This story was first published in Chaffin Journal, winter 2023.
Here is a quiet story. It happens in wartime. It contains no noble knights. Since it is wartime, the heroes of the noble knight stories are elsewhere, engaged in re-enactments of the monomyth. They do not care to make appearances on sets without dragons.
These characters are not to be faulted, only sighed over. Everyone copes according to their own habits, until they no longer do. Em is inclined to something just above a whisper when she talks at all. She has her reasons. There are still spaces where muted voices speak. Here is one.
If you stand at the corner of Broadway and Sweetwater at certain hours of the morning you will know the shadow of the sunrise against the freeway that leaves certain parts of certain zip codes in perpetual shadow. From there, it is possible to notice that the V of Broadway and Sweetwater lands almost squarely in the neon-pink clit of Little Darlings XXX live nudes, the one that the babies walk past in the shadow of the freeway as they turn uphill toward her old school, tracing the chain-link fence. Here is what it looks like when she is working up the courage to address the father.
It is the season before the hills ignite––a good time to acknowledge the old songs. Em is standing at the church again––the one near the corner of Broadway and Sweetwater next to the No Vacancy motel. Em is here to talk to Father Christos. She tells no one. She reminds herself, go. And then, wait.
When she’s working––which for now and the better part of the last two years, but probably not for much longer, is onstage at Little Darlings XXX live nudes––men tend to unburden themselves of heavy stories and it doesn’t take a genius to hear them pleading, Save me. In most cases, they seem happy enough to feel seen. Yes, there you are, she says, sometimes, when they are kind. Come here, as she rests their tortured heads between her breasts, one at a time, and not always.
It is Tuesday afternoon, a few hours before she clocks in, and all she wants is to be near anybody who isn’t needing anything, breathing in a shared space. Perhaps this is all she’s ever wanted, but the need is different lately, coming faster at a higher pitch. She holds questions to it, not unlike a forearm against the sun at midday. Some of the questions have to do with the limits of a body. And what is she doing here, anyway? It looks like nothing. But it can be so easy to miss what isn’t screaming or pretending to have answers.
She often senses something lurking under the bridge that connects one state highway to the next, above the intersection of Broadway and Sweetwater. But the man on the couch is away for another week. The club waits like the metal between scissored legs, wet with fluorescence.
***
In the beginning, Em would not say the baby’s name out loud. At most, she would write J. over a napkin, a nod to the river her grandmother would sing about, whose waters promised to wash a crossing body of its fear. St. John’s is just up the hill from Little Darlings. Christos takes confession Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She works most weeknights and rarely starts before three.
Across the street, hunched figures push full shopping carts of blankets and water and tarp and clothes, along the cracked concrete sidewalk beside the metal fencing that frames the weedy quarter-acre sections of abandoned lots. A line of black helicopters crosses the sky. The discount tire guy waves and falls, to be raised again, a blow-up Lazarus. Alive.
Often before her shift, before she’s dressed for the night or done her makeup, Em walks up the hill in the other direction, away from the bridge––to wait in the foyer of St. John’s, keeping company with veiled women and the homeless men. She wants to feel the proximity of a possible throughline between the hot mess of now and the ancient wonders suggested by the architecture.
If she waits long enough, soft whispers come. She leans in to hear them as the old ladies greet each other, clasping both hands up to their elbows. When these women whisper of la gran tormenta, Em recalls her grandmother’s living room, three-thousand miles and ten years ago, where there was a painting of a tiny rowboat, a single hooded figure at the oars, holding through la larga noche.
The stories she would tell, of vessels splitting in pieces against the rocks, how some held the fragments while the others swam; how they lived through the years-long drought and cried for rain, Dios ayudanos; keeping watch for symbols. Em knew these stories from and another time. When she took it as a given that there was a vast presence waiting in wilderness. Now it’s gone but the whispers continue, aquí estoy. Her main talent, she suspects in private, has something to do with devotion. But what to do with this, here?
***
Prone to a sense of being drawn, here she is again, waiting beneath arches and the stained-glass images of parting seas and rains of fire, Noah and his ark and the messenger doves after the storm. The meeting of the women, bowing into one another with their news.
The old songs called for gatherings: prophets, children, sacrificial bulls offered to opposing gods. All howled for fire but only one would kindle, and soon the seer told them to eat and drink, and then the rains returned. After the rains, there was sickness, then war, and the sun and the moon stood still. The people were delivered until it was darkness again, and it was during the age of captivity that a dreamer issued warning of a famine to follow the feast. Hungry years converged and people assembled in lines for food. Later, a reunion and the long fast was broken, and then came the days of light and thunder.
