Good Sex, Great Prayers

by Brandon Tietz

  “I’m older than I look,” she says. A small black bag is set down on the bed, which she starts to dig through. Not a medical bag like Dr. Keller used to tote around. A purse. “But you can’t tell how old I am, can you, Pastor? Can’t see much of anything nowadays…even after two surgeries.”

  “You can read a file, then,” I say bitterly. “Congrats.”

  “I can do a little more than that,” she says, still digging around in her bag. There’s a smell coming from it that I can’t exactly pinpoint. Like stale dirt, as if she’s got a sleeping bag or an old baseball glove in there. “The doctors can’t help you because your problem isn’t medical,” she says. “That’s why your vision hasn’t improved and your heart is getting worse. You’re taking a bunch of pills for something they can’t fix…drying out. Remind you of anybody?”

  The priest from Barnes. Skin like paper, hair like old attic cobwebs. It was as if Pollux sucked the life right out of him. There was a lot of explaining to do when some folks came to claim his body. Apparently, this man was only supposed to be thirty-nine years old. They had to get his dental records just to make sure they had the right guy, but I remember thinking at the time how he looked aged to death. Put the fear of God in my heart that something like that would ever happen to me.

  “It is happening to you,” she says. “You’ve been playing two roles in one body for so long that it’s finally caught up with you.”

  She knows me. She knows me well. Intangibly, I can feel it. Then the heart punches against my chest again, harder this time. Less of a flutter and more of a sharp pain. I wince, clutch my chest and try not to scream. Try to look strong.

  “You’re supposed to pass on today,” she says, placing a thumb and a finger on an eye. She spreads them apart, bringing a dropper close to the cornea. “Hold still,” she tells me.

  My heart prickles, cramps up like old muscle. Hurts so bad my back is arching, having spasms. “Who are you?” I whisper, feeling drops hit my eyes. First, the left, then right. Liquid sizzles, but not in a burning way. It’s eating, dissolving the cataracts, chewing up the abnormal cells, and then I begin to see her.

  “I couldn’t stay away any longer,” she tells me, the girl with fair skin and dark hair. A campfire smile, and eyes just as warm.

  “Madeline,” I say. She’s not supposed to be here. I buried her; I remember putting her in the ground and blanketing her in dirt. “How?”

  “I told you, Johnstone, there’s no afterlife for people like me. We’re in a loop, a circle,” she says. “Sometimes you come back as a tree or a sparrow or a stone sitting at the bottom of a river. You play your cards right though, you can come back how you want. I thought you would have figured that out by now.”

  Because when you boil it down to the basic elements, this is all ingredients. Some of them you can see, some not. I remember what she wrote in her letter, that death is a very important ingredient. Been asking myself for years why that was important. I should’ve been asking myself ‘how,’ the method in which she passed. White fire so pure that only God could have forged it.

  “Sacrifice,” I say.

  “And you,” she says, smoothing her hand over my chest, stopping on the heart. It punches. Punches hard. “You followed the instructions, made it so I could come back,” she explains. “You, on the other hand…you won’t come back. You’ll go on. The end of the Divine path is the beginning of something else for a man of the cloth.”

  The afterlife. The Kingdom.

  “Maybe,” Madeline says. She can read me, read what I’m feeling and thinking. She can feel my heart threatening to burst inside me. “Maybe heaven, maybe nothing. You’re about to find out in a few minutes.”

  The punching relents, reverting back to a light flutter. I can breathe again. For now. “Come to say goodbye, then?” I ask.

  “If I have to,” she says. “I’d rather not. I’d rather you come with me.”

  I start to laugh but it comes out so dry and wheezy it deforms to coughing. Throat’s dry, lungs are dry. “Too old,” I say. “Lost the gift some time ago.”

  “You never read any of those books, did you, Johnstone?” Madeline asks, but she already knows. The answer is written all over my face: I compromised, sat in the fringe for a while, but I couldn’t bring myself to go all the way with it. My faith had been rattled enough for one lifetime.

  “Put those in the basement,” I say. “Never touched them again after that.”

