Bad Luck Black!

xxxviii. Down the Hatch

TW: 10K Words,
Slight Gore

     Lonnie Yates is a practical man with an impartial mind . . . And yet, he's succumbed to religion. The quietest trap, the easiest fall. He was devout. By the bell's toll, he dwelled in the pews, clasping the whittled beads of a cracked rosary. Four points on a cross, all sharpened by age. He fisted it; it stung. Prone on his lap rested God's word. The leather was dry and cracked, pages slashed, stained, and torn. It'd been used and abused.

     On the dais, Pastor Deacon crooned sermons claimed from God's own lips, stretching an embrace to the Heavens in spiritual reverence. Centered above the lectern, God's Son hung. A faded crucifix slightly off-kilter, eyes downcast. All seeing. Lonnie could never stare.

     Nothing was romantic about the weekly endeavor. There was no church, not in the conventional sense. Instead, service was held in an upcycled farmshed on the outskirts of Pastor Deacon's private land. No steeple, no windows. Light was manufactured through broken panels and undignified apertures in the ceiling. Straw covered the ground, and it stunk of mildew and stored, soured grain. And it was always damp, Lonnie remembers. A cloying, perverse humidity no scourge of airflow could dislodge. It wasn't orthodox, but it became a haven.

     A church isn't the building, it's the congregation—Deacon's paradoxical mantra crowed every Sunday.

     Then, Lonnie was frightened. Of what, he could not identify . . . Fear's untamed. The game is irrelevant, lust is all consuming. All it craves is the satisfaction of the kill, the raw primality in teeth shredding flesh. It strikes at a whim. Yet, you can die knowing you will not be wasted. Fear will consume you whole. Offer the bone, swallow the pill, fear cannot be domesticated.

     Almost as if a barrier screened the threshold, he found himself unable to enter. A beast lies inside—fear, and its companion, uncertainty. Every child's downfall is the expulsion of caution in favor of curiosity. Newborns aren't blessed with sight, rather it's a gradual acquisition. Those lenses are procured once innocence is lost. That morning is the moment Lonnie Yates awakened.

     The horizon was doused in blossoming pastels layered with slothful clouds. Atop a hillock, Deacon's farmshed was untouched by the sunrise, as if the sun itself feared hellfire. Chipped wood-beams were slathered in ink, serenaded by crickets' woeful hymns. Splinters of grass were damp, Lonnie remembers dew soaking his sneakers. Cherry red converse Etty'd managed to snag with her latest paycheck. A mistake, in hindsight. They remained stained.

     Pastor Deacon stationed himself at the entrance, warmly greeting his congregation. He clasped their hands, embraced, smiled. There was a line into the farmshed, and it ran slowly. Patience is a virtue that's escaped Lonnie, but Pastor Deacon bathed in it. Moreover, exuded it. One after another, he heard his people's plights, their newest sympathies, or idiosyncratic rambles. He's a vessel for God's word, a humble servant bearing himself raw. He'd touched his people's hearts. Their souls.

     So why, why did Lonnie halt?

     Perhaps shyness? No, Bernelle Yates didn't raise meek children (More like, loudmouths). Little Lonnie is a friend of all, stranger to none. So, again . . . why? He doesn't know, and it kills him. He hesitated. Why? Right as Deacon's gaze bore into his own, Lonnie cast himself to the moist soil and watched a trail of ants disappear within a forest of weeds. Memories aren't reliable. You are your own narrator, but he knows he'd witnessed something. Judgement? Scorn?

     Being who he is, Lonnie's skin is chainmail. Words sink into the links, not his flesh. He's familiar with dislike. People are tiresome; it's not his fault honesty is apparently the wrong policy. If the issue was a case of pathetic insecurity, Lonnie'd have concocted his cure. Instead, he's plagued by the disease of the unknown. He doesn't like not knowing. There is natural order to the universe. The moon's steady hands guide the tides; animals abide by natural laws; Etty plants pansies in the spring and asters in the fall.