Notice the pattern: dark, drought, flood, famine, hunger, silence, release. Notice what it isn’t: the idyllic original world as a prelude to the call to adventure. Start in the nadir; now what? If you need a neat circle, where will that lead you? The dragon laughs, clawed fingers upturned a if to beckon, Baby, come back, licking teeth.
***
With the last one, she had a feeling but tried to hang on. Then the man on the couch had one of his weeks, and there went half a paycheck at Rite-Aid. And several hours on YouTube, studying the art of concealing a bruise. Yellow over purple, green over red, but it’s how you blend that really makes the difference. The bleeding started the next day when he was sleeping.
The women unclasped hands, walked slowly, arm in arm, stooped into one another, toward the front wings of the church, toward the candles for prayer vigils. The women reached the candles, and each released their grip on the other. Taking turns with the long match, each lit a tiny flame behind red glass, then grasped the railing with both hands to kneel.
One day maybe when she is somewhere else and the baby is toddling on chubby legs, safe and laughing, it will be time to start telling that story. Somewhere where no one is trying to make any points about what they hear. But now is not that time, and this is not that story. That story is a long story, and you don’t earn one like that until you show how you can keep it.
This is not a story about learning how to wait, either––because by the time it begins, she already has. By the time it begins, there are other things she wants to know. But they don’t have anything to do with heading out to slay something or flying off a cliff. It’s funny when you think about it, what makes a story move. Hers doesn’t, but here it is anyway. Taking up space.
She senses it often, how easy it would be, to make her disappear. You don’t need convincing storylines to explain the disappearance of characters never seen onstage, except when they were giving it all away, half naked beneath strobe lights.
Some people have a presence like cool water. Her grandmother had been one of these. You could hear her saying Yes, love and there now just by standing next to her while she folded the laundry or sliced a cantaloupe. Em had a feeling that Christos was like this, too.
***
Her grandmother had been taller than these women, with no veil but sometimes a scarf over her head, and she knew women who looked like these women, and kept their specific petitions in her prayers: over Babe’s arthritis, Peggy’s MRI, Ethel’s husband when he started drinking again. The Koningsburgs, who had lost their son in that terrible fire years ago, God forbid, who would never recover.
Dead for half a decade now, she still hums about the river in Em’s ears, intoning, I’ll meet you. . . on the other side.
“Where is the river?” Em wants to know.
“Everywhere, Babygirl.”
Jordan, then. But some things are too good for naming.
***
The main problem, when it comes to trying to meet Christos, is not having a clear idea of how things are supposed to go. If she does connect with him, then what? Thanks, Father. Gotta go. Shift starts at three-thirty– –before heading down the hill to get costumed for the night?
What she wants is something more like How’s it going? or What a week. But those sorts of exchanges don’t usually mean anything unless you are already in an ongoing conversation.
But I am–– she wanted to say, Fatha! dropping the r in reverence to a felt kinship she could not have justified, if pressed. The point was to affirm some knowing in reference to the story that was supposed to hold this place together, bookended on either side by sense of something coming.
Her grandmother had told her many times: how witnesses assembled at the birth, how the ninth hour of darkness met the guardian, how the cry for comfort came with no answer until the ghost released and the temple veil split; how the beginning was the word–– “And we’re still recovering,” she’d whisper, seeming to laugh at the pretense of a certain kind of death. She watched the old women at the flames. She will leave soon for the afternoon shift.
Another line of helicopters passes overhead. Sirens on the bridge. The blast of a nearby truck, emptying its contents.
Her grandmother had a theory about times like this and what they meant. As she saw it, it was always during the waiting times that the chorus would start up, first humming at a pitch that nobody but the young and the deaf could hear. “The animals knew it, too,” she would say.
The man on the couch, before he left for the desert, had been having what she had learned to call a rough week if she called it anything. Which she generally did not. The other baby died a year earlier, after one of these rough weeks. That was a different time.
After it happened, she put the fuzzy yellow K-mart blanket over her head for three days. When she finally left the apartment, it was to wash the blanket and put it in the donation bin at the end of the same shopping center lot where she bought it.
