Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

In his new manifestation as a butterfly, the caterpillar was only interested in sentimental stories of transformation, tales that made his mascara run and turned his tiny nose pink. “When Donna Polito gave birth to her second child,” the butterfly began, his blue and silver wings making a glittery and glamorous backdrop, “she felt a singular moment of joy at baby Miranda's first cry and then nothing. Her world went black and she slipped into a coma. Infection ravaged her body. She needed a machine to breathe. After fifteen operations, the doctor told her husband to make plans for her wake. But he couldn't do it. ‘Maybe love will succeed,’ he thought, ‘where medicine has failed.’” The butterfly looked at her with the pleading eyes of a TV evangelist. “So that night he recorded the voices of his two young sons and the next day brought the tape to the hospital room where his wife lay near death. ’Mommy come home!’ they pleaded on the tape. Suddenly his wife's eyes fluttered open.” The butterfly paused to dramatize this moment by batting his own long lashes obsessively. “You see, she'd dreamed she heard her children's voices and she looked into the eyes of her husband and whispered, ‘Take me home.’” The butterfly dabbed at the corner of his eye with a wisp of fluffy milkweed and said, “Something similar could happen to you, but only if you hope hard enough, my dear.” And he flew out of the pink spotlight and the unicorn stepped inside the circle of light and nudged his wet nose against her cheek. His crystal horn sent out rainbow slivers like a prism.

“You were chosen, for your similarities to raindrops and day-old kittens, to the first white crocus and a baby's tender heart,” the unicorn began. A gold filling in his mouth shone like a piece of glass in the sand. He raised his creamy blue hoof and balanced it on the edge of her mattress. “These are the qualities of a princess,” the unicorn confided, “and so we directed the troll to you.”

The troll fed her pear slices and a few cubes of Swiss cheese from a cracked floral plate. He wore the clip-on bow tie, the red shirt with the lima bean — shaped grease spot, and sat on the edge of the bed, gingerly, as if he didn't want her pee stains to soil his clothing. As always she was mesmerized by the reflection in his glasses, today the image only vaguely familiar. The wet gag hung around her neck as she shredded the rubbery cheese and limpid pear flesh against her back teeth. She leaned forward slightly and asked him what had happened to the cat. His eyes startled and he yanked his head back as if a chair had talked or a piece of pizza. Setting the last pear slice back onto the plate, he lifted the cloth from her neck and retied it tightly around her mouth, the corners pulling like a horse's bit. He stood, walked to the boarded window, his hands in his pocket worrying the marbles.

“I'll let you go if you tell them you ran away from camp and spent all these weeks counting dead leaves on the forest floor and making friends with little animals,” the troll began thoughtfully as if he'd been practicing this speech all night. “If you can tell me the name of the bird with the highest IQ, or the exact weight of the one-legged Indian chief's beautiful daughter,” he stared at the inside of her wrist where the tendons stood up like piano strings. “I'm going to let you go,” he said in a firm voice, meant to convince himself, “but not until the very last minute.”

“No talking allowed,” the unicorn said, because to fly he had to meditate, think about angel food cake and milkweed spores, of loosened balloons and grocery bags caught in the wind. The mall from above resembled sand dunes, and the myriad condominium complexes, patches of mushrooms. Wind stung her ears and jerked her hair back. She crouched behind the unicorn's head, her hands fisted in the long hair of his mane. His fur smelled like old snow and was sooty and damp, pricked up on end with effort. Below the cloud cover, school buses lined up behind the cement-block building and a smudge of gray became the flapping American flag. She was surprised how shabby and ephemeral all the buildings looked, like an overturned junk drawer filled with gray ribbon and ugly dime-store beads. There was the 7-Eleven where she and her brother played pinball, drank Slurpees, and ate silver-wrapped Hershey kisses. She recognized her block by the strange triangular cul-de-sac, and the unicorn spiraled down until he hovered like a dragonfly just above the split-level's bay window. Inside, her mother slept on the couch under her winter coat, her face above the navy wool so slack and lined that she looked like a different person. On the coffee table was a drawing Sandy made in kindergarten of a stick figure with arms coming out of its gourd-shaped head and a naked doll with stiff black hair. Watching her mother's hand clutching the coat's material to her chin, Sandy realized that for a long time before she'd gone to camp she'd felt sorry for her mother. In her head she created a string of pink hearts and red rose petals, and clasped this necklace around her poor mother's neck. Through the doorway, Sandy saw her little brother sitting at the kitchen table eating a TV dinner. He'd turned his head to look at the poppy-colored refrigerator, a fancy one with double doors and a tinkling ice machine. There, held up with a magnet, was a pencil drawing he'd done of her face and at the bottom he'd written Sandy Come Home.

