Saint Sadist

by Lucas Mangum

  Ambrose reaches across the fire, igniting his sleeve. His fingers grasp for my hands. I scoot backwards and make my way to my feet. He starts that damned laughing again, even as his entire arm is engulfed. He watches the blaze grow and laughs harder. Not knowing what else to do, I squeeze the trigger again and again and again until it clicks dry.

  Everything falls silent but the crackle of the fire, which has returned to a normal volume. Ambrose’s head, save for his bottom jaw and tongue, is completely destroyed. Bloody pieces of it are scattered everywhere. I lower the weapon and breathe. I shake from the adrenaline. My water breaks.

  Epilogue

  I DON’T REMEMBER HOW I got to the hospital. I suppose I must have driven myself, either that or this has all been a dream and I’ve been in a coma since that accident on the road so long ago. But I don’t know either way. All I know is right now, I’m in labor. There are nurses all around and a doctor between my legs. Pressure and pain ravage every part of me below my chest. I’m groggy, yet somehow manically awake.

  The doctor tells me to push and I do. It’s like I’m trying to shit out of my vagina.

  I breathe the way they tell me.

  It crosses my mind I could die, but then I remember women rarely die in childbirth these days.

  No one is here to hold my hand, so I grip the cool, steel banister. I keep on pushing.

  Looking up into the lights hurts me somewhere behind my eyes. It’s like a sinus headache, but worse.

  I no longer know what’s real and what isn’t, save for one thing. Me and my child. We’re here. We’re now. We’re going through the first of many struggles together, and we’ll get through this one, just like we’ll get through the others.

  I don’t know if I’m a goddess or a gateway or a prophetess or a whore. I’m Courtney Ashlyn Burnet, and I’m about to become a mother. Though it’s my father’s child, I’ll do everything I can to make sure that abusive son of a bitch stays out of my life.

  If he’s alive.

  Again, only two things are real to me right now. Me and my child.

  I push. I breathe. I sweat. I cry.

  The doctor urges me to keep going, keep pushing. One of the nurses takes my left hand and squeezes it. I squeeze her back, sure I’m breaking bones, but too focused on bringing my child into the world to apologize for it.

  “I don’t like this,” the doctor says and I lift my head in a panic, nearly sitting all the way up, but the nurses hold me down. “We need to get this baby out of there.”

  Another nurse hands the doctor a pair of scissors. He cuts the skin between my cunt and my asshole, and I want to scream, but the epidural has lessened the pain to an uncomfortable pinch. He reaches inside me and I hear my baby’s voice and look toward it. Finally, through the agony and amniotic muck, I glimpse the screaming face of God.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank Jean Mangum for all her support during the writing of this book (and every other book I've written), CV Hunt and Andersen Prunty for believing in this book and the risks I took as a storyteller and a stylist during its writing, art historian Kathryn Blair Moore for exposing me to many of the works that fueled some of the book’s headier themes, poet and translator Cyrus Cassells for broadening my horizons as a reader, and Dr. Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, whose reading of Paradise Lost got me thinking about many of the theological ideas I wound up exploring in Saint Sadist. This book wouldn’t have been possible without any of you, and I thank you all

  Lucas Mangum is the author of six books, most recently Saint Sadist, We Are the Accused, and the collection Engines of Ruin. He lives in Austin, TX with his family and can be contacted at lucasmangum.com or on Twitter @RealLucasMangum.

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