Flashed Before His Eyes

    The flash and bang. All is dark.

    00:03 [Number Withheld] South Cherry Drive

    All is silent.

    00:04 Caller says that male subject has just shot himself.

    That summer of impotent flirtation, singing songs from Fiddler on the Roof to crack her toothy smile. Following her blue eyes across the crowded room. Holding secret hands. Laughing into her laughter.

    00:08 Caller believes subject is deceased.

    Rain in the woods. Minnesota north shore in October. Hiking up to the lighthouse. “We’re just happy.” Was she? Ever? Living beneath fallen skies.

    00:17 Call back ambulance needed at [Number Withheld] South Cherry Drive.

    How difficult it truly was then, a process of discipline to trust myself, to do the things I said I would do, no matter how hard. Awkward. I want to be the friend my friends think I am.

    00:20 Caller says that a man shot himself there. The gun is still on scene. Confirm.

    Scratch five wide and four deep, broken loose, lightning struck. Loose tooth. Sitting at the screen door to watch the rain. Old enough to remember hope bending backwards like a tango kiss. Mom is in the kitchen making dinner.

    00:22 Caller believes the subject is deceased. Killed himself.

    This face, her face through eyes dimmed with tears, a hand confessing. Remember her drinking from a glass. I realize that name. I never knew it true. Someone I knew?

    00:30 Paramedics on route.

    Beneath the arms of an enormous cactus. Syncope event. Catch her. Any idea what went wrong? You love someone. Who knows what they will think. What they will say? Find shade and water before she faints. Was it a mistake? Maybe. All of it.

    00:52 One Six One is on scene. Thank you One Six One.

    A month of endless rain and days without the sun. A small and interdigitated world. Part of the ruptured whole. Maybe I’ve misremembered it all. Maybe I’ve...

    01:14 One Six One confirms: subject is deceased.

Memory and False Luminaries

    I was living a bifurcated existence, like most everyone in those debilitating, degenerate days, divided myself from the world, with one foot on the upward path and one foot on the pitch, on the city streets at night, walking in the flickering, projected light of digital advert displays. It was best to avoid looking at those lights. They are false luminaries. And to beware of the shifting shadows as well. They are whispering spirits.

    All the moist elements of murder were there: a woman with stolen money and a hole torn in her thin white blouse, her lover starting fires in the stairwell, her ex-husband, and a gun. It is commonplace, but untrue to say that there was no motive for the crime; some things just resist explanation. Some wounds never heal.

    The words blurred like an everflowing river.

    I was dreaming of a place with no memory and had no memory of my dreams, of a life of authentic choices made by the principles of determination.

    Meanwhile he was screaming outside their apartment, trying to get in, screaming from the stop and go streets. It might have been two or three weeks. Maybe six months to a year. It’s hard to remember now after so long. And the currents of time are unstable.

    He saw her kissing in the park. He saw the fire. He saw her walking hand in hand down the sidewalk. He saw the river. He saw her in a parked car with a stranger.

    I remember hearing about it – though I was very young at the time. I remember seeing the bloody photos. Why did my parents allow that? I didn’t understand it then and only later, much later, realized what had happened.

    He had unresolved issues, problems of aggression behind a cherub’s face, burning pitch behind a Boy’s Life smile. No one believed it. No one believed him. Even when he confessed to the fires.

    I remember the images on television: a woman, face down on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood, a message scrawled beside her. “We are deeply distressed by the brutality of this age.” Was that irony or confession? But I do not remember the midnight gunshots just before the hour. I don’t remember hearing them. As I said, I was very young then. Only a boy, but I read about the blood and the glass. And how he was screaming outside the apartment, trying to get in to see her.

Cain and the Capitalist Cult

    The curdled sky unplaceable through the smoke of burning cities
    day and night disfigured, bulldozed earth in a heap of spoil
    Cain stands screaming in the field of blood,
    “Am I my brother’s keeper?” 
    Patron saint of the Capitalist Cult.

The Crisis

    The oak that I’d always wanted removed – the dead one in the front yard – fell through the house during the night. The night of the winds. Straight line winds, a hundred miles an hour. The night of the horror. Shattered windows without a glow. Someone’s minivan lurched over the curb like a vomiting hangover.

