Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

When his pounding heart subsided enough to allow it, he held her by the arms and laid her down upon the daybed. She looked at him again in that absent way, then tilted her head back onto the mattress, her mouth parted. She whispered again, — Parnell. And she said something else, too faint to be heard. Hands upon her cheeks, growing cold, he leaned down to her lips. He laid his ear just barely against them. -Parnell, he heard her whisper again, something’s wrong.

He knelt and grasped her by the arms again, and believed he could feel something in her beginning to slow and thicken, heard a gentle rasping deep in her throat. The shadow of her dusky blood crept into tender crescents below her eyes. The delicate fibers in her cornea quivered, and in her dark pupils the tiny reflected image of Parnell’s face seemed to dissipate and disappear.

— Parnell, she whispered, barely audible, save me.

Then she lay still, eyes upon the ceiling. The cottage timbers shuddered in the gusts off the Gulf. Parnell rested his head upon her breast. He could hear the crushing sound as breakers collapsed against the beach. -Parnell, she whispered again, don’t be ashamed. Take me, like you want to do. Parnell began to tremble. He knelt before her on the daybed, and pulled apart her cool and sticky, lovely white legs. In a moment he groaned as heat flushed through him. He gave in and fell upon her. Her breath huffed out as from a cushion, her arms lay rigid at her sides, her head arched away as if in the throes of some horrible death, eyes turned to look unseeing out the Florida windows, lovely mouth opening in dry exhaustion. Parnell crushed his lips to hers, the ripe taste of shrimp still upon them. He squeezed her small and lolling breasts to his chest. And slowly she began to change again, her whisper taking voice again, love literally coming alive beneath him. He heard himself saying her name, his voice deep and crusty as a troll’s, and she responded with a cry that shot into his spine. Blood slammed at the ends of his fingers and toes. He was momentarily blinded. She gripped him with her heels and nails and he felt as if there were no longer any bed beneath them, and a roaring in his ears became their own sobs. She clasped him to her. She knew then, she would tell him one day, that he had unbound her from the tyrannies of grief and fear. Those who would embrace the beautiful dead are most open to the living, have nothing to fear, neither loss nor oblivion. The world was flesh and blood and bone, and through the blessed privilege of sensual touch lay contact with the spiritual world. The air is adrift with what presences are left behind, which find new forms in the living, in those who are most open and alive themselves, not slaves to ignorance and fear. In this world, Parnell had given her that. But in his secret heart Parnell knew, and he would always believe Selena knew, that it was Selena who had saved Parnell.

WHEN SHE WAS a child listening to her mother’s sermons she came to realize the possibility of the divine in an ordinary life, this miracle that had occurred with Our Lord Jesus Christ was as much chance and the openness of one’s divine nature to the miracle as it was the big finger of God pointing out he or she. We do not choose God , her mother had boomed from the pulpit over and over. God chooses us . Our choice, she always said, was to be open to God or to close our hearts forever and ever. Her mother was obsessed with death. She always said she couldn’t wait to go to the other side, to be in heaven. Such words had so frightened Selena that her own obsession with death took a hard turn toward salvation and the only way to guarantee that was to be the agent of it herself. She drew pictures of heaven in her first-grade class, and all the angels were her mother. God was a very old man with wild hair that hid his eyes, and a fierce beard that hid his features, and in his hand he held a long-handled scythe. Beside him stood a smaller figure with jet-black hair and a little wand of her own. And who is that? her teacher asked brightly. That’s me. Really? the teacher said brightly as before. Why are you standing next to God, hon? I am standing at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Selena said. The Christ Selena, who died for your sins. You’re not dead, though, honey, the teacher said. And Selena hon, it’s the angel of death that carries the scythe, her teacher said. Not God. God is the angel of death, Selena replied. Selena the Christ is the life everlasting. Selena is a very wise child , her teacher wrote home in a note, but with somewhat disturbing notions. Perhaps she has been exposed to ideas which she is not yet equipped to handle.

She did not see God as evil, but indifferent to the kinds of things that so grieved human beings. He was above all that, and so she strove to be more like God in this way, and this made her an aloof child, difficult to reach or decipher emotionally. At twelve she knew from the scriptures it was time to shoulder the burden to which she had opened her infinite heart. It was in the evening, very late, in her bed. She rose to her knees in the moonlight soft on her bedcovers and asked God to take her then and to use her to His ends, and a flood of emotion washed through her as she had not felt in her life to that point. She wept a long time, wept herself into exhaustion, and then it was that the spirit entered her and gained a hold.

There were miracles she performed, in her own quiet way. She could make her teacher call on her for an answer, if she wanted her to. And if she wanted to be passed over, she could control that, too. It was a simple matter of will, and something she did through her eyes, which were large and such a dark brown as to appear almost solid black globes of softened glass. If she wanted into a group of other children who were occupied with something, she approached them and they parted to let her in. And if she was not interested, she was invisible, they never even sensed she was near. She could arrest animals with her eyes, as well, and keep them from approaching or slinking away. Her cat, Rosebud, understood her every mulling thought, and watched her as she would an object of prey, but one beyond her powers to prey upon, and therefore a kind of god. She did not worship, though, being a cat. She expected to be worshiped herself, Rosebud did, and so was always unsatisfied. But when Selena touched her on the top of her head between her ears, she gently closed her eyes and was absolved of her envy and felt content, for a brief while anyway, to be just a cat. Other things she could do were make birds fly from a bush without herself making a sound or a move, turn bad dogs away tails tucked, shut up talkative grown-ups who got on her nerves, and if she really wanted to and it was something she rarely did, knowing it would be an abuse if she did it too often, she could change the weather. But more often she merely willed weather to stay as it was, since she liked most kinds of it, rain and storms as well as sunny days and clear nights. She could make a tree die, if she thought it was a bad tree, though this was rare. She could make other people, the whole town, sleep later in the morning, if she wished. If she was sleepy and didn’t want to get up for school, she could do this, and when she finally dragged herself to the schoolhouse, her father’s old postal bag stuffed with her books slung over her shoulder, the others would be just arriving, too, all sleepy and draggy, including the teachers, who yawned and slurped from cup after cup of coffee, and declared they just couldn’t wake up this morning to save their lives. She could simply slow things down. And sometimes she did. Riding in the backseat of their old black lurching car to church she could tell there were fewer cars on the road, the people inside looking sleepy and tired, and there were fewer people in the church itself, and her mother had to work extra hard at her sermon to keep them awake and responding with Amens and nods of the head that weren’t nod-dings-off. When Selena noticed that, and before the collection plate was passed, she willed them to wake up a little bit, and they would. At home she scaled herself back. For some time she wasn’t sure if she wanted her mother to know her secret or not. She realized she might not be believed, and that her mother might think it a sacrilege that she even would think such a thing.