chosen their own ways and taken pleasure in their own abominations, I in turn will choose ruthless treatment for them and bring upon them what they fear.
The basement of St. Anthony Catholic Church is windowless, square, cold: the dim grey of air conditioning in an underground space. Horizontal stripes creep the walls, the scuff marks the chairs have made when people have leaned back in them. The water coolers glug, coffeepots steam. These are the warden whistles of Wednesday Bible study as she and Leah Campfield march to the refreshments table.
Mrs. Campfield chatters as she makes her tithe, sacrificing a plate of baked goods to the Bible study snack committee. Leah points her ruthless red smile toward the parishioners blinking at the sudden sharp retreat of sunlight as they take the last step down into the basement. Accepting pets and praises as these passersby take her cookies, Leah waits until they chew and swallow and give their feedback before telling the story of herself and Christie in the kitchen until around midnight finishing this batch.
“The dough didn’t go quite as far as I thought, so I never tried one myself. Bless you, that’s a high compliment. Yes, it is a shame that Zeke couldn’t make it. He’s not been well. Yes, please pray for him.”
Leah Campfield, a butter squash-shaped woman in red satin and a crimson lip that curls as she takes a bite of her own cookie.
“I think I probably added too much cinnamon.”
Leah’s words brush the baby hairs at the base of Christie’s ear, demanding and insistent. She picks up one of the lumpy, yellow misshapen cookies freckled with ruddy brown powder in strategic places, to look like mud-coated tires or windows on school buses. Cinnamon sugar glitters on their surfaces in the dim light of the basement, and the scent of the confection, the brazen sting of the cinnamon against her nose, kicks up the dust of nausea in her stomach.
She breaks off a bite, swallowing with effort. The cinnamon is hostile, but she knows the value of divine lies; it is one of the few lessons that her momma taught her well, the scent of Will Dinkle’s quality chew on Peg Curruthers’ breath as she pulled her daughter closer and reminded her that some lies brought you closer to Heaven rather than further.
“Well?”
Leah takes another bite of her own cookie, a reddish smear left behind on its innards where her lipstick smudges. Another curl tendrils through her stomach.
“They’re good, but I’m not very hungry.”
Leah takes Christie’s cookie, stretched towards her like a child would hand over a half-finished meal to a parent, and breaks it into two pieces, dipping one half in the thermos of coffee she has filled at the community pot.
Christie fiddles with the coffee pot, the swirling grounds left in the bottom creating a black, goopy tempest that reminds her of tea leaves, of the eighth-grade field trip to St. Louis and the fortune teller she found tucked away amongst the fabled shops of the Delmar Loop. It was the first year that the district took the eighth graders; they used to take the graduating seniors, Mrs. Campfield said, back before kids starting getting more interested in pills and needles and dollar store condoms than diplomas. Christie’s daddy almost didn’t let her go, fearing that exact kind of thing, but Leah insisted this was an important milestone, and, “Christian, don’t you think she’s getting a little old to be babied so?”
And so it was, while everyone else was scaling the Arch or scouring Cardinal Nation at Busch Stadium for overpriced keychains, she needed to know about her momma, if it was true, what her daddy and Leah said, that the devil took her.
Instead, the fortune teller, a dumpling woman with thick, yellow curls and cat’s eye glasses, peered into the glass so long that she squirmed on the metal folding chair, her legs turning sleep-numb. Looking at the amorphous shapes Christie left behind, her residue painted on the bottom of the glass, the fortune teller finally said, “You’re fourteen, girl? Fifteen?”
“Thirteen.”
She frowned, spun the leaves one last time, then beckoned for a twenty. The scent of cardamom and sandalwood drifted from her, and the fortune teller’s dry advice followed it.
“Use protection, kiddo.”
The coffee grounds make the same formless lump that the leaves made in the bottom of her teacup, and she squints, trying to find some scaffolding, some omen, for what comes now. Could it be a staircase? A ladder? Wings? Something to indicate the way Heavenward?