    The moon crashed over an empty highway. The night lay long through the dark and we were dying in shifts.

    We hid through the crisis of that night and the days and weeks that followed in the closest church lockdown. We barricaded the door with a broken pew. A solace without comfort. A comfort without consolation. Flaming billboards and parking lots of ash. Offices sacked in the escalation of destruction. My children sat on the floor with me, sleeping with their little heads on my lap.

    We heard women crying in the bathroom and men screaming in the alley. Two thousand years of longed-for apocalypse boiled down to a wordless howl. Crowds of the staggering sick were turned out of the hospital. The daily dead with meaningless eyes like blackened stones.

    Meanwhile, the great men in their great coats and black cars - the optimates - were buying and selling the antheap. Poisoning the river. Irradiating the soil. Cutting our throats and gloating as a parade squad of soldiers in jackboots marches across the square.

    None of the pleasant words. None of the challenging speeches. None of the proclamations and declarations mattered. Sermons from the void. None of them could stop anything. None of them meant anything anymore. Stupid fools wanted the world to end. They paid for its collapse.

    Fine. Goddammit. Burn the whole thing. Let their wickedness come down. Let ‘em have what they’ve always wanted. Let ‘em choke on it. I know I have. And I’m sick of it all.

Lamentations 1:22

Unsatisfied Unsettled

    Say nothing for those who see nothing
    concealed, suppressed trauma
    and unchecked philosophy

    The grinding, ruthless race
    of unsatisfied winner takes all
    the plots of violent hearts
    and lies of mischievous mouths

    We are conditioned by a lifetime of storms
    taught the ambitions of greed and malice
    brought up to believe this is the way

    But watch without envy
    and wait without impatience

    There is no future here, no reward, no hope
    the unsettled glow behind his eyes
    will flicker into darkness.

Proverbs 24:19-20

I Still Have Some Livin' To Do

    I wrote this song on Thursday as I was out carrying the mail. I sang it as I wrote it. Or I wrote it as I sang it. Either way this is how it came out. I sang it at church this morning. 

    The song is at the 15-minute mark in this video of our church service. 

I Still Have Some Livin’ To Do

His mercies are new every morning
but my morning glories haven’t bloomed.
It feels like the whole world’s dying
while I still have some livin’ to do.

There are butterflies in the garden
orange and pink, golden wings.
They scatter and fly away on the breeze
and I’m left alone to sing.

Grace, Lord, grace and love,
goodness to start the day.
Faith, hope and charity,
our strength along the way.

I hear dogs barking at strangers
and sirens screaming down the road,
if I know my brother’s struggling
let me help to shoulder the load.

My heart will keep on beating.
My feet will keep on the way.
I won’t stop though I stumble,
soon the night gives way to the day.

Grace, Lord, grace and love,
goodness to start the day.
Faith, hope and charity,
our strength along the way.

His mercies are new every morning
but my morning glories never bloomed.
It feels like the whole world’s dying
but I still have some livin’ to do.

The Same Agenda in a Different Hall

    It was the same agenda in a different hall. He knew where he was though he’d never been there before. Not that he could remember. His gaze shifted from the window to the closed door. From mirror to the fluorescent lights overhead. Back to the mirror. The glass.

    Scratched across the bathroom wall, a message: WE KNOW YOU’RE on CIA PAYROLL. He read it in reverse in the mirror. He heard footsteps at the staircase. He heard echoes from the walls, the whispered voices of doctors and drug dealers. A scratching behind the wall. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

    Then – a spontaneous displace of rage. Curses! He smashed the mirror and the room was dark. empty. The air was still.

    Was this the same crime scene? Two murders in two weeks. Two different murders in the same room. The same agenda in a different hall. Was it a mixed message? Crossed communication? Did it matter? The sensations were exactly the same. The smell and touch of blood.

    A moment of hesitation and he was back across the hall. Double-backed and empty. He smiled. “Terror on every side! Let not the swift flee away,” he chuckled. “nor the mighty escape but they shall stumble.” He laughed again. “Charge! Horses! Chariots! A day of vengeance and revenge!”

    He was not a religious man, but he liked the liturgy and the rhythm of the prophetic register. He was not a pious man. He was a killer. And a killer had arrived with an appointment for murder. He knew what was coming. And he was ready for it. “I am no one and nothing. Paroled and free to do as I please.”

