Choir Boy

by Unknown Author

  Lights appeared at the center of the baptismal font. The angels carved on the font’s outside reached through the bowl’s marble case. They beckoned Berry. He watched the lights dance and grow larger. Star-shaped fingers of joy and acceptance sailed through Berry’s pupils and into his retinas. He understood he couldn’t be what he had been, but he could shine a new way, like Lisa said.

  Berry wondered if someone who drowned in holy water went straight to Heaven. Berry couldn’t form thought-chains any more, but he had an image of himself (herself) being born from that light, which was just a pinprick now. He could swim past the hardness in front of his face into a new life. He’d be a mermaid or an oyster-diving girl. The lights darkened. A black oval surrounded the whiteness and then it started to close in, swallowing the light.

  Then the Canon hauled Berry’s head out. He swatted Berry on the back. Berry coughed water.

  “You okay?” said the Canon. “You must have lost your balance. I tried to pull you out. You’ll be fine.” Then he raised his voice, “I baptize you Berry Sanchez.”

  Berry couldn’t take breaths. He made trapped baby seal noises when he tried. He nearly fell, but the Canon held him up. That black circle slowly widened and framed his vision. It disappeared as Berry staggered back to the choirstalls. He tried to hang on to the feeling of peace, of accepting who he’d become, that he’d felt at the bottom of the baptismal font.

  The organ started and it was time for “Hear My Prayer.” Six bars of intro, then Berry’s solo. Berry felt water on his face, not from the baptism but from his sore eyes. All that would come from his mouth was a rattle. Maybe that was what Canon Moosehead had intended. The organ reached his cue. Randy gave Berry a vicious look without changing his bright-eyed open-mouthed choirboy stance.

  Berry’s solo was a second away. He still felt as if his lungs were full of water. He wept that his voice could fail him now. He looked at Mr. Allen at the organ, then closed his eyes. He couldn’t let it end like this.

  Berry took a huge breath through his nose instead of his mouth. He clutched his music tight against his chest and looked up into the cathedral’s ceiling. High above, fans circulated and stone rafters interlaced the space teeming with air, enough air for every voice for a million years. Berry imagined himself filled with that light and that air. Not a sick wreck drowning inside himself. The intro ended. Berry opened his mouth.

  The solo cracked at first, but then it flowed. Joy, glory, terror, the human ability to imagine a millionth pinprick of another being’s suffering, filled Berry’s voice as he pleaded with God to hear his prayer. His voice cracked, but he didn’t let that stop him. He breathed in and his insides sloshed, but he sang. The solo seemed to go on forever, but Berry’s voice came surer the longer it went. He sang past the water in his lungs and the piece of paper taped to the back of Randy’s music folder facing him which said, FOOL YOU gonna die, and which Randy flashed in Berry’s eyes. Past the angry people. None of it mattered.

  And Berry knew then that he could keep singing no matter what, no matter what anyone did to him. And that his voice could fill any space, no matter how big or awful, even into the dullest acoustics of despair and ear-blindness, he could keep singing.