She wishes, now, that she had more than twenty to sink, that day. More than one question to ask.
“I wasn’t sure we’d see you here this afternoon. Aren’t Chase’s semi-finals today?”
Leah interrupts her divination, the corner of her red-painted lip snaking up into the tiniest scowl as she takes a sip of the bitter sludge that fills her coffee cup, the same rancid concoction that she complains about every week. Christie supposes Leah thinks the sip disguises what, or who, the scowl is directed towards.
“I hear he’s pitching the first seven innings at least.”
Christie puts the pot back down. The ashy tornado of coffee grounds at the bottom reminds her of the tumbling inside of her, so she fills her Styrofoam cup from the water cooler at the end of the table instead.
“He is. They are. But I wanted to be here.”
Leah Campfield nods approvingly, polishing off her cookie. A splatter of crumbs rests on her breast, dusty brown and vanilla off-white stark against the aggressive red, shimmering satin.
“Good girl. You know where your soul belongs.”
Leah shifts; the shirt shifts too, like some kind of living organ, a rippling muscular contraction of the heart or a lung, something with its own intelligence and motion beyond cognizance. It hurts her eyes.
“Sure that boy thinks he’s going to make the majors and sweep you off your feet someday, but in the meantime? Paying to be in a rich kids’ league, driving forty miles every day just to be petted and pampered like a mutt on a leash?”
Leah hmphs, brushing the crumbs off her breast. Christie watches them twirl to the floor, the shimmering crystals in the cinnamon sugar catching the light and refracting, for just a moment, a rioting glitter shine. Her throat constricts; no one, she knows, will see this beautiful, small, but true miracle, happening right here in the church basement.
“Proverbs 16:5,” Leah continues, her voice waxing elegiac. “It’s not right with the Lord, and that boy will regret it someday. Better to stay here, give up the foolish game, come to Mass once in a while instead. Learn some humility.”
Leah bites into another cookie. The crunch is feral; another glorious spray of cinnamon sugar shimmies through the air, edible confetti.
“Too much cinnamon, but I guess no one else is going to eat them.”
She sips. The water from the cooler, trickster warm, is thick like strep throat. “He’s taking a trip down to Nashville in October. A Vanderbilt recruiter watched him in the league playoffs in July.”
So there. She puts down her cup.
“They offered him a scholarship. All he has to do is the interview.”
Then we’ll be long gone.
Mrs. Campfield dips the cookie in her coffee. When she bites, it releases a crunch that hurts Christie’s jaw. Her mind wanders to her momma, the plastic packages of Pillsbury dough she’d eat whole, raw, offering Christie a puck. The soft, delectable cold, the sugary toothache.
Sweet tempting thoughts: Mrs. Campfield’s bus cookies, crumbled and crusty on the ground, scattered around the overturned platter, the worn plastic tablecloth fluttering gallantly to the ground around them like a torn tapestry. Her hands, ripping it all from the table, a purposeful misfire of a magic trick. A blip in her mind; she blinks the thought away like windshield wipers on a car, glaring down at the cookies. Not imagining anything. Here they are, just whole, sugary-dusted yellow cookies. Leah’s red fingernails curled around her Thermos.
Another crunch.
“Burnt ‘em a little too, I think. Sweet Pea, he could be the next Waino. It won’t matter. Besides, you know what James tells us, chapter 1, verse 20. ‘The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.’ That awful temper of his will get him into trouble one of these days.”
The bus cookies, on the ground. Someone’s heavy boots, maybe Rob or Kenny, one of the men seated in the circle, tactfully avoiding the refreshment table and the rancid cookies. Someone’s heavy boots, stomp stomp stomping. The cookies, a pale, delicious dust.
“You know Deputy Clarence already has his eyes on him after last summer.”
She blinks, and the cookies are once more whole. She forces her hands into action, some physical tether to cement their completeness. Picking up her Styrofoam cup, she turns it in circles in her hand. What if she dropped it? What if the water spilled everywhere, sogging up the cookies? Destroying them?