    He’d received the word, a message from his handlers on his machine: “We have vital signs. That is a 1033 weapons transfer. Legal.” Authority was given. And power.

    Still that echo of a hidden voice. “I know what you did. I know what you did.” Scritch. Scritch. Scritch behind the wall. “Warrior upon warrior. The mighty man has stumbled against the mighty, and they are fallen both together.”

    The fluorescent lights flickered. Hummed at the back of his neck. A horripilation down his spine. The copper smell of blood. The ache in his tooth and burning in his throat. Pain is memory. Memory is pain. He smacked at his head to stop the pain and wailing filled the world.

Jeremiah 46: 2-12

The City Was Not Worthy of Them

    It was barely noon or just after, but already the sky was dark. I shivered and hurried on, eager to reach the city before whatever calamity this celestial portent indicated, but the earth lurched and I fell sideways and stumbled to the ground. I smacked my face against a stone and tasted blood. I spat and saw my blood in the gravel and the dust.

    The earth shook again and I screamed as rocks careened down the hills around me, cracking in half and breaking. A cavern opened in the hillside in front of me. And the wind whipped up. I heard a voice shouting – calling for God, though I could not make out the words.

    And from the newly opened crevasse there came a morbid parade. I saw the bodies of many holy ones walking forth. Their flesh still bore the marks of the pillory and the scourge. One carried her decapitated head in her arms. Another severed torso pulled himself along with his arms as his legs walked alongside. One young man had thorns in his eyes. They wore sheep and goat skins. They were bruised and emaciated. Some still had shackles on their wrists and ankles. I heard the clank of their chains as they marched out of the earth. I smelled flowers as they passed.

    “Media vita in morte sumus,” I stammered as these lively dead entered the holy city ahead of me. And the city was not worthy of them. “Speraverunt et liberasti eos.”

Matthew 27:51-53

The Visions of Iddo the Seer

    These are the visions of Iddo the Seer in the first year of King Jeroboam, son of Nebat.¹

    When the sound of the fire died down and the desert wind, full of grit, laid low, I was found naked, more than naked, outside the walls of the city. I climbed the foundation of the walls and looked about the city. I saw the house reduced to scattered stones.

    I was assaulted by terror and unable to stand. I climbed out the window and stood on the sand.

    I saw stones stripped and laid bare in blind circles. It was the house of the dead, flying the banners of corpses.

    Men cowered behind the wall. Forced through barricades into darkened corners. The city was a great inhabitation of despair. And I was afraid to scream.

    Strange visions in my head during the night. Visions and a voice that said, “You must not speak of yesterday.”

    I saw beasts and stars and horns and slaughtered children in the rubbled remains of an open air prison. A shadow army. A whisper militia now screaming for the whole world to hear.

    I saw lightning and all the shekinah glory legends, all eyes and fire in the storm hovering over my bed. I saw burning olive trees beyond the walls and checkpoints. I dreamt of burning human bones ritually defiling the land. I dreamt of fish and cucumbers, leeks, onion, garlic, and watermelons rotting.

    The voice said again, “You must not speak of yesterday.” I sat long in silence listening. Waiting for another word.

    I saw hellfire fall from the sky to burn families fleeing in the dark. I saw the earth crack open to devour and drag them down. And the voice said again, “You must not speak of yesterday.”

And I knew it was not the voice of HaShem. And all I could do was scream into the sound of the fire.

2 Chronicles 9:29

1 922 BCE approximately. Scholars continue to debate.

Let Them Stay

    The world of light and laughter breaks and the sky collapses, spilling darkness. The stars and wind dissolve. The moon burns black. The fundamental earth beneath and the firmament above are inverted.

    “Your cousin, John, is dead.”

    Jesus buckles, stumbles, pushes the messenger away. Pushes past the disciples and climbs into the boat. Alone. And the sea carries him away to a lonely place.

    But the village, not privy to the bad news delivered, follows on foot, racing along the shore to meet him on the other side. He steps ashore and they are there – calling, crying, cawing, clawing, galling. They brought to him all the intrusive demands born of desperation.

    And he sees them through his tears. He sees them with broken pity. Passion is pain and compassion is a shared grief. He heals their sick and calms their fears. Touching. Holding. Weeping. Soothing. Blessing.