  “Then you still have a lot to learn,” Madeline says, smoothing a thumb over my forehead, the hairline. “It’s your choice, though. You don’t have to come with me. You can stay here…see what’s on the other side. I’d like you to come with me, though.”

  “How could…?” I trail off, looking at myself, my frail little legs and weak body. My chest hurts and every joint feels like it has broken glass in it. I can barely walk, barely think straight. Even little things like going to the bathroom and showering require two people now. I could never subject her to that.

  “You won’t hold me back. Not after you’re all fixed up,” Madeline says. “I can do that, y’know…make you healthy again, young again. You can be even younger than you were when we first met. It’s just like the car, Johnstone…you can be restored with the right materials…the right ingredients.” Madeline digs around in her bag, pulling out a small glass bottle with a cork stopper. The liquid inside is light green, glowing like a firefly. “This one stops you from going into cardiac arrest,” she says, leveling another in my sightline. “I’ve prepared others…one to repair your joints and bones, another that will fix your short-term memory. You’re in bad shape but you’re not past the threshold, Johnstone. Not yet.”

  “And what would we be doing once I’m all fixed up?” I ask.

  “We see where the path takes us,” she says. “See the world.”

  The world beyond Pratt: mountains, oceans, deserts. The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Niagara Falls. Other countries and continents. It hits me that I’ve been praising the Lord’s name and his creations for some decades, but I’ve seen so very little of them with my own eyes, restricting myself to the small joys of the daisy hill and Pratt’s numerous golden fields. I’ve served long and well, but as many men of the cloth will attest to, it is a lonely servitude. Often loveless, bound to the church and the flock until He takes you. I could let Him take me right now, take me past the threshold and see what exactly is on the other side. Mary’s already waiting there for me; I can feel it. She bounds through endless pastures. Then I look to Madeline holding that bottle that could save my life, the black bag of numerous other miracles made especially for me. She’ll never enter the Kingdom. She can’t. Madeline Paige walks the loop, destined to recycle on earth until the Lord decides there will be no earth left. Maybe a bomb will drop or the surface will freeze over. As it is written, one day all this will end, but right now the world is a beautiful place ripe for exploration. Right now Madeline is here and young and offering something that few people ever get: another chance.

  “So what’ll it be, Johnstone?” she asks, still holding those bottles. Ready to restore, to revitalize that which has become senile and weak. Madeline smiles, leaning in close. “What path will you choose?”

  Acknowledgements

  It’s only when you get to the end that you realize how many people were involved.

  First and foremost, I’d like to thank my publisher Phil Jourdan of Perfect Edge Books. Your belief, support, and patience with this project has been nothing short of stellar and I’ll be forever grateful for that.

  To my Wendy, thank you for being wonderful, keeping me sane, and allowing me to bounce every crazy idea I’ve ever had off of you. This job is so much easier when you have love in your life.

  A huge thank you to my friend and graphic designer, Jamie Turpin, who took a simple sketch and turned it into a beautiful work of art.

  Thanks to Derek Beals and Renee Pickup who served as my beta readers for this book. Your feedback was invaluable. />
  Thank you to my femme fatale editor, Pela Via. You kicked my ass, ripped my guts out, and I’m better off for it.

  To Dennis Widmyer and the good people at LitReactor, thank you for the support and for giving me a literary soapbox to stand on.

  A very special thanks to Clint Mansell, Hans Zimmer, and M83 who serve as the soundtrack to which I create.

  And lastly, I want to thank my friends. I won’t list you off by name for fear that I’ll miss someone, but all the dinners, drinks, and conversations we’ve shared have meant the world to me.

  “There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say,” Cyril Connolly wrote, and we believe he was right.

  Perfect Edge seeks books that take on the crippling fear of other people, the question of what’s correct and normal, of how life works, of what art is.

  Our authors disagree with each other; their styles vary as widely as their concerns. What matters is the will to create books that won’t be easy to assimilate. We take risks, not for the sake of risk-taking, but for the things that might come out of it.