She picks at the Styrofoam; a small chunk sticks to her fingers, evil static cling. She pinches the Styrofoam like a cookie crumb.
“Eddie Richards had it coming,” she says. “He’s been picking on him since middle school. It was only a matter of time…”
Leah’s expression ossifies into that of one of her stern, statuesque saints, as she grips Christie’s wrist so tightly she can already feel the bruise.
“Christiana! We don’t take matters into our own hands. Best to let the good Lord do the beating, for He knows when to stop. That devil could have gone away for assault.”
The words are a wicked glint of light on a baseball bat. A hideous, thick, fleshy thunk; not the clean split of wood and cowhide. Something denser.
“Besides, you got enough going on here. Think of your Pa. Think of the reading. How did you find the reading, girlie?”
The gilded veneer on the question sends a small smoldering in her chest to growing, chewing on Christie’s nerves. She sees, in the water of her cup, two blue lines, one sin doubled. The test that Chase stole from his brother’s girlfriend’s purse; the lingering lines, burnt through her retinas into her skull, like Chase’s headlights on rain-wicked night pavement.
It was right after the dandelions, spiking their blonde heads up through the gravel in the driveway, had lost all their yellow. Late May. Daddy took one of his monthly overnight trips on the twenty-fifth, and this time, he left the iron key in the drawer where it belonged.
She watched Chase drive down the narrow two-lane, the rusted bumper of the Horizon cutting its way through the budding sprouts of soybeans. His face, the scar stretching from temple to chin; painted with flashes of light from the oncoming thunderstorm, that scar was at once horrible and magnificent. He didn’t have to knock; she was waiting for him at the front door, watching him from the porch.
And she knew then just as well as she knows now that it was wrong. But she also knew it was right. If she had the opportunity to change it now, she doesn’t know that she would.
In that first electric moment, appearing on her porch like an avenging angel, a Virtue with a halo pressed beneath his baseball cap, lightning sizzling her beneath fiery fingertips, he promised.
She’ll burn in Hell, but she knows he’s not as bad as they say he is.
She fiddles with the cross around her neck, and Leah spots it right away, frowning, her cookie poised halfway to her mouth. “What’s the matter, Christie?”
Before she can answer, Father Nathaniel reigns his flock into the big circle of folding chairs congregated in the center of the basement. Still twisting the cross around her fingertips, she takes her seat, leaving an empty chair between herself and Rob, who pulls back a folding chair for her in some vestigial, gallant reflex, the scrape of metal against linoleum tile sending a chuckling ripple of shock through the group. Small, today. Just seven, and no Tracey Anne; she wonders, absurdly, if Tracey Anne knows that Chase stole the test, if Tracey Anne is purposefully avoiding her.
Leah follows her, sitting on her other side. She nods to Rob, her tight frown cracking into a grin, but a crease remains between her eyes, just as severe as the twist of her dark grey curls, as severe as the clouds in the sky, that night Christie willingly mistook a man for holy fire.
The clouds had given up their firecracker stunts, electric shocks fading to harmless lights in the sky like distant searchlights, the thunder a low, gurgling grumble. God’s gone bowling, her momma used to say. He trembled, winging heartbeat frantic as they lay chest to chest. She realized that he was crying too, hot tears streaking down her forehead and onto her lips.
The comforter twisted around their ankles, and a hot breath of early-summer air snuck through the crack in the window above them. It never closed all the way, so a dollop of raindrops collected on the warped hardwood below. She imagined seeing herself inside that puddle, a tiny communion collection of all of her regrets. Far more precious than gold to the Lord.
* * *
They’ve been studying Galatians, bent over their Bibles and necks crooked in near-silent contemplation, for fifteen minutes when Tracey Anne Vaughn arrives, swinging into the church basement in shredded cutoffs and an oversized Mr. Fill t-shirt that belongs to Benny, Chase’s older brother. She slams into the seat beside Christie, her metal chair making a horrific, owlish screech as it slides across the tile, and tightens her high, honey-blonde ponytail. Her permed curls spill everywhere as she leans down into her tote bag and pulls out a much-highlighted travel Bible. The movement sends a puff of sweet air, rose and baby powder, Christie’s way.