    The invisible sun settles itself toward evening and the disciples say, “This is a lonely place and you want to be alone. Now it’s late and time has slipped with the sun. Why don’t you send these people away?”

    Jesus sits down among them on the whispering grass and sighs. “No,” he says. He lies down and closes his eyes. “Let them stay. Let them stay.”

    (Matthew 14:13-16)

A Catechesis under Duress

 

    I begin to feel ill.

    I am bound behind a closed and locked, iron door, sitting in the gloom of a faint light on an unsanitary floor. I’ve been here before, with my arms nailed out, chained within the gilded rooms of our favored fathers, reading the spidery handwriting of forgotten saints.

    Open the closed doors.

    Rome is America. Empire is empire no matter who holds the sword. And the sword will not be held in vain, my brothers. Rome circa A.D. 45 or the United States of America 2026 – it is the same illusion stretched over space and time, simultaneous simulacra. Sinister simulations. A projection. A hologram of time irreal crowding out the kingdom of God.

    The blind mechanical agents of the tyrant on the Potomac observe our movement and conversation. An incessant cricking sound of servo motors trailing behind us on the streets. The test produces results, and the transcript is produced for the imperfect prefects. “What’s all this about sin? You propose to tell us of sin? You needn’t proceed any further.”

    Return for beatings. Blood on the iron door. Return to your cell.

    But where could I go to escape? If I go to the edge of the world it is there. And I am not out of it. The authentic has not yet overtaken the manufactured reality that we are forced to inhabit. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

    It is a catechesis under duress. Our teacher in this is Jesus the Christ, born for this and raised from this. Crucified under Pontius Pilate. And that we reasonably worship him, the soul of the world. Learn this: Repentance. Chastity. Charity. Love for all enemies. Care for the poor. Mercy and not greed.

    Why can you not accept us who believe that we will receive again our bodies, though they be dead and cast into the earth? Would you, seeing semen, believe it to become a full human body? Resurrection is difficult, true, but nothing is impossible for God.

    Return for processing. The face is clawed away. Force of impact thrown down the stairs. The body cracks sharp, bent at a sinister angle. Blood on the floor. Return to your cell.

    Returned. Revealed. Restored. Reflect, if you will, on the death of disciples and kings.

    I am guilty, perhaps, but I am not wrong. I am not a criminal no matter what the oscillatory prosecution said in their public statement and press release. Crucifixion is for the guilty and even the innocent can be guilty. Enjoy that contradiction for it is a true one and I am an honest man.

    No cause. No effect. Only destruction, the destruction of human identity. The collapse of objective information. What kerygma is here? No redemptive death, only death. No crucified Christ, only a crucified carpenter. Rome did not fall, it follows.

The Night of the Murder

    We saw this coming. Everyone knew. But everyone looked the other way. Pretended not to notice. Or to care. We were all tense. Unsettled. We were nervous. What could we do?

    Which isn’t to say…

    We’d seen the photos. We saw the police on the street, the detectives. We saw the reporters and the news crews. The bathroom window broken. A stranger on the corner. An unknown car parked across the street.

    We closed the doors. Like being in a void. Avoid. Weightless and unreal on the floor. Fallen. The press of feet and hands on my face, my head. Stopped center. Even my skin was ill at ease.

    But what do we know? We were obscure strangers in the dark.

    “What?”

    “We don’t have to…”

    “We don’t have any choice.”

    “Of course we have a choice. We always have a choice. God damn!”

    “Sorry.”

    That got half a smile. But not much more. And no news.

    “Never go that dark.”

    The shadows continued collapsing into the basement where he kept his pornography, his filth. The beginning, middle, and end of all his horror. All the conversational cause and effect, false affect. Fate and destiny forever just below the surface, continuing inevitable. No one paused to consider these things. We barely spoke to each other.

    We smoked cigarettes.

    I remember one woman, a local girl. Unzipped. On her knees. Surrounded by broken windows. Sightless windows. Half remembered buildings passed by, offices moved to new, brighter premises. A disused playground, abandoned by progress, forgotten by the future. Children crossing narrow pathways to secret places. Sheltering in improvised homes here and there.

    Some desire nothing but to keep as they were. Some forget. Some sleep.