If she did somehow manage to share a non-smoking smoke break with Christos, where would she even begin? Over the years, she’s learned to have a few stock answers ready for the rare occasions when a man is moved to ask what she is thinking. But when does anyone do this, anyway?
There is no honest way of explaining any thought without trying to at least make some passing references to a web of related thoughts to which it is attached, any one of which had felt to Em much more like an organism unto itself than some decision on her part. but she has learned by now that that most people didn’t see it this way.
The price of this lesson was a very long night and an unmeasured amount of time watching makeup tutorials on YouTube. Something she never knew before: a search “how to cover a bruise” will yield over ten million results. Now when she is late getting home from anywhere, she still bothers to go, she knows better than to try to explain who she ran into or what conversation transpired.
***
The men at the club rarely look––not really, and almost never at the eyes. She can spend a whole set looking for a pair. She talks about this with Christos sometimes in her head. “I mean, it’s a trip, isn’t it, Father? The way a body is and isn’t yours.” Christos knows all about this. She’s pretty sure priests still take a vow of celibacy.
Continuing a possible conversation, Em remarks, “That always used to get me in church, Father, you know? That part where he says to his boys, Take it. I give it up. For you.” Em knew it wasn’t hers when Mama grabbed her from behind in the kitchen like it was nothing and told her, “Honey, you need a bra.”
As far as Em was concerned, what she needed most was a way to slow down time. That or speed it up to the next beginning. This in-between was too much. There had to be some way to climb back into a place where it was all still hers––the hours, her skin, the space inside her head. Like Adam and Eve before they knew they were naked. Here’s another thing to ask Christos about.
The old songs called for gatherings: prophets, children, sacrificial bulls offered to opposing gods. The next afternoon, Christos is smoking in the shade at the end of the parking lot, on one of the benches near the Wash ‘N Go. She walks over slowly, takes a seat at an opposite bench, beneath a fig tree.
“Father,” she says to him, finally, “can I ask you a question?”
He nods like he’s been expecting this.
But it turns out she isn’t ready yet, so she asks him instead what it is he likes to do. “I mean,” she explains, “when you’re not in that, um––thing you wear.”
Until this moment, she has never fully considered the image of a priest laughing so hard that he coughs himself in half. But it makes sense that a guy needs a great sense of humor to work in a church these days.
“I like to read,” he tells her when he recovers. “Fishing, too. But I don’t do too much of that anymore. These days, I do more woodcarving.”
“What do you make?” Em figures it is probably saints.
“I started with military figures.” Not like GI Joe, he explains, as if that were the natural assumption. He started with Marines in full dress. “For my brother.” Then he moved onto other branches. Then onto all sorts of people in work clothes: nurses, custodial workers, gas station attendants. People who work for Metro Transit.
“How come?”
He shrugged. Who knew? He liked the detail, all the little things you had to look for. The set of the lips, insignia, and details for each uniform, how people hold their faces––which, Christos pointed out, was different from how they hold them when they are watching TV or waiting in line at the grocery store.
“I guess,” he tells her, “I just like how people can just––you know. Give themselves over to a role?” Here he laughs. “Maybe I need a reminder sometimes, that we’re all here doing that.
“It helps,” he tells her, “Sometimes.”
“And when it doesn’t?”
Now he moves his arms like the blow-up Lazarus. “Well,” he says. “You know.”
“You too, father?”
Christos finishes his cigarette. Snuffing it out in the ashtray he keeps in the bushes by the statue of Our Lady, he carries the full looking bowl over to the trash and brings it back. “So,” he says.
“I’m Em.”
“Christos. Some just call me Padre.”
They look across the street as a low rider goes by, bumping an old school Snoop track. Three tatted cholos with bandanas and shades raise their hands to Christos and he hold up an open hand back.
“So, Em. You come here for the view?”
She coughs. “Mostly.” After a pause, she adds, “Good talking with you, Padre. I gotta go.”
He holds one hand out, open with fingers splayed, just as he had with the guys in the car.
“See you around.”
She walks down the hill to change. Her grandmother’s old stories follow, how the hungry years converged, and people assembled in lines for food, until one day, there was a reunion. A long fast was broken, and then came the days of light and thunder.
Obviously, this is not the kind of story where somebody goes around rejecting church-related comforts based on an abstract principle. Rejecting offered comfort because of abstract principle is not an option for those living lives outside the circled quest. Views from the mounts of righteous steeds, while widely advertised, are not universally preferred.