“Chapter five, right?” She asks, with a vocal-fried, valley girl voice that women like Leah Campfield can’t stand. “Oh, this is a good one. A real page-turner.”
Leah clears her throat, her eyebrow raised in disbelief. “You’re a half-hour late, Miss Vaughn. As usual.”
Tracey Anne glances at the analog clock over the refreshment table. Her eyeliner, a sharp cat eye that sparkles when she shifts, gives her a Cheshire look, and she leans back in the metal chair, winking her left eye at Christie, tugging on a hoop earring, and cracking her gum.
“Hm. Says up there I’m only seventeen minutes late. But I’m here now. So what’re we talking about, desires of the flesh? What is this, show and tell?”
The tops of Christie’s ears sizzle, and she glares down at her own Bible, reciting the words in her head as if to drown out Tracey Anne’s make-believe vaudeville. But she cannot drown out Mrs. Campfield’s indignant squawking.
“Young lady! It wasn’t that long ago you took my PSR class. Are you telling me this is all I ever taught you? To be crass and vulgar and… and…”
“Naughty?” Tracey Anne suggests, flicking a page in her Bible, shrugging. She stretches her legs, crossing one sandaled foot over the other, and stretches back the way she might in a beach lounge chair. “Afraid so. That’s why we’re here, right? We’re working on getting better. Sinning less, and all that good stuff. I know I am. And eight years is a long time, Mrs. Campfield. Although for you it may feel like the blink of an eye.”
A dull purple color rises to Leah’s cheeks, but before she can say something biting back, Father Nathaniel clears his throat, leaning forward and saying democratically, “Let’s get on with the reading, shall we? Christiana, why don’t you direct us to a line?”
A few shrill, painful beads of sweat run down her spine, exactly the size and shape and feel of Chase’s fingertips, and she finds her voice very small as she murmurs into her Bible, “Twenty-four. ‘Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.’ I think it’s…”
“See, that’s the part I don’t get,” Tracey Anne interrupts. “I mean, sure. ‘Crucify the flesh.’ Premarital sex, boo hiss. Gambling, cheating on your partner, drinking too much on a Saturday night, I get all that. But all passions and desires? Why give them to us if we can’t experience them, right?” She raises an eyebrow in Christie’s direction. “You’d think it’s a sin to hold hands. You do that, you might as well retire your chastity belt and break out the self-flagellation. What, is God just that unbelievably cruel? We can’t all be nuns and priests. No offense, Father.”
Leah sneers, revealing the red lipstick has licked her teeth.
“The Lord is not always kind. That doesn’t mean he isn’t good. Just.”
Tracey Anne blows a bubble and, popping it, ponders, “I guess when you’re all powerful anything that works out the way you want it to is just.”
“How dare you say such a thing?”
Mrs. Campfield, in her distress, accidentally kicks her Thermos, which sits against the leg of her chair, but she makes no move to clean the spill as she continues, “It’s not for us to question what is right and just in the eyes of the Lord. His will is justice.”
The coffee makes a small, murky puddle, and Christie watches it spread, a blotchy, fetid stain against the scuffed tile floor. Mrs. Campfield’s shouts echo throughout the mostly empty space of the basement, and she imagines them emanating from the puddle, imagines them at first very small, and then very large, taking up every bit of spare room, suctioning and collapsing her lungs into airless fleshy lumps. She knows, somehow, that this speech is not really for Tracey Anne, but for herself.
“If you’re suffering, be glad God has decided to test you. Be glad His will is done. We cannot comprehend His ways here on Earth.”
She cannot stand it. She grabs a bundle of paper towels, attempts to mop away the mess, wipe away the words that rattle her skull.
“Christie, you want a hand?”