    No. No. Forget it all. We had no recollection of night of the murder whatsoever. No barking dog. No surveillance. Nothing. We were trapped. Cold and nervous. The following gaze of prying eyes. Only moonlight on the lawn.

A Farewell to Friends

    The blasphemy was already written
    on the underlying bone
    beneath the skin

    What could we do
    but wait for the denouement?

    Blurring
    burning
    breaking open now
    for all to see

    Close the curtain
    bring down the lights.

*For Andy.
*For Spencer. 

The Fall and Rise of Eutychus

     We were, one night, the last night we were there, gathered together in the upper story of the house, the great room with many small windows. It was late and we’d been working all day but Paul was going on and on, preaching as he did. It was a conversational sermon, Q-and-A, give and take, rap session concerning the glories and hardships of living in the kingdom. And he went on and on and on. It was very late. We lit many torches to light the room. Midnight and many lamps.

    And one of the boys, Eutychus, Little Lucky we sometimes called him, was sitting on the window ledge for the breeze. The room was stuffy with the hot and oily air. Claustrophobic and close. Eutychus sat in the window for a breeze but still he grew drowsy – his eyes moving slowly, his muscles relaxing – brainwaves diminishing - and was soon overcome by sleep. His head bobbed down and up and down and then he fell from the window. Three stories down, he fell and smashed upon the pavement below.

    I’m a one-time sleepwalker, myself. I was fifteen or sixteen, away from home for the weekend at a youth retreat. I woke up in the middle of the night, very early in the morning, on the floor of the cabin bathroom. I assumed that the other guys in the cabin had dragged me there as a joke or a prank on the spindly kid with glasses and braces who preferred Dungeons and Dragons over football. I woke up, cold and confused on the floor, in the dark with no idea where I was. It took several long, almost panicky moments to figure out where I’d awoken. Realizing that I was in the bathroom didn’t alleviate my confusion. I went back to my bunk and back to sleep. I expected that the other boys would tease me in the morning. But they didn’t. No one said anything about it. I realized that I must have been sleepwalking. I had no sleepwalking episodes before that. And I’ve had no sleepwalking episodes since. My younger brother, however, used to sleepwalk all the time. He’d walk out of the house and urinate on the front porch when he was a small child. I don’t know if he still does that.

    But brother Eutychus wasn’t a sleepwalker. He was a sleep faller. And his was a sort of autodefenestration, if you will.

    What is sleep, anyway? No one really knows. Even the neurologists who study sleep don’t really understand it. Neurotransmitters acting on groups of neurons in the brain. It is death and it isn’t. The body may be stilled (somewhat) but the brain is living and active. Sleep is a sort of death. Sleep is a strange country.

    For Little Lucky, the euphemism of sleep became the reality of death. We raced down the stairs and found him, smashed upon the pavement and picked him up dead.

    But Paul in prophetic reenactment clasped the body of the boy to himself and said, “There’s no reason to fear,” he said, “There’s life in him yet.” Yet he was dead. In the strictest and severest sense of the word. We know death. We’ve seen death and we know death. A broken neck is death but Paul said, “There’s life in him yet.”

    We were still there with tears forming in our eyes when, without warning, Paul stood up and went back upstairs to break the bread with the brothers and to continue his preaching until daybreak.

    A few moments later, Little Lucky – Eutychus – coughed once and spasmed twice and began breathing again. I leaned over him and felt for a pulse. It was strong and true. “Speak to me, son,” I said. “Recite your numbers.”

    The boy stood, folded his hands and recited his lessons: “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Jack. Queen. King.”

    We were not a little comforted. There he was, our Little Lucky.

from Doctor Luke’s Personal Notes (Ananias and Sapphira)

    Though I was not present to witness the deaths of Ananias (“Yahweh is gracious”) or Sapphira (“Beautiful”) and neither did I perform an autopsy on their bodies following, I have been asked by members of the community to address as a doctor and member of the Royal College of Surgeons the peculiarities of their sudden demise and to, if possible, describe the cause (other than the supernatural obvious). The community wants to retain a record of these events, as discreditable as it may be, so that Ananias and Sapphira and their legacy will not be forgotten.

