Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

Underneath the rocky overhang, a sleeping bag. A military-surplus olive sack. A cross wedged into a crevice.

While he preaches God’s word to the emptiness, Molly turns the bike upside-down on its handlebars. She checks the pressure in the tires, oils the dust out of the gears, readjusts the left front brake pad an eighth of an inch. She listens to him proselytizing the creatures of the wilderness. Like Saint Francis, preaching to birds on the roadsides because he knows they won’t talk back.

The clank and shudder of the crane through dry, sweltering air. The angel dangles on a wire, flashing gold as it ascends.

“Are you going to the service tomorrow?” she asks.

The crow’s feet around his eyes wrinkle like cracks in parched earth. “You think I’d abase my faith to that ? They make it out to be a messenger from God. Then they imprison it in gold. They freeze that benevolent expression to its face. They petrify the Word upon the angel’s lips! To honey-coat the message of the Lord? Worse than gilding a lily. How could I worship under a symbol like that?”

Molly flips the bike upright, resettles the saddlebags astride the rear wheel. “Know thy enemy?” she says. “I’m going.”

“Then I’ll see you there. I’ll stand outside the doors of that false temple and preach! I’ll turn people away. I’ll convince them. That angel—if you could unseal its lips, and somehow get that trumpet to them, it would herald the coming of the End.”

Molly swings her leg over the crossbar. “Yeah.”

“Don’t try to tell me you don’t believe it—in a few years you won’t be able to ride a bike through this town without dying of heat stroke. A few years after that, God will turn this whole place back into a real desert. Lifeless. Like the deserts of the moon.”

That’s the trouble, Molly thinks, with wearing your convictions on your sleeve. Or on a sandwich board. Even when you’re right, it makes you look crazy. And then how can you ever convince anybody?

She doesn’t say it, though. It would come out sounding cruel.

Everything is so much easier to take in, orbiting past it on a bike at uniform speed.

Evening approaches. The angel, mounted in its high place, gives off a color like molten rock that sunglasses do nothing to mitigate. Most days, she’d be long gone by now, halfway to the next town, the gears whizzing beneath her, wheels glued to the white line.

Molly checks into a motel across from a mini-golf course. She digs a crumpled summer dress out of the bottom of the saddlebags and irons out the wrinkles. The motel-room door, half open on an evening surprisingly cool. Grasshoppers singing in the waste grass between the putting greens and the desert. The pink stone, dangling from her neck, its color muted.

She finds her cellphone in a zipper pocket. She calls her mother.

“Molly? Anything wrong?”

“How’s Dad?”

“Better, I guess. You’ve been gone a long time. But he’s still mad, if that’s what you mean.”

“Mom, I’m going to church tomorrow.”

“Really. Why?”

“I don’t know. To make you happy?”

“Well, that’s a nice thought—but Molly, your father doesn’t need you torturing yourself on his behalf. And neither do I. We’ve accepted that you’re not interested in faith. You’ve made that abundantly clear.”

“Mom, I want to go.”

“Oh you do. Why? Is it one of those old mission churches? I bet that would be a great cultural experience.”

“No, it’s….” She doesn’t know why she’s going, why she’s staying here the night instead of some campground way out in the hills. She’s stalling. Because she doesn’t want to go home. “Have a good night, Mom. Love you.”

“Okay. I love you too.”

She can’t bike to the church. The dress would rip, get caught in the gears. She can’t ask for a ride; she doesn’t want to expel any more of her toxins on this town’s spirituality than she already has. It’s only a few miles from here to the church. She can walk, if she gives herself time. It won’t mean waking up much earlier than usual.

She sets the clock alarm by the bed. When it buzzes the next morning, she dresses. Hesitates a moment over the pendant, in the end puts it on.

The sidewalks emanate faint heat. The bank sign says Sun., Sept. 7. 64° F. 4:16 AM. Her sandals swing from her fingers. Her sneakered footfalls make no sound.

The lady from the crystal shop was right about the stars. As the town shrinks behind her, the predawn sky presses close, crowding in against the cliffs. The Andromeda galaxy, spinning overhead. Betelgeuse and Capella on the horizon. The pale line of the highway. A hundred satellites sail past in an hour.

It feels funny to walk such a long way. Her steps come too easily without the pedals to resist her.

At the midpoint between night and dusk, a silhouette, small and thin, distinguishes itself from the shadow on the highway ahead of her. A person. Daniel maybe. She quickens her pace, tries to catch him.

The stars and galaxies fade. A rosy glow, white-streaked like rhodochrosite, insinuates itself upon the sky. Daniel’s silhouette sharpens, then disappears.

In the parking lot of the temple, Molly passes the pastor’s car, the empty flatbed and the crane. No sign of Daniel. She sits on the steps and switches her sneakers for the sandals.

People begin to arrive and file into the church. Baggy eyes, expectation. No Daniel to deter them. Molly expected more of him. She fiddles with the pendant, almost wants to shout at them herself.

The dark, curving outlines of the angel’s wings against the sunrise. The slowly growing sheen of gold. Giving up on Daniel, Molly takes a place at the back of the line.

Inside, four immense panes of glass impose a frame upon the desertscape in the shape of a towering cross. The bright line of the dawn progresses across the red boulders and juniper like the raising of a shade, accentuating contours, valleys, crags.

Molly finds a seat among the cramped pews. She feels tiny. Alone. Like sitting in a planetarium after the projector goes off, when the floor lights come up and the canvas behind the cosmos is revealed. The people around her make murmurs of awe over the hum of the central air. Molly shivers, rubs the goosebumps from her arms.

The pastor enters, silk vestments rustling. A pale face unnaturally young. He taps the microphone. Behind him, the glorious, red-golden vista of broken hills and sage and otherworldly buttes is as still as though it were a shoebox diorama, and Molly thinks that whatever he says, she won’t be able to forget the frame around it, the stark filter of holiness, like the knee-jerk impulse of the scientist afraid he’ll lose his funding unless he dyes the Martian desert the color everyone expects.

The sun breaks the horizon, spilling light directly into Molly’s eyes. She squints; she left her sunglasses behind.

Then he speaks, and it’s worse than she imagined. The crisis of faith—Christ in the wilderness. The sermon Molly’s father threw at her back as she fled.

Throw yourself off, the devil keeps saying. Throw yourself off the cliff.

She stands abruptly, both hands in front of her eyes to block the light. Her legs bump awkwardly against the knees of the people between her and the aisle. The crystal shop lady sits in the back row dressed in white, her face beatific. Molly covers the pendant. She hurries through the doors into the morning.

Her sneakers are right where she left them, behind a rock by the top of the stairs. And the angel is still there, at the top of its pinnacle, never to fold its wings or fly or blow its trumpet, frozen in its posture of change. Molly wriggles her toes as she steps out of her sandals. By the time she gets back to her bike it will be hot again.