Em remembers that she forgot to dip her fingers in holy water before she left. She crosses herself anyway, in the name of the father, and the son, and the holy ghost.
***
She was a year out of high school when Mama went away, with a constant feeling of trying to get back to something she might name if only she could hold her gaze still for a minute.
Meeting a man can feel felt like finding a needed weight against the possibility of being blown into the atmosphere at the next updraft. With his face swelling with heat and shoulders flexing, she would think, of this new man, here is a way to hold me down. She didn’t understand the full weight of this then. Now she knows.
***
Gina’s in the changing room. She’s just out of rehab and only working weekday shifts for now. Until it sticks, she says.
“Hey kid,” Gina says now, “How you doin’?” Since rehab, Gina asks with a look like she really wants to know. Before then, Em couldn’t remember much of her. Girls came and went and Em would wonder about some of them, how they carried their stories inside them at such a low burn, unwilling to waver.
“Well,” Em says. “Thinking things through.”
“So,” Gina calls back, “I was just telling Joey about this thing some people can do with just their mind. I don’t think he believes me, which I told him is why he probably won’t be doing it anytime soon.” Joey works the door. His soft eyes are kind, and he reads books during the slow hours.
Ever since she got out of rehab, Gina only gets pretend drinks and as far as anyone can tell, spends most of her off time watching meditation videos.
“What do they do?” Em asks her now. More for encouragement than to find out.
“It’s all about the breath.” Gina is close now, right by the locker. “I mean, it’s one of those things everyone says, lip service or whatever, but who really thinks about it, right? Joey, he’s something, I try to tell him this and he says something about fish having no word for water and I’m like, ‘Hello, are you even listening?’ That guy. I worry about him sometimes. Anyway, here’s what they do, are you listening?”
She is.
“They think, what is that place that needs it right now? About their breath, you know? The energy of it. And they just move it like––,” Here she moves her arms wide. “Boom.”
Em hopes this round of rehab sticks.
But this is not a story about Gina. Other girls arrive, in pairs and threes. “Go ahead, girl––get it,” Shanae calls out, as she opens the locker beside her. Shanae’s been doing back-to-back weekends and most weekdays for as long as Em can remember. “Send that breath to your foot so you can kick that fuckhead who keyed your car. You know where, too!” She has what Joey calls a lot of spunk.
There are moments like this, before the shift starts or on a break, when the energy between the girls is humming and brief and Em can feel it everywhere between them, the waiting hum of nothing she can name.
***
At this point in the story, a question arises: Then What?
Without an answer, a story might not be one. And perhaps it isn't, after all. Except that here is Em, still in it.
Call this the point of resistance.
What has drawn Em to this church was the sense of presence, the ritual structures and language for acknowledging it as fact, and a sense she couldn't always explain, that what waited behind the artifice was much larger and more lasting than any of its structures, and that it moved between, beneath and above the whispering spaces inside. That it waited in attentive witness, holding to some possibility for life yet undefined.
When the time for speaking comes, if there is a confession of love for the dragon, who will listen?
No answer––and yet, this unrepentant end. If you see the judge, call it a motion for continuance. Call it a stay of judgment. Call it anything but what it is, which is a chance at the next possible breath.
Here it is anyway, this unnamed dark, breathing. Who will the hero slay now?
Hush, this is still a quiet story. Its wide arc stretches far beyond where she stands, into what she still can't seem to know.
***
Walking home, under the overpass, past the tiny altars with Our Lady candles and teddy bears, past the carniceria and the autobody place, the liquor store, and the payday loan outlet, she passes a man she sees regularly transporting something large on his bike. Today it’s two empty five-gallon jugs. She tries to imagine how someone manages to ride back when they are full.
“Hey father,” she practices. True, she still wouldn’t have words to describe what she’s doing. “You know someplace I could stay for a bit?” she tries. “Like while I sort some things out?” No big deal.
But this is not a story about staying somewhere. This is a story about the reach that inspires the dream about crossing a river at the end of the wilderness that came at the end of the long wait and many plagues, to something like safety. How it comes with a rush it the chest like something wild and caged and moving toward the first notes of a new song, remembered.
In a few months, when the first ember catches on the hillside, in the dry growth of an abandoned lot, Em will listen for the women, and she will hear them whisper in the nave about the time coming.
Aqui estoy, they will say to one another, and she will feel some response, the thud of it kicking a way out.
***