They lived in a shabby trailer close
to the Church of Sweet Revival
where he served as the assistant
pastor. He always wore a mask of
mature righteousness, pretended he
was compassionate, soft-spoken and in
a pensive mood, but it gnawed at him
that the pastor gave him a measly
salary and rarely let him preach.
He wanted to speak about love
and deep, all-encompassing spirituality,
a divine hand clasping the soul
with its ethereal fingers and
he greeted every member of the church
with the phrase, ‘Christly blessings.’ One day,
as fate would have it, he ended up
in another church, where a different
sort of revival took place,
the preacher hollered and spoke of hell,
a place where they’ll chop your nose off,
where maggots will feast on you like you’re
rotten cheese, where despair and madness
and weeping and gnashing and bludgeoning
and fire and sulphur and torment and anguish…
he listened, shaken, and then ran home
to his wife, said, “The Lord’s sending us to hell!”
and worried her until the two of them
cried aloud for mercy, yelled and screamed
that God spare them. He tried everything
after that — walking on glass shards, pouring
hot coal on his feet, drinking boiling water
until it flayed his throat, bashing his head
against the headboard, abstaining from sex,
disciplining his son, shaking him and
saying, “Boy, do you want that fire to
have you? Hell, that’s where you’re going
if you don’t get right with the Lord!”
until one day, he fell down, exhausted
from whipping himself with a belt
and dreamt of a mountain. Now, his wife
started harassing every Tom, Dick and Harry
in town, accusing them of being sodomites,
yelling in the street for the wicked to perish,
the rotten fruit to find the furnace,
God to rain AIDS on the liberals,
the pansies, the queers, the effeminate men
who touched each other in public bathrooms,
the cross-dressing sickos who gave her the
heebie-jeebies. She went to every store
in town, proselytising. “You bunch of
wicked fags and trannies are going to
hell! Yessir! Hell! Where the fires will
burn your privates off!” she yelled,
while he dreamt and dreamt.
The pastor laid him off, thinking he had
lost his senses, and one day, he ran
to his wife, saying, “I know the meaning of
the dream the Lord gave me. This is a
test, but we’ll get through it.” He proceeded to
tell her, and she ate every word like
it was manna from heaven.
The next day, he called his son, said,
“Boy. Your name’s no longer Marty.
It’s Isaac now,” and took him to a hilltop.
“Where are we going, daddy?” Isaac asked,
and he told him they were sacrificing a
goat. “Where’s the goat?” the boy asked
and he replied, “The Lord will provide, boy.
Yessir! He will!” with a mad glow in his eyes.
Photo by Maxim Tajer on Unsplash
For dVerse
Ordinary Person 
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