The troll carried a blue plastic bucket and sang “Rock-A-Bye-Baby” as he entered the dark room. He bent over and turned on the pink shell night-light. Steam rose in fragmentary tendrils from the pail's lip. He sat on the edge of the bed and sank the yellow dishrag into the bucket and crushed a stream of water out with his fists. He washed her hip and thigh in tiny round strokes as if he were buffing a beloved sports car or stripping an antique table. Through the cage of her lashes she watched his face flush and his eyes fill up with tears and she felt grateful and wanted to tell him it was all okay, that God could still forgive him if he'd change his ways at once.

“That's exactly right,” the butterfly, who was always looking for any opportunity to proselytize, interjected. “Miracles happen every day! Take the little baby who crawled onto the open window ledge, tried to reach out and touch a bird on a nearby branch and began to fall.

‘''No, baby!’ a man screamed out and ran forward. He arrived just in time to catch the infant in his cradled arms.” The butterfly sighed dramtically, “Now isn't that a sweet story?”

Sandy nodded her head and the moon sent a ring of light into the room that moved across the floor like a rock's ripple on water, and she tried to get the dream back but the unicorn had lost his concentration. Crippled with exhaustion, he needed to be led through the dark wood.

In the dream she was singing off a printed sheet at the new-age center. The melodies were like campfire songs and the lyrics full of eagles soaring above mountaintops and lines about beautiful souls dancing in celestial moonlight. Cheerful men in pastel sweaters took her father away to the county hospital. She felt the lyrics bite into her scalp, slither into her brain like baby snakes. As the group chanted their affirmation, she managed to sneak out of the cinderblock building. But all around the perimeter stood a chain-link fence. Spirals of barbwire laced the top, and on the other side a Doberman with a bloodied, bandaged foot foamed at the mouth and stuck his snout angrily through the metal mesh.

Throwing off the sleeping bag, she limped up the stairs, still wearing the thrift-store blouse with the Peter Pan collar and her mother's floral skirt, the waistband twisted to one side. The house reeked of phantom pot roast and ink off the Sunday Times. She hallucinated tinkling silverware and her mother's lilac perfume. Turning on the faucet in the kitchen, Ginger washed out her father's coffee cup and scrubbed the oat bits stuck to the edge of his cereal bowl, then let water gather into a glass and carried it to the rec room, where she sat under the gloomy Easter lily painting and contemplated putting on one of her father's jazz records. She liked the blue duo-tone covers and the way the scratchy music crackled out of the speakers. Sipping the chlorine-spiked water, a light froth spun on the cloudy surface; she noticed that the latch on the window behind the TV was open. Hairs on her arms pricked; her flesh goose-pimpled as she walked over and slammed the frame shut, twisted the metal lock. Anyone could shimmy up the drainpipe, latch onto the deck rail, and slip inside the window; that's how a convict escaped from a chain gang had raped a lady the next state over. He climbed onto the deck, opened the sliding glass door, found a steak knife in the kitchen, and accosted her on the bed, where she was folding clothes still warm from the dryer. The lock on the kitchen doorknob lay horizontal. Her father forgot to lock it when he went to church. Ginger slid the button vertical, which stiffened the flimsy latch bolt, not that somebody couldn't kick the hollow plywood door down or break a pane and shift the lock. The dining-room window was locked, but at ground level one smash of a hammer and a stranger would be standing beside the table with the white lace dolly and the bowl of plastic fruit.