People enter and pray, think, wrestle with thoughts not shared with others. They are the little balls of radiance, pulsing, illuminating energies sustaining me. Those times of quiet and light are the most precious, filled with grace and uncomplicated honesty. Silently and fervently, I protect the words that tumble off lips or the tears that fall down cheeks. Desired or not, I’m heir to their memories and I pluck out moments, those that are forgotten or want to be forgotten, those that are happy and hopeful, sad and incomplete. Looking inside and out, my time and position fixed on this avenue, I see things are better and worse, people are smarter and more foolish. I don’t have more hope and I don’t have less.
I don’t remember birth. I remember being. My history etched in numbers at my base, my memories are the whispers and gossip and conversations of congregants old and young and dead. But in the very atoms that make stone, stone and wood, wood, you can find me. You will never hear me speak. I have a feeling a few people, Elder Hughes in particular, would ask me only for the numbers to the next lottery jackpot anyway. But I’m not a genie. I’m a collection of decaying bricks and crumbling mortar. I’m not all-powerful and all knowing. I am not God. I just am and people just are.
That is the bulk of it.
LEBANON ELIAS KING
“I didn’t want you to come here. They did.” Sara gestures to the hospital staff milling about outside of her room.
She birthed me, but she doesn’t love me. I don’t think she can love. She can’t hurt me anymore with her words. She can’t beat me with her hands. She can’t touch me. She’s only my mother. That’s all. I repeat this and breathe deep.
“Say what you gotta say,” I fire back.
“I’m sorry ’bout what happened with Alice, son. We know the world is a dangerous place, don’t we?” She tries peeling the orange sitting on the table attached to her bed. Her dark brown fingers shake. “I mean people ain’t even safe in they own houses anymore. But the Bible says, ‘It rains on the just and the unjust.’” She shakes her balding head; a few stray gray hairs cover her white pillow.
“You’re quoting the Bible now?”
“Just sayin’ bad things happen to good people more than it ought to, I guess.”
My mouth waters, like it does right before I take my first drink of the evening, happy to let my problems melt away with a little liquor, but I don’t have a drink in my hand. I want one. My body wants it, but I’m not at home. And Alice isn’t at home.
“Are you sorry, I mean really sorry something bad happened to Alice?” I ask.
“Course I am! You wasn’t the only one who felt some sort of responsibility to that girl! When Naomi told me Alice was coming to Chicago for college, I promised to look after her. Couldn’t even do that right.”
Sara takes her mask and breathes in the oxygen once, twice, three times. Her collarbone rattles around, sharply jutting out from her skin. Her eyes hard set and drilling into mine. Naomi was one of Sara’s few friends she’d do anything for. I still don’t know how she got Sara’s love. What do you have to do for that? What do you have to sacrifice?
“Well, I don’t know what you promised Naomi you’d do for Alice. None of my concern anyway. I wasn’t even there.”
“Yeah, ’cause your ass was in prison for killin’ that boy... What was his name?” she asks, clumsily clawing at the fruit.
I snatch it from her hands, making short work of skinning it and placing the wedges in front of her. “Syrus. Syrus Myllstone,” I reply.
It was January. Before I met Alice. Before I had a business and a family. Before I became a good Christian man, I was sent to prison for killing a boy no older than me. The few times I’ve seen Sara in these last years, she always brings up my time downstate. Trying to hurt me, she dangles my past sins in front of my face as if she doesn’t have to answer for an abundance of her own.
“Considering the job you did raising me, it’s a wonder I didn’t kill someone sooner.” My stomach tightens. I swear I can smell the stale musty air of our old apartment, remember my stiff fingers cutting around the moldy bread to the edible parts.
“I did the best I could,” Sara retorts.
“Your best? Damn, Sara, I’d hate to see your worst.”
“Did you better than my daddy did me.”
“Least you knew your daddy.”
“Shut up, boy. Just...you don’t know so shut up talking about the past. Don’t do us no good, and I ain’t got enough of a future left to relive it.”
Next to her bed is a vase of dying roses and the picture of her and two girls. I can’t see the other faces all that clearly. It’s black-and-white, kinda blurry in a dirty silver frame. I saw it only one other time on her dresser next to some raggedy doll named Louisa. I snuck in her room trying to find a toy Sara took in one of her fits. She hit me when I touched the picture. She didn’t have any pictures of me.
“Why your fists clenched?” Sara asks.
I shrug. Often, I don’t notice one way or the other what my hands tend to do.
“Alice brought my picture to cheer me up. Make the place feel a little like home is what she said. She was a good wife. Not that good of a cook from what I remember, but a good wife to you at least.”
Sara chuckles empty and cruel. “Anyway, seeing as how they figure my old ass is gonna die from this cancer, they want some kin they can talk to and make arrangements. All I got is you, my son.” She coughs, a hard, phlegmy sound from her lungs. She grabs for her oxygen and takes big, deep gulps of air.
“I can see about talking to someone, but I got somewhere to be, Sara.”
She puts the mask down and sits up. “You disrespectful as hell, boy. I’m your momma.”
“If you acted like one, I might call you one.”
“If you was worth a damn, I might’ve claimed you more. Only thing you ever was good at was whining. If they gave out awards for that, you’d have at least been good at something, might have these hospital bills paid.”
“I provide for my family well enough.”
“No the hell you don’t. You don’t provide for me!”
“I don’t owe you a damn thing! Plus, I do better than you ever did.”
A wheeze and a smile cut across her face. “Tried to tell Alice about you before y’all got married but she had stars in her eyes and a baby in her belly. Still thought she could find a way to make her dreams come true. Dreams just childish. Thinking she could make people good. You can’t make people nothing. They are what they are.”
Her eyes are unfocused while she talks to me or more precisely at me; I could be air and she’d still ramble on. It’s probably the drugs they’re giving her. They make you loopy, like you’re talking to the past and present. I don’t know if she’s berating me or a ghost.