Before she can answer, Tracey Anne leans down beside her, keeping as far from Leah as possible as she sweeps the paper towel over the splotch. Up close, Tracey Anne’s perfume is stifling, tightening her throat and causing just about as much nausea as Leah’s cinnamon-thick cookies.
“Look, no need to get flustered. It’s just one gal’s opinion. But He didn’t want to make us smart enough to question Him, either. That says something about the guy.”
“I think that’s quite enough,” Father Nathaniel says tightly, glaring down over his cheekbones at Tracey Anne, and she realizes that, by mere proximity, everyone is staring at her just as much as they’re staring at Tracey Anne. She quickens her swiping.
“Tracey Anne,” Father says, as she begins to argue, “Your colorful opinions on the scripture have given us much food for thought. Perhaps someone else would like to pick up the thread from there?”
When his invitation is met with silence, Tracey Anne sighs, pressing her hands to her knees as she pushes off the ground. Extending a hand to help Christie up, she takes the soggy paper towels and deposits them in the trash.
“Face it, Father. They’re good sheep. They follow their shepherd.”
From across the room, at the trash can, Tracey Anne beams her blue eyes Christie’s way. Two blue lines, two blue threads that only she and Christie can see.
“You all aren’t wandering stars. No black darkness reserved forever for you. Just holiness and heavenliness and Hail Marys. Paradise.”
Leah stands, takes one frantic step toward Tracey Anne and the trash can, and then sits back down. The thermos clatters against the floor again, a hollow reverberation bellowing across the circle.
“And I suppose you imagine your particular proclivities holy?”
Sitting back down in a different chair, this one across the circle from Leah, Tracey Anne winks again, her right eye this time, and Christie feels her skin sizzle, flames outside and flames within.
“Sometimes. Depends on how good a mood Benny’s in.”
Mrs. Campfield makes a high-pitched whimpering noise that sounds suspiciously like a teapot, her fingers white on her kneecap.
“Leah, let it go,” Father commands, but his voice quavers, and he refuses to look at Tracey Anne. “She’s just provoking you. She’s just…”
“A harlot.”
Mrs. Campfield seethes, tiny bubbles of spittle gathering at the corners of her mouth. Red bubbles, stained from the lipstick. “A half-dressed prostitute. A licentious whore!”
“Leah!”
Tracey Anne laughs again, her head lolling over the back of the chair and her legs stretched toward the center of the circle. She examines the ceiling tile, flicking her toes in a loping rhythm that causes the black nail polish on them to blur, like some light-absorbing sprite flickering at her feet. Beside Christie, Rob seems mesmerized by this back-and-forth motion; she notices that he shifts in his seat, hands over his lap, and she jerks her gaze away from him, a surge of secondhand embarrassment a choke chain around her neck.
“Please, stop. I’m blushing.”
“Does nothing shame you?”
“Not since we had this conversation last Wednesday.”
“God damn you!”
“Leah!” Father Nathaniel’s baritone belts again, but this time his voice catches in the middle, almost petulant. The rhythm echoes in her head: Le-ah. Le-ah. The same jagged, galloping pattern of her breath.
Leah grits her teeth, a sick sound that sounds suspiciously like she has just bitten into one of her cookies. “Just who – or what – do you think you are?”
Tracey Anne shrugs, leaning back in her seat, her turbulence spent as quickly as it came, as if she has reached the eye of her own hurricane. She glances at the tile floor beneath her feet, the sparkle on her eyelids twinkling, blue glitter on blue eyes, double blue. Two blue eyes, two blue lines.
“I don’t think myself anything, Mrs. Campfield. Nothing at all.”
Tracey Anne slinks over to her original chair, the wafting rosy scent floating downward toward Christie as she slides her travel Bible inside her bag. The entire circle watches as she hoists the bag high on her shoulder, adjusting the t-shirt so that it hangs loose, one pale, freckled shoulder revealed, skin dimpled beneath a hot pink bra strap.
“Well.”
