SACRILEGIOUS
It was two shots of vodka and one to the head.
It was a bad breakup and a long walk off a short pier.
The problem with my town is that it was always trying to kill you. This was back when everyone
prayed before bed. And not to aliens or dairy product deities.
It was the bourbon-veined business men fingering pistols in their pockets.
It was a set of gnashing teeth hibernating under your porch step.
The other problem with my town was that it was both sides of a mix tape to the nearest hospital. This
was back before people planted pansies and became pansies and ate pansies in gluten free soup.
Kurt Cobain died the same day St. Brigid’s Catholic Church went up in flames. The repairs took a
week and by Sunday mass the parishioners filed back into their pews.
The fourth time the church caught fire, Marilyn Manson played on the radio. The foundations melted
to funhouse angles and the place was deemed unsafe. A chapel went up across town just in time for
Lent.
And so the old pews went into purgatory until kids with track marks and hangovers started using it to
shoot up.
I’m the first person to die in there.
Your textbook case of joint-custody revolt. Drugs seemed the obvious choice. I was too dumb to be
any less of a cop-out cliché.
It takes the average junkie 500 mgs to get sky high. I take nearly six times that much and junk chunk
shampoo foams out of my mouth.
I’m on a plane with no pilot, plummeting 40,000 feet.
Please fasten your seat belts and put your trays in the upright position.
30, 000 feet.
The paramedics strap me into a gurney and press on my rib cage until it cracks.
10,000 feet.
I can’t breathe. I can’t see. The blood in my veins freezes over.
500 feet.
Retrieve your oxygen mask from the compartment above you.
100 feet.
Your emergency exits are located here, and here.
Prepare to evacuate in soul 3, 2, 1.
And then I’m gone.
It’s both sides of a mix tape to the nearest hospital and I’m pushing narcotic daisies by track 4.
Junkies stop going there after that. Even the Columbine Cool Kid types can be superstitious.
They find hip new hideouts with hardcore bands and clean needles. And the run down rubble of old St.
Brigid’s gets taken over by real hedonistic heathens.
The best part about being dead is that you get to see everything.
I’ve seen grannies choke on dicks in confession booth glory holes.
I’ve seen gays pray to Ginsberg on anal rosaries and give ass-to-mouth enemas.
I’ve seen kids sew hatred into their legs with India ink.
I’ve seen guys with dicks fuck guys without until they’re both shooting nothing but dust.
And I watched them all die.
The worst part of being dead is that you can’t do anything to stop it.
The problem with my town is that it’s always trying to kill you.
The 38-year-old boy keeps his kiddie porn pressed between the pages of an ashen bible. He stops into
the old church after work sometimes to flick through his stash. This guy is so fat that his wife has to
sew elastic into the waist of his pants, like she did for herself when her belly swelled with his
brother’s child. He thinks he’s losing weight because his jeans are starting to feel loose, but the
elastic’s just stretched from all the times he didn’t pull them down to jerk off. He dies in the master
bedroom with a noose wrapped around his neck and his hand wrapped around his dick. For once he
bothers to pull his pants down to his ankles. The funeral has to be closed casket because he’s still
sporting a semi. The priest calls it a terrible tragedy, the police call it a suicide. And in every
supermarket aisle and classroom back corner they whisper about a haunted church.
The salesman lives a routine life. He’s a white collar cubicle slave from 9 to 5. And on Thursdays at
6, he meets his mistress in the abandoned church while his wife takes the kids to soccer practice. He
comes home sometimes with his underwear on backwards and she pretends not to notice. One day he
takes his kids to the circus and he wakes up on the tent floor in a puddle of vomit that still looks like
popcorn but smells like Sprite and battery acid. The doctor calls it cancer, the salesman calls it karma.
The cellist waltzes down the aisle with her arm hooked around a dude with Abercrombie abs. She’s
tired of blowjobs under the bleachers and hand jobs in bus backseats. They screw on the altar, right
there below the melted face of a disapproving Jesus. And a few weeks later she’s got a plus sign
peestick in one hand and free clinic flyer in the other. So she plays her outstretched veins with a blade
until the only music she can hear is the sound of her heartbeat fading and a melancholy moan
escaping her lips. The priest calls it a test of faith, the kids call it a whore getting what she deserves.
The problem with my town is that it’s always trying to kill you.
And I can’t do anything to stop it.
Glint Literary Journal 