Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

Wearing the traveling stole around his neck, her father raised the wafer, stamped with a dove, and Sandy's mother's head flopped forward in complete capitulation. He moved the wafer to her lips and her tongue darted out and took the wafer. Ginger's father tipped the tiny communion goblet to Sandy's mother's mouth, her throat shifting as she swallowed the wine. Her father's lips moved again, as he raised his hand up to his forehead, down past his chin, from shoulders, right to left, in the sad sign of the cross.

“Stand still, if you want to look gorgeous,” the butterfly said, as he applied mascara to the unicorn's long lashes, glittery purple eye shadow to his lids and pink nail polish to his marbled hoofs. The troll's mouth moved but no sound came out. He sat on the cellar steps and ate from a paper plate of hash browns drenched in ketchup.

“There's some for you,” he said with his mouth full. “Don't you want it?” She smelled the onions, saw the lumps of potatoes he dumped onto the paper. She reached her hand out and brought the warm mush to her mouth. The food went down her sore throat like gravel. Pain laid on the newspapers like cold black stones. She was there only to contain and connect these sensations. When she looked over at the stairs, the troll was gone and the ridges of the brown cardboard gave off a little light. Had he been there at all? Or was that yesterday? She heard lead snakes racing over the wooden floor above her head and realized the troll was moving the furniture, pushing all the chairs and tables to the front of the house. The floorboards strained with the added weight and she imagined the house staggering forward, then sinking deeper into the mud.

When the unicorn came on stage he wore white bell-bottoms, his silk shirt unbuttoned to the navel, a gold chain dangling around his neck; the strobe lights went crazy as he sang a wild song about loneliness and love. In the closet, Sandy decided to let the boy put his hand up under her shirt. Dresses dangled above their heads as the boy slid his fingers over the skin of her stomach. Because he smelled like a zillion school lunches, she was afraid to touch him, instead bracing herself, one hand around the toe of a high heel, the other gripping the sole of a tennis shoe. The closet door swung open and the light let her see the expanse of newspapers spread over the basement floor and the pruning shears hung on a nail against the far wall.

“Keep it down,” the troll said, then shut the door again. She pulled her knees closer to her chest and coughed so hard she choked up some bitter-smelling gunk. The troll opened the door again and rushed down the stairs, stood in the wedge of light, and glared at her. His eyes magnified by his glasses, his white beard made him look like the God of hash browns and cold pancakes.

The boy said he liked the drawing on her notebook of the unicorn and the butterfly with big doe eyes. She heard the TV going and opened her eyes to see the troll in a different shirt bending over in the far recesses of the basement. But by the time she opened her mouth, he disappeared. She heard him upstairs moving the furniture again; stone snakes raced across the ceiling. And something was in her mouth, mealy and sweet. It took a minute to recognize the flavor, narrow it down to a fruit, then land on the letters, arrange them, APPLE. The seeds and the stem were like bark against her teeth. But she swallowed these bits and let pee drizzle against her thigh, run down the crack of her rear. And then the poke of a bone against her cheek and she winced. The troll offered her a pork-chop bone with a bit of meat on the end. She grabbed it quick and ran across the floor, squatted in the corner and gnawed the fat. He sat on the stairs laughing, calling her his little monkey. Cute little monkey girl.

As the van paused at a red light, she glanced through the black curtains. Angels were strapped to every light post. Angels made of white shredded plastic, gold halos hovered above their flesh-tone heads. Their gowns were covered with car exhaust. Sandy recognized them from the highway in front of the mall. The van turned. Its tires wobbled like wagon wheels along an unpaved road. She was thrown up against something warm, something soft. The cat, she thought, and flipped her head to see the last bit of streetlight shine on a mess of shiny brown hair. It was Sandy Patrick dressed in footed pajamas with teddy bears on them. She was the little monkey, skinny as a pencil and covered with black and blues, and here was Sandy, ruddy-cheeked and almost chubby, her eyelids showing the spastic flicks that signaled REM sleep.

The van stopped and the troll turned off the engine. All she could hear was his breath coming from deep down in his murky lungs, and then he hacked some mucus out the window. Cars rushed down the highway and she heard the soft sound of snow gathering on the windshield.

The girl gave off a dry and comforting warmth like an electric blanket turned to the lowest setting. Wind hissed through the motorboat tarps, got caught in the ice-covered boards of the dock. Deep inside the green ice, a half-dead fish moved like a muscle spasm in the slushy body of water and the unicorn slipped as he landed on the man-made lake.

“Who will be with me?” she asked, but he pretended not to hear her, saying he'd just come by to give a quick hello, that he must hurry off as he was keynote speaker at the self-empowerment conference and already he'd missed the free baked chicken.

When he was as tiny as a bit of paper blown up into the sky, she watched the moon rise over the water. The skeleton baby waited inside. That bone baby would stay inside the moon forever. Only the dandelions kept changing from suns to moons, then back again.

Her nightgown broke up like tissue paper in water as he carried her back through the woods toward the cabin where the exhausted girls lay sprawled on their bunks. On the ground, books nobody wanted were encased in ice and she saw her blue feet, the nails like bits of hard candy. She felt a slight repulsion for them, like a plate of half-eaten food.

The cats, their fur the palest pink, each wore a necklace made of periwinkles and smoked cigarettes held in long rhinestone-studded holders. They sang in high trembling voices a sort of nonsense French and her little brother drew a unicorn with blue eye shadow and long silver lashes and he handed the picture to her and she thanked him and said she'd tape it up over her bed. It was easy really, these ideas, her mind, smoke-encased in ice. He threw the afghan onto the forest floor, spread the edges out with his foot, and laid her down near a pile of broken bricks.

“Shut up!” Sandy said, and the sound of her own voice, high-pitched and incoherent, terrified her.

“You must control your cough,” the troll said, his hair a mass of ice-covered strands. But she hadn't realized she was coughing. He squatted down and put his hand to her throat, fingers feeling for the glands just at her jawline, under her ear. “Swollen up like lima beans,” he smiled. “Poor little monkey.” But then the smile flew off his face and his features went blank as a hollow-eyed statue and she felt all the air leaving her life like an inner tube with a pinprick leak. The ice broke under her weight and she sank down into the lake's cold water. Her hand clawed out, frenzied and separate, until she grasped the lava rock and sat up in her bed, poured white sugar in her palm so the deer would tongue her lifeline, her blue-veined wrist. It felt nice, his urgent animal tongue. But still she couldn't help thinking, Is this all there is to it?

The bear shook his head, took his hat off, looked down at her lying on the afghan spread over blue moss surrounded by broken plates. “My dear little girl,” he said sadly, “what else did you expect?”