    Ananias: 42-year-old, male with no previous history of heart disease or cardiovascular difficulties and his wife, Sapphira: 30-year-old female with sparkling blue eyes and a clean health history were both suddenly and inexplicably struck dead on the same day, within a few hours of each other.

    The couple had voluntarily sold a piece of property and brought the cash to the apostles as part of the voluntary communalism being put into practice by the Followers of the Way. Ananias reportedly told Peter that the amount he brought in was the full amount of the sale. But when challenged on this, Ananias began to sweat profusely. The apostle Peter described this as a lie not to men, but a lie to the Holy Spirit and asked him, “Wasn’t the property yours to use as you wished? And once sold, wasn’t the money yours to give as you desired? What put this scheme into your head? Your philargyry will not save you. Keep your money. Keep your mammon. Keep your mummery.”

    And with that Ananias fell down dead; he ‘breathed out his soul,’ as one witness described it. A group of young men wrapped the body in a sheet and took it out for burial.

    A few hours later Sapphira came too and was challenged in the same way by Peter. “Listen! You can hear the footsteps of the men who just finished burying your husband returning. They’ll carry you out next.” Immediately she fell down dead like her husband. The group of young men who had just buried her husband, wrapped her in a sheet and buried her body next to that of her husband.

    There are a variety of physical conditions that could have resulted in this sort of sudden death. The sudden onset of excessive sweating could be indicative of a Heart Attack. This “cold sweat” would probably have been accompanied by other symptoms including chest pains and a racing or skipping heartbeat. If their deaths were caused by a Stroke they would have felt a numbness or a prickling sensation in various parts of their body, along with a headache and blurred vision. This is not an uncommon occurrence; deaths caused by strokes are fairly common. Emperor Valentinian died as the result of a stroke precipitated by yelling angrily at a group of foreign envoys. I might have suspected a Pulmonary Embolism but there is no indication that either of them were coughing or that they experienced a bloody or frothy mucus with the coughing. Shigellosis (a bacterial intestinal infection) might be considered except there was not an accompanying diarrhea, fever, abdominal pain, or bloody stool. Neither does an Aortic Rupture seem likely as this would have been accompanied by a sudden loss of blood pressure and a blue tinge to the skin. It may have been a case of Exhaustion as the result of diseased blood vessels in the lungs – but this seems unlikely. There was no trace of either Strychnine, or Prussic Acid, or Opium.

    More exotic diagnoses have been suggested including: Being Struck by Lightning – I read an article in one of the Latin medical journals about an entire football team from The Democratic Republic of the Congo that was simultaneously killed by a bolt of lightning. The old adage, “Lightning never strikes the same place twice” is veritably untrue. It is possible that the couple in question were both killed in the same place by separate lightning strikes. This is strange, but not outside of the realm of fortean possibilities. Or they could have been killed by other articles falling from the sky. A villager in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq was killed by a falling Meteorite, and the Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed by Tortoise dropped by an eagle flying overhead which mistook the author’s bald head for a stone on which to drop and break the tortoise’s shell. It’s true that none of the witnesses mention lightening, meteorites, or tortoises, but these possibilities cannot be completely discounted.

    My sometimes traveling companion, Paul, has often suggested that members of the church who violate the standards and expectations of the community should be Turned Over to Satan for the “destruction of the flesh.” I am not sure what he means by that but it sounds like death to me.

    Psychosomatic or Psychogenic Death (sometimes referred to as “Voodoo Death,” is a parasympathetic backlash of the mind against the strong emotions of fear and terror that is powerful enough to shut down the body. It is possible that the couple were, quite literally, scared to death.

    A skillful physician could, from the color and cast of the skin, make an inferential diagnosis of an illness, but it is impossible at this far removal in both space and time to make any authoritative diagnosis, but it would seem that something incredible and fearful happened here. More than that I would not hazard to say.

One Life and One More

    A lush tone poem by Sibelius played upon the phonograph as Darling sliced vegetables in the apartment kitchenette. The light of a hazy sunset filtered through the flag that hung in the window. She could feel the lush orchestration and soaring melody thrumming inside her.

    “Darling, are you okay?” Milo asked from the door. She was standing at the counter, with peppers and onions on the cutting board and knife held loosely in her hand, but she wasn’t moving. “You seem distracted.”