Tracey Anne’s voice is lofty and regal as she tosses her ponytail over her shoulder, her cheekbones pointed at a forty-five degree to the fluorescent lights above. A strand of hair gets tangled in the hoop of her earring, and she struggles to free it before letting her hand fall to her side. A small tingle of pink appears on her cheeks, but Christie knows she’s the only one who sees it.
“This has been fun, but I’m afraid my whoring around has to come first,” she says. “Want a ride, Christie? Benny should be outside now, managed to get off early. We’re heading to Chase’s semi-finals. Missed the first, but we can catch the second game if we go ten over down I-70.”
Fourteen eyes. Seven congregants in this Bible Study, and every one of their eyes is on them. Two women, one scantily clad, the other overly clothed; a ponderous charcoal smudge with silvery blonde wisps and tufts, and a blazing gazer beam of a tiny woman in cutoffs. This, she decides, is Tracey Anne’s punishment. She knows Chase stole the test.
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough, girl? Stop taunting her,” Leah says, with the firm command of a dog show handler.
Tracey Anne tilts her head, and the tote bag slides down her shoulder, coming to rest against her hip, before she nods.
“’Kay. Don’t forget your Thermos, Mrs. Campfield.”
When she reaches the door to the stairs, one foot propped on the bottom step, feeling that all eyes are still on her, she turns, adding, “Alright y’all. See you next Wednesday.”
* * *
She follows Leah Campfield up the cracked stone sidewalk along the front of the church, the light from inside dappling the concrete through the stained-glass windows. The Wednesday Mass over, Leah leads her toward her bronze Crown Victoria, her heels clacking on the asphalt. She still mutters about Tracey Anne’s shamefulness, but her outcries fade into a soft clucking as they reach the cemetery, the crooked teeth graves reminding her of her daddy’s front incisors, mossed and twisted and sunken into the silky green grass that tickles their ankles.
She finds her momma easily, at the Curruthers corner of the cemetery, the engravings softened and buffered out by time, names lost beneath river stains and oily brown marks at their bases from where the water sinks in every summer. She and Leah stand beside the metal railing, just a single pipe forming a border between the back of the graveyard and the fallow field, the spiky paunches of dirt that might have held crops, in a different rotation.
Someone has left a glittery tiara at the top of her momma’s grave, a cheap child’s toy for dress-up, divoted with rhinestones and plastic rubies and topaz, molded into false emerald cuts. Beneath the crown, a hot pink spray-painted exclamation in jagged, aggressive all caps: LONG LIVE THE RIVER TRASH PRINCESS!
Mrs. Campfield scowls, her lips twisting into a hideous asymmetrical shape. She notices that the travel thermos has smudged Leah’s lipstick on her bottom lip; a crimson fingerprint in its shape lingers on the rim.
“Disgusting, what people will do for a laugh. Disgraceful.”
Mrs. Campfield, she knows, is wrong. To think; her mother, a princess, revered by some stranger, wearing a crown of fish skeletons and twisted, rotted twigs, a gaudy veil of fishing nets and human flotsam and jetsam, a cape of river debris, beer cans, plastic bottles, all that gorgeous waste. She imagines her mother, the only way she knew her, huge and beautiful, physically transformed into this wonderful vision, fish baits the jewels around her neck and enormous words about God and glory and the divine promise her just incantations, the pearls she will impart.
When Mrs. Campfield isn’t looking, she peels one of the plastic jewels from the tiara, the glue yielding easily beneath her fingers, leaving an empty silver eye socket in its place.
She puts the jewel in her sweatshirt pocket and wonders who it is, this loyal subject and servant, who also loved her mother.
Outside of the chilled church basement, the late summer oppression sits like a heavy cat on her chest, her legs stuck together with sweat beneath her wool skirt, a line of it ringing her ankles where her socks stretch up above them, and she pictures Chase, all those miles away, her angel of destruction, the wood of the bat stingy and hot beneath his fingers, eye-black running in raccoon mascara lines down his speckled cheeks. She sees him, a twisted crooked figure, a crooked body for a crooked face, tensed and poised and ready to deliver that beautiful white orb into the distant yonder.
