The pocket bible was no bigger than a grown man’s hand. It often slipped from mine as I read it in bed. Onion skin pages tented above my head, flanked by faux leather covers the color of a twilit sky turning worse. Megan had invited me to her church group’s Finger Lakes retreat, but only the camping and boating parts, where the strangled strands of brown refuse stained the canoe’s belly water. Where everyone prayed and laughed into the fire. I looked into the woods’ comparative shadows. My godless back cold as though watched from afar. The relentless mosquitoes’ quick sips and screams echoed the monologue blaring in my head. The hammock held me like a closed hand outside the church group tents, the cicadas’ occlusion—I couldn’t tell if they or the trees’ elbows creaked beneath my blood’s night-long chant. The church bus let me go on a street corner, smelling of deet, my first bible tight in my backpack. I read that book cover to cover years after it found its way to me, while sick on Effexor—unable to move from bed, like I had mono. Unable to move, like I was forsaken.
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Fiction - ISSUE #28