    “Yes, Milo” she said and then, “No, my love.”

    “You are distracted,” Milo said. He said aside the drafts and drawings he carried and, stepping into the kitchen, relieved her of the knife.

    She clenched her teeth and, looking silently about the room, shook her head. She saw her reflection in the window and again in the cracked mirror on the wall in the living room. “Not distracted,” she whispered.

    “You’re shivering,” Milo said. “Cold too. What is it?”

    “The death of so many. I could not. We couldn’t.”

    Milo led her to the couch at the center of the living room. “Sit, Darling. Sit. Please. Let me get you something.”

    “No,” she said clutching his arm. “I want nothing.” She looked into his eyes. “Just sit with me a while.”

    He sat on the couch with her, and it was a comfort. To them both. A comfort to know that she belonged to him and he to her, in equal measure. They sat that way, together, until the sun was set and the room was dark.

    "We don’t know what we’re doing, do we?” She said later, during dinner. Not really. Your art and my travel. And yet we cannot do nothing. How can these little motions stand against so many lives?”

“If we can save but one,” Milo said.

    She’d fallen in love with him years before, slowly, over occasional conversations and walks to the market. He was patient. Always patient.

    “One life,” he said again. “And one more.”

    Gunshots erupted in the night – as they had most every night that month. These were not so close as some of the others. Perhaps at the train station down the street.

    “One life,” she whispered back.

    “And one more.”

Everything’s Back to Normal

    I don't quite know who these two people are just yet - where they live, or what they're doing - but I've enjoyed finding them and expect that I'll see a bit more from them.

And Say, Amen

    Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world
    which He has created according to His will.
    May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days,
    and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon;
    and say, Amen.

    To life, a blessing. To life with grief. A life of questions and too few reasons. The complexity of purpose is beyond us. We are too weak for these heavy weighted conversations. We are more suited to pleasant reminiscences and the laughter of games.

    May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.
    Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored,
    adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He,
    beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that
    are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

    Shade the window and light the candle and, with head covered, recite the remembered prayers of our grandmothers and grandfathers.

    May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
    and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

    Remember that time in the park, when the sunlight filtered through the oak leaves and we rolled upon the grass, our clothes still wet from the stream…?

    He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
    may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
    and say, Amen.

    An angel of the sun rises with the steel of God in his hand.

All I Know Is Darkness – a Psalm for Palestine

    A song of sickness and native-born suffering.

    Look, it is night, it is dark, but look, shuttered windows and boarded doors on the street, unfriendly faces leering from suspicious shadows, and the message you receive, loud and incessant, insistent, if you’re listening, is: help, oh, God, help me!

    I’ve been filled for so long now, time, times, and half a time at least, with misery, living on the shores of Sheol, numb and numbered with the ones hanging upside down over oblivion, stalked and hunted and left for dead, all strength is stripped from these arms, like one of the slaughtered tossed into a ditch with no protection, unremembered, even by you, no flowers, no grass, only stones beneath the grave, not a place for anyone, only depth, only darkness.

    Drift

    Like a man from the black, friendless, defiled, grotesque, wheeling, spinning, thrashing but no escape, trembling hands a prayer for return, but the dead see no miracle, no sign, no wonder, only shadows rising with no praise.

    Drift further

    With the door closed behind, the room is black and dark and silent, do they sing here? Love songs? Hymns? Do the spirits sing spiritual songs? Do they know your wonders in the void? And still I’m here, weeping in the dust on the floor, every morning, every evening, though those words mean nothing when you won’t even look at me, I was born too close to death, wounded in birth, I bleed to death, shifted weight and slipping foot, I carry unfinished terrors in my wretched body, and all I know is darkness.

Millions of Years of Death – An Eighth Imaginary Conversation with a Real Troll

    “We’re in a rut, Gunner,” I said when I saw him approaching. It was my day off and I was enjoying a cup of coffee and a novel of historical fiction on the front porch. One of the stray cats that hangs around our place for food was there, allowing me to pet her occasionally. But she bolted under the porch when she heard the guttural roar of Gunner’s pickup truck. He parked it in my driveway, turned off the engine and stepped out, waving at me.

    He took off his red ball cap and said, “What?”

