Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

The troll nodded emphatically. He wore a black beret today, cat fur stuck to the wool. He sat on the edge of the mattress holding her hand and said, “There used to be a real nice girl who stayed in this room named Sandy Patrick.” His glasses reflected a patch of her dirty T-shirt and a slender white arm. She braced herself by arching her back and cataloging her brother's features and the way her furniture was arranged in her bedroom, but these were loose footholds on a slippery slope. Memories wore dangerously thin; like a notebook left out in the rain, letters ran together, geometry proofs smudged, only an occasional configuration reminding her of the freckles on her mother's collarbone or the time her class went to the flower show and she'd watched a tiny Japanese lady in a red silk jacket arrange orchids in a way her teacher called sublime.

The troll said “like a big girl” she could eat with him at the kitchen table tonight. He was making Mediterranean spaghetti with black olives and capers and she smelled the onions turning translucent like chips of ice, the garlic moving around the house like a bully. The food activated a sideshow in her stomach. The fat lady laughed deeply and the flame swallower, a Latin-looking man with a singed mustache and a red silk shirt, gave her a knowing look. The girl in the silver leotard balanced on the high bar, swinging gracefully this way and that.

In a spirit of festivity he left the door to her room open so she could listen to him cooking and the TV tuned to QVC. A retired lady called and said the teddy bear she bought looked so cute on her bedspread and how, since her hip replacement, QVC kept her company day and night. Sandy smelled the browning sausages and heard the troll sing one of his stupid songs. One little sausage sizzling in a pan. Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle. Sizzle. Bam!

She imagined herself swimming up from the bottom of the pot, careful to avoid chunks of garlic and bits of basil leaf, climbing up on a sausage log, wringing olive oil from her hair and lying out in the warm range light. The butterfly brushed his powdery wings against her cheek in a showy if insincere butterfly kiss. His hands were folded and his eyes wet.

“Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Rodkey of San Antonio, Texas, waved to her father, then jumped into her boyfriend's pickup truck,” the butterfly began, ignoring her sour facial expression. Like the bear before her, she wanted to let the butterfly know to keep it short. “As the twosome headed to school, danger was the furthest thing from their minds. But as her boyfriend rounded a steep curve, the truck gained a will of its own and skidded off the road. The truck flipped, trapping her beneath its crushing weight. This is it, I'm going to die, Jennifer thought in terror as her eyes got blurry and she passed out. Her boyfriend, John, crawled from the wreckage, but Jennifer was not breathing and had no pulse. She can't die, not here, not now, he thought to himself. He gripped the edge of the roof and lifted the one-ton truck off the ground. A second later Jennifer drew breath and cried out. ‘Everything's okay now, sweetie,’ John said, holding the truck up until the emergency crew pulled her out.”

The butterfly closed his wings dramatically and bowed his tiny head. “Can I tell you one more?” he asked, rushing into his own moment of silence. “About the lady in New York City who survived a subway collision, or my best one about the teenaged drug dealer who planted a dahlia bed in an abandoned, trash-filled lot.” Before Sandy could dissuade him, the troll's footsteps frightened the butterfly and sent him flapping into the dark corner where the bear, the unicorn, and her little brother all waited, opaque as ghosts and just as helpful.

Mattress springs shifted, crunched, and the troll knelt next to her, all the time whispering his strange prayer. God help me for I have sinned and I do not know the difference between water and wine and I am an on person trying to be real God help me. . The bat flapped its wings fiercely against the cave wall, the rat just behind him, rapacious and noisy in the garbage. The troll choked monosyllables from his clenched throat, using his black magic to go back, turning himself into a sea lamprey, a mollusk, a carnivorous plant that loved flesh and bled curdled cream.

It was long after midnight before she found herself staring at the candlelight wavering over the carefully set kitchen table. The troll poured a little more wine into her teacup as she examined her plate of spaghetti, saw the black olives and tiny green capers, but there were also what looked like cat's-eye marbles, limp crickets, and furry spiders’ legs floating like junk in the tomato sauce.

“The girl that used to be here was an ugly duckling,” the troll said, “afraid of everything, always worried.” He waved his hand, “But she's long gone now.”

Sandy flayed tendrils of consciousness around her mother's favorite dress, sunset pink silk with a scalloped neckline, and the citrus scent of her father's shaving cream. When these didn't work, she dug her fingernails into the skin of her forearm, but even pain was ineffective in connecting her former life to this one.

The troll wore a velvet bow tie, his eyes magnified by his glasses, teeth like bits of charred wood. He stared at her and asked why she wasn't eating.

“I'm not hungry,” she said, looking at what must be a mouse's pink tail curled in with the spaghetti noodles.

“That's absurd,” he said. “You haven't eaten in two weeks.”

“My stomach has shrunk to the size of a kidney bean.”

He smiled. “No matter, soon all this will be yours,” the troll said, motioning to the sink full of dishes, his love letter spread out over the Formica.

QVC sold plastic taco stands and queen-size cabana sets. His anxious attention exhausted her and she wanted to go back to her bed.

“It's perfectly natural for a girl to watch her figure,” he said, covering her free hand with his own long-fingernailed one and using the other to lift her chin up. Unshored eyes and the swaying candle's flame reflected in his lenses and she smiled at him as convincingly as she could.

“Looks like creepy man has a date,” the girl whispered as they squatted on the cement front porch and peered into the big bay window. All the houses were dark except the dandelion of muted light in the window of this split-level. Ginger watched the old man, dressed like Klass in bow tie and plaid vest, pour beer from a beaded can of Budweiser into a teacup. A white candle dripped liquid wax over a green wine bottle. The man was talking animatedly, tipping his chin down as if listening intently, then throwing his head back and laughing. Though she couldn't see the sides of the table, Ginger knew this was a lonely heart's dinner, or like the tea parties she'd had as a child, arranging dolls in chairs, setting a table of tiny ceramic cups and saucers and making polite, one-sided conversation about the weather and the price of limes.

Though the man was clearly disturbed and there was no excuse for leaving your penis out ever, Ginger felt sympathy for the old guy. The way he dressed reminded her of her father's vestments, old-fashioned and slightly seedy, and she realized that the new church members connected her father's antiquated robes to something gothic and dangerous. Ginger's minister's-daughter mechanism churned, turning the man's perverted past into pity. He'd never been loved enough.

“What do you think he's saying?” Ginger whispered.

“Something creepy,” the girl hissed back, “impressing his date with his knowledge of pornography or his love of small animals.” At first thrilled to see the old man so dissolute, the girl's grudge no longer gave her pleasure and she was getting bored, glancing up the block at her own dark house.