He’s a horrible batter. It still spikes his nerves, every game. She can see him, prowling up and down the dugout, hair sticking up in sweaty ribbons when he removes his helmet.
He used to get sick, every game, when he was still on the high school team, right before the first inning, between warming up and taking the diamond. All over the batting, the one thing he couldn’t improve. When he started on the high school team, the slowest runner, he’d spend hours after practice, sprinting bases, timing himself, until the blisters on his feet and ankles burst and bled; hours, throwing harder, faster, in curveball loops and in rocket blast fastballs, into the tree at the edge of the baseball diamond in Satan’s Tears, so fast that the bark would splinter away and scatter amongst the roots.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” she’d said, one of the times he let her come and watch. She worked on her crochet, a green washrag that already seemed age-faded appearing beneath her needles, and he ran bases, hands to knees, leaning over and panting, so hard his whole spine heaved with the breaths.
He had looked up at her, his face pink with sunburn and flushed with the running, and gave her one of his sharp grins, so unexpected and joyously painful that she blushed, looking back down at her crochet.
“Me? Nothing can hurt me, babe. I’m fucking bionic.”
She’d almost believed it, too.
As she and Leah Campfield walk to the car, Leah’s hand on the inside of her elbow, leaving a smudgy sweat mark along her skin where she has pushed up her sweatshirt sleeve, she imagines him, now, his stalking walk up to bat; the snickers, behind his back, of the crowd. He has that awkward, jagged look of someone too thin and sharp to be real; someone who never learned to walk right, their bones were too stiff and their flesh stretched too tight. They all had their names and their jokes, although she hadn’t understood them, the few times she’d sat in the bleachers.
She can see him, clear as if she was smooshed between Tracey Anne and Benny, their ward; Tracey Anne and her rose perfume, snapping a stick of Spearmint gum and stretching her black-painted toes over the empty bleacher beneath them; Benny, tearing off a bite of hotdog and offering it to her. She can taste the sharp tang of the mustard, the fearsome yellow bee sting of it against her tongue, as she swallows down the snickers of the crowd at Chase’s self-serious strut, his gritty scowl. She knows better than they do.
He’ll crush them.
She turns the rhinestone over in her sweatshirt pocket, slides into the leather seat of the Crown Victoria. The metal burns her fingertips as she creaks open the door handle, the seat squelching beneath her. She can feel the heat emanate through her skirt, still unbearable even through the thick fabric. She finds the top edge of the slightly asymmetrical trapezoid of the rhinestone.
Chase, the bat hovering near his right ear, his eyes squinted against the sun, his jaw tense with gritted teeth and sharp against the flesh of his cheek, every muscle in his body coiling and ready to strike. His stance, awkward and tight, his knees bent so low he is almost lunging; the high school coach, before that dreadful day with Eddie Richards, before his fall from grace, used to say that he had the most inefficient technique. That if only he could unlearn his habits, he wouldn’t just be great; he’d be heavenly.
The sinews stand out beneath his knickers. Her eyes catch the slight twitch of his muscle as the ball snaps from the pitcher’s fingers in one blistering, imperceptible moment. He has caught fire.
The trouble, his coach always said, was he was never patient enough.
The crack is blistering, loud, ricocheting around the cab of the Crown Victoria as the engine shudders and turns, as Mrs. Campfield pulls forward through the parking space and the blinker clicks on.
It’s a right turn, a majestic flight that blinds her, but it’s not out of the park, and she prays that he can work it.
His feet skid some dirt, his cleats kicking up a brilliant red cloud.
She traces the outside edge of the rhinestone, so sharp it stings against her finger, and imagines his journey along this straight, wicked line.
Savannah Kluesner lives in St. Charles, Missouri, where she works at the local library designing and implementing social programs for tweens and teens. She recently completed her Master of Arts degree in English at Truman State University, where she taught as a graduate student for two years. This short story is the first chapter of her creative master’s thesis, A Place Too Cold for Hell; or, like paying homage to an idol. This is her first publication.