    “We’re in a rut. I know how it’s going to be. It’s always like this. You come to me with a question or a challenge. I respond and I answer. You insult me and then you leave. Now, I don’t mind playing this role, but you know that we don’t have to be enemies, right? There is no obligation to hostility.”

    “Oh, come on now, Jeff. You know you’re in control here,” he said.

    “Okay. Okay,” I said. “Fine. Come on up to the porch. Let me get you a cup of coffee. You like sugar in yours, right?”

    Cup of coffee in hand and seated on the porch with me, he began. “I would bet that you’re one of those who believe in the theory of evolution. But I want to challenge you with one thing.”

    “Go for it, Gunner,” I said.

    “The alleged evidence is the fossils in the layers of sedimentary rock, a long and tortured history of death and suffering. But it just doesn’t work. You can’t have millions of years of death before Adam’s sin.”

    “Well, the scientific descriptions of cosmological, geological, and biological evolution are not actually in conflict with theology…”

    “But the Bible…”

    “Or the Bible. Only with a particular and peculiar interpretation of the Bible.”

    “False. False! You are elevating man’s opinion – your opinion over God’s word. The God of millions of years…”

    “Billions,” I interjected but he either ignored me or didn’t hear me.

    “…is not the God of the Bible. If you’re unwilling to believe Genesis, if you’re unwilling to believe the first, the foundational book of the Bible, how can you claim to believe the rest of it? Either you’re being disingenuous or you’re deceived. Either way, you’re insulting God’s character. Calling God a liar. Like all of your so-called educators and scientists, you are slow to acknowledge the legitimate, slow to honor what is true. Paul says that ‘the wages of sin is death.’ So you can’t have hundreds of millions of years of death before the introduction of sin.”

    “Okay, Gunner,” I said. “Let’s accept that premise.”

    “So you agree?”

    “Well hang on. Hang on. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s accept first the proposition that without sin there is no death. And your argument is that there could be no death before Adam’s sin. Yes? Do I have that right?”

    “Spot on!” Gunner agreed.

    “Okay. But Adam’s sin wasn’t the first. Sin was already introduced.”

    “What are you talking about?” Gunner furrowed his forehead.

    “You also accept the idea that Satan is a real individual, an evil entity and not just a myth or a personification of the idea of evil. You believe that Satan was an angel in heaven who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven. Yes?”

    “Yes,” he said hesitatingly.

    “And when did Satan’s fall occur? After Adam’s?”

    I could see it happening behind his eyes. The sputtering fire and smoke of incredulity, the proof-text checklist rolled up like a scroll. And then the confidence returned. “But the six, twenty-four hour days of creation still don’t allow you millions of years for life to evolve.”

    “Billions,” I said again. He didn’t respond so I pressed forward a little. “I understand the creation stories of the Bible to be more myth than history. As a sacred story not a scientific document. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe. The world is God’s and I believe this. Sin brings death. I believe this.”

    “If you don’t believe Genesis, you don’t believe the Bible.” He declared and set down his coffee mug. “Your faith is weak. Your faith is blind. Your faith is destroyed by Big Bang insanity. You want the creation without the Creator.” He stood as if to leave, but turned again and said, “Tell me, Carter, is your tongue scarred from all the double talk?”

    I didn’t have an answer, so I sipped my coffee. He looked at his watch and said, “Well, I’ve gotta’ go. See ya’ next time?”

    “Sure, Gunner. You always seem to know where to find me.” he descended the steps of the porch, got back into his noisy truck and drove away. I picked up my novel and returned to the story. A few moments later the cat reappeared from under the porch.

An Imaginary Conversation with a Real Troll (the first of the series) 
I Will Not Fight the Argument (the second)
Supermarket Wrestling (third conversation)
Do You Even Pray (the troll returns)
All Means All (A fifth conversation)
The Doctrine that Cannot Be Challenged (sixth conversation)
Toward Sodom - (a halfhearted seventh conversation)

Speak Peace and Breathe

    In the old domains, vast dark plains
    and strong dominions,
    speak peace and breathe.

    The doors of death and hell
    may be locked and barred,
    speak peace and breathe.

    Doubt is touched and
    uncertainty probed like wounded flesh,
    speak peace and breathe.

    Love pulls us back to the place
    where everything ends
    and all things begin again.

    Speak peace and breathe.

(John 20)