Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

The match's flame sent a prism of fractured light over the blackbirds’ oily feathers. Orange sequined their wings as they huddled in their own shit on piles of bound newspaper. The deer's eyes like marbles dipped in mayonnaise, an earwig climbed up a nostril, and slivers of dried ligament were pasted with soured blood to the top of the TV. She felt in her pocket for the baptismal candle she'd taken from the junk drawer in the church kitchen. She'd thought she'd have to use the small Christmas Eve candles with the cardboard skirts her father kept in a box in his office closet, but the old baptismal candle was there in the drawer, meant for a baby girl with its tiny pink rosebuds and cream-colored dove. With a swivel of her wrist, she worked the candle into the red dirt, took the big tarnished serving spoon from her pocket, and stabbed it into the earth over and over until she could lever out wedges of dirt. With her fingers she picked out bits of broken glass, an earthworm, molten pebbles like tiny internal organs. Breathing through her mouth, she avoided the voluptuous stink of the deer and the blackbird droppings like scuzzy ocean foam. Dirt packed under her fingernails as she used the edge of the spoon to hack through a thick root. Chips of geometrical ice fluttered in the candle's light, first frost forming on the goat grass that grew along the inner barn walls. She coiled each half of the severed vine, like baby snakes, in the dirt. The blackbirds were upset, picked at their feathers, made subtle sounds like a lady in church searching for a hard candy at the bottom of her purse.

She placed the small plastic cross against the granules of dirt and pulled the flare out of the deer's head, ripped it off the top of the television. Its expression seemed to have changed; maybe it was a trick of light, but the stoic stare was tempered now by the mouth's smirky angle, the wry tip of the deer's head. There was a drapery panel of paisley material in a pile of rain-soaked clothes out in the dump, near the ash trees and the earth balls where she'd once seen a black snake, and she hoped to use the cloth as a burial shroud. Candlelight sparked the frosted sumac berries, the kudzu leaves. She walked out of the barn among skunk weed and fisted ferns, a baby's cracked car seat and water-wasted Playboys. The flame blew sideways and dimmed. She cupped her hand around the flame, felt the fire's heat in the soft part of her palm. She heard a sound in the trees and terror quivered through her. It wasn't the furtive moves of squirrels or the sneaky sound of rats gnawing into garbage, but the sting of electrified flesh, like a belly flop, or a slap across the face. The toe of her tennis shoe caught on a kudzu vine and as she went down, five warm fingers wrapped around her ankle. Leaves flew up as she flung her arms out and kicked with her free leg. A blackberry briar ripped across her cheek and a star zigzagged like white neon.

With every thrust of his hips, soft pubic hair and balls hit Sandy's chin and she let out a gasp, her tongue a rag carpet, her chapped lips stretched into an O, the cracked corners stinging. Worms moved inside the earth, inching their fleshy bodies through the dark; they met and whispered like French lovers, twisting themselves into knots and bracelets. She kept her eyes closed, relaxing each part of her body like when the gym teacher played the wave tape and the girls learned yoga and stress management. Worms needed oxygen when their muddy tunnels slogged full of water, so on rainy days they sprawled out pink and obsequious onto the sidewalk, letting their ridged skin breathe. The rounded shadow of her umbrella fell over their pink bodies, and Sandy, in her yellow rain slicker with the ducks on the pocket and little yellow boots to match, crushed each under her plastic sole. Gray globulars glistening on the cement, usually a sliver kept its wits and squirmed for cover in the damp blades of green grass.

For fishing, you dug them up in the backyard, pulled them out of the earth and dropped them in a coffee tin with clumps of moist dirt. Her father showed her how to run the sharp metal up through the worm's body, so the whole hook wore a flesh-colored coat. If you got out of bed at night an Indian might grab your ankle and if no one left the night light on, then you'd stay in bed. Sometimes she dived headfirst under the covers, where there were colored fish like in the dentist's salt-water aquarium. He likes me because I lie still. Her brother put slugs in a jar, sprinkled salt on them, and watched as they blistered in the sun. He'd cut green tomato caterpillars with his Swiss army knife into tiny bite-sized pieces and helped their father pour gasoline on the Japanese caterpillars’ webby homes in the backyard trees.

All morning the caterpillar bad-mouthed worms, how they lay around on the forest floor smelly and lazy as drunks. He felt superior because he had a hundred legs and a velvet coat of shiny blues and greens.

“But it's not nice,” the bear said, “to be so uppity. What about ‘all God's creatures great and small?” They both leaned against a big maple, listening to rain slap at the highest leaves and watching the turtle open her stonelike mouth and press out her gray tongue to the beads of water that dangled off tendril ferns.

“It's easy for you to say.” The caterpillar was always touchy about his genealogy. “You come from an old family, one known for its lack of common sense and lyrical appointments.”

“I've never understood all that,” the bear said yawning. “If we're all here now, aren't all our families the same age?”

“I admire your Socio-Marxist tendencies,” the caterpillar said, stretching out on the collar of the bear's evening coat, as if he might nap. “But the most important thing to remember is not to take anybody else's toys.”

“You make it sound so easy,” he said sleepily, shifting his rump off a jagged rock and tipping his hat down over his eyes. “If only it were so.” The bear sighed as if he were made out of caramel, a quivering baritone that intermingled with the prickly static moving in and out of the troll's lungs. Sandy opened her eyes. His belly rested on her forehead like a fat cow and she could see up the tunnel of his loose shirt to where chest hairs grew like ocean grass around his nipples. Each of his kneecaps pressed against an ear, magnifying the back-and-forth rub of his khaki pants. His hands gripped the headrest, pelvis repeatedly flattening down, then tipping up over her face.

The worm strained to multiply and even though she didn't really have breasts, she didn't want the little girl T-shirts anymore. She wanted a training bra and had snuck over to the lingerie department to look at them. Weary of the salesgirls and suddenly embarrassed, she fled to the toy department, the far counter where they kept the expensive baby dolls locked up behind glass. His pelvis cracked against her skull and the troll swung his knee over her face and knelt beside her, trying to catch his breath. She tipped her head sideways and gagged up warm Coke laced with come. The sky behind the windshield was a green-blue cellophane. He stood, hunched over, squeezed between the front seats, got his cigarettes from the glove compartment, his glasses from the storage shelf, and a beer from the cardboard twelve-pack on the floor. They didn't stay in motels anymore. He'd taken to sleeping beside her on the mattress, spreading the afghan over them both, curling up behind in a parody of marital bliss. He opened the driver side door and the harsh overhead bulb lit up the van, attracted a pair of tiny moths, made her feel like a girl in the water-stained porno magazines she found in the woods behind the house. He left the door ajar and walked out into the trees to smoke his cigarette, finish the warm beer, and pee inconsolably into the roots of a maple. Last night she'd seen the troll, sitting on a stump, wiping his eyes with one of his cloth handkerchiefs, shoulders heaving.