Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

Turning her head away from the little puddle of puke, she saw the file folder where he kept his love letter. It must have fallen when he'd pressed himself between the seats. Her wrists were secured together with tape, but she managed to lift the folder into the light and open it to the first page.

Michael Jackson told me he never liked Lisa Marie, but he had to marry her because the king came to him in a dream and demanded that he be her second husband. If he has on white, then it’s the real king, the Love Me Tender king and you should listen to him. But if he has on green sequin trousers and a silk shirt then it’s the fake king and you should disregard everything he says. You may wonder why I took girl, that’s very secret and only for the king to know himself, it may have to do with office politics in a certain giant corporation and that the board of directors wants me dead. This is because I read the secret documents and found out about my non-person status. I challenged this 666 man to prove to me he had not tampered with the weather map and I warned the world about this christ killer in 1978. People don’t know, but Jesus once had a girl he kept tied up. He did many things to her, like sprinkle whisky on her forehead and feed her plums. Even though she was heavy he carried this girl on his back like a baby and he’d test her to make sure she was real. The Las Girl is a white cat with a pink tongue. Anyone can fuck her anytime they want. The magazines are filled with girls and no one seems to realize you can take one whenever you want.

The pages flew out of her grasp and there was the troll's face. Orbiting bugs reflected in his glasses and a soft blue vein swelled above his eyebrow. Why hadn't she heard the door open? The troll heaved his weight up into the driver's seat. His jaw trembled and she smiled to assure him it was all right. Already he turned his ring around so the ruby was palm up and he swung his arm up over his head. She closed her eyes; there were reasons. Before all this, whenever the light fell a certain way across her bedspread, she'd think of herself as a girl in a movie, watching rain beat against the window, the subdivision houses snaking off like a necklace into the horizon.

Sometimes she wrestled her brother down to the ground, sat on his chest, and dangled a drop of spit over his face while he twisted his head back and forth screaming for her to stop. She complained about unloading the dishwasher and taking out the garbage and sometimes she said hateful things to her mother that hinted at the reasons Dad left her. A desperateness came over her, a feeling of knowing the limits of her own mind, and she'd say sneaky things to everybody aimed at making them feel bad about themselves. She lied too, told strangers that she lived on a farm, that her mother was a lawyer and her father away in New York City on business. She'd lost a lot of friends because she lied; they got suspicious of everything she said, then started avoiding her in the hallways at school.

This summer her mother kept asking her brother if he'd packed, if he had everything ready. She'd taken a bath, put on a new dress and red lipstick, then sat at the kitchen table flipping through a magazine, glancing up every few minutes at the clock. He'd come into Sandy's room and sat on the edge of the bed, told her how weird it was that Mom hated Dad, because he didn't even think about her that much. His relief at going home was so palpable it infiltrated everything he said, made him flushed and talkative. He told about the video arcade in the mall and how they rented movies and watched them in the basement. Sandy felt pressure building up around her heart; she couldn't look at her brother and finally picked up the picture he'd drawn her as a good-bye present, a depiction on tracing paper of two white horses drinking from a stream.

“Anybody can copy a horse out of a book,” she said.

“You're probably right.” He took the picture back and went into his room with the red truck wallpaper and Snoopy bedspread.

The troll cut the black electrical tape with his pocketknife, pressed a strip down over her mouth, climbed into the front seat, and started the engine. She told her brother the drawing was beautiful and tacked it up on her bulletin board between her Winnie the Pooh postcard and the one of leaping dolphins. Her brother took her hand and said you couldn't touch dolphins because they got head colds and sore throats from the germs on your fingers. Dolphins liked people and wanted to come up on the land and get married, eat cheeseburgers, sleep in warm beds. Her brother said their dad was getting sick of his new wife and soon they'd both be coming back home. The troll was talking too, as he backed the van. But Sandy only half-listened, lying as she was in the grass behind the mess hall at camp, reading the letter her mother sent from home. The bear was over in the raspberry bushes, complaining about the thorns, picking nubs in his striped silk vest, and eating all the biggest berries himself.

“The caterpillar,” he said, “wasn't feeling very well. His symptoms are quite exotic: winged hallucinations and a longing for an Indian headdress. But to be honest,” the bear said sheepishly, “I'm afraid I've stepped on him. This happened once with a rather congenial cricket. One misstep and the most satisfying friendships are gone forever. It makes you think about God,” the bear said sadly. “It's so annoying leaving everything up to him.”

Ted spread his wool army blanket on the ground, picked up glass shards and sharp rocks, though he couldn't stop the razor-tipped leaves of the kudzu from snaking closer. Through the blanket she felt bent grass, stiff weeds, and underneath cold damp dirt. He slipped his hand under her shirt, pushed her bra up so the underwire dug into flesh above the nipple, coned and flattened her breasts so they felt like animal teats. Above them a blurry drunkard's star was framed by gray branches. Trapped between that heaven and this earth, they were like the sinful Adam and Eve, Ginger thought, but instead of being cast out, God confined them to the polluted garden, to these fouled and fucked-up woods.

“You scared the hell out of me,” Ginger said as he undid her jeans, the metal button, the tingly silver teeth. This was a repentant fuck, so he treated her delicately and with great reverence like the common cup. Gently, he pulled her other tennis shoe off and pitched it into the kudzu near a rain-soaked sweater, then wriggled her pants down and crouched between her legs. By her head, a plastic grocery bag spilled out a roast bone, old spaghetti, yogurt cups, paper diapers that smelled of ammonia and melted butter. Junk mail and slimy plastic wrap were intertwined with the vines of kudzu.

Ted flattened his tongue and she felt his rough taste buds against her labia and looked down, watching how he moved his head like a dog drinks. And this thought was the raft that floated her over to pleasure. Sometimes it took a vision of herself, butt up, back arched, breasts hanging. Sometimes it was a rhythmic bar of his tongue strokes that pushed her out of this material world into the pure purgatory of sensation, that moment when the dirty words — clit, cock, and pussy — filled up with blood and became the language of desire. This reversal cast the fetid garbage, Ted's own palpable body odor, cigarette smoke, and sour milk into a metallic lick, the tangy taste of death's cock. The planet's gravitational spin swung her hand off the blanket into what felt like dry rice and wilted bok choy, ancient Chinese food in a splayed white paper carton. Ants ran from the scene, each holding a white kernel on their backs. Ted's voice box crackled like a jag of radio static. She put her hands into his long hair, cupped his scarred cheek against her lifeline, felt the stretched skin, the sinewy knots. Stray light from the condominium complex snagged in Ted's hair, his shirt fell open, exposing his bruised nipples; between them a crucifix, the minuscule body of a dying man nailed up on a tiny silver cross.