Lamb

My catechism class was constantly threatened with hellfire. Like quicksand from third grade science class, or peer pressure from the drug unit in the fifth, hell was one of those things proclaimed inevitable, unavoidable and, the worst of all, of nobody’s fault but your own. And that was not the best thing to tell children, and momentarily, I liked the idea of at least having a choice in such a matter; unfortunately, that indifference I had was not shared, nor well received, especially by my religion teachers. 

Yet, despite their previous, futile warnings of thinking that Hell was at all something of comfort, they decided that the only way to combat this was to tell me—when I was at my observable lowest in my nine-year old life, plagued with grief splotched cheeks—that my beautiful bunny would no, not make it to Heaven. Animals can’t go there, silly, they don’t have souls. You, you do, though! That’s why you must try your absolute hardest to get there! She had smiled at me sweetly, sickly—crouching with wringing hands—between wine-stained lips and for a second it looked like traces of blood coated her teeth. All I remember are those teeth, and that smile, and wishing I had never asked. But after those words, my vision shifted to the sickening gray carpet of the prayer hall, where I resided only with three other classmates in the beginning moments of class. And so, my shoes padded to my desk in the middle of the room, and once sat with anything than grace, I tilted my chin in my elbows, upward. And next to the frame of Jesus’ limp, emaciated body that I would be tasked in finding beauty in, I would stare at the ticking clock, and hear its song muffled by the wind moaning at the windows. 

I wondered, as I looked upon him above me, when in his death he stopped being God—his blood the only thing he could give—when he stopped being human, and when he became nothing but a lamb.

I could not stop staring at Sister Bernadette’s crooked, pink teeth for the rest of that class, the way her dress wafted like bat wings, the way her cross flung against her collarbones in movements of passion. I sat silently and hardened; my welling tears had not fallen, but they were stinging droplets I was all too used to and would have cut my cheeks had I allowed them out. And when the clock finally granted my freedom, the icy outside furthered my subtle shifting to Hellfire, for when I climbed into the backseat of my mother’s car, I fought for room against the fog that creeped in along with me. And my mother, unable to use her strongest headlights, hummed a tune in her abdomen. The backseat was bumpy, clumsy and warm, and the streetlights allowed for moments of light as I blindly picked at the pages of my Catholic study book until they, in proper lighting, looked like they had been chewed up by feasting caterpillars. The Church bells rang behind into the night, I checked on the moon outside my window, and was pleased it was trailing home alongside me. 

Everything was blurry, and heavy, and tiring; my eyes were squinted and my cheeks were hot and I wondered if Hell was hotter. I never liked the cold. My mother pulled the car into the garage and the familiar gold-red light attempting to blind me. But the heat had been powered off with the car’s engine, but I craved it again like water. 

Days later, when I was dressed in white and lace and Bernadette told me that receiving first communion was like I was marrying Jesus, I suddenly was mad that I had to have my hair done for this. This pins in my curls at the crown of my head seemed to sink my scalp as I knelt upon the altar; is this what they meant by eternity? My fingers, slim, lean, white with tension, wrung together in prayer and my kneecaps felt bruised against the kneeling pads beneath the pews. This all felt weird—I did not close my eyes, and Jesus stared straight away back at me from the tallest place on the wall. I could not recite some spell that would marry me to an invisible man that I did not know; especially one who didn’t let my bunny into his supposed kingdom. My mouth tasted stale and hot as my tongue clicked against my teeth in wait, reminding myself of the wafers they had given us for practice. 

I barely heard the priest’s bellow between the dulled sound from my tongue and the blood rushing in my ears. But I jolted when the organ started to blare and when voices, deep canyons and high mountains, announced their presence with a loud hymn. The voices swirled around the Church, streaking through the rays of light streaming through the windows, red and green and blue in their glows. I felt frozen, in some kind of hesitation, nervousness, and my eyes fell back to the man hanging upon the altar, his face crestfallen and his feet seeming to melt from his legs before the nail caught them in place. The other kids clumsily scrambles to get into the line stretching through the aisle, hands folded together and raised against their stomachs to receive this newfound offering. 

I wanted to go home. I wanted the warmth of the car and my caterpillar pages between my fingers, not the wafers deemed as “bread”—no, the body of Jesus—feeling weightless in my palms, hands stiff and straight from my ribs. I was hungry, yes, gluttonous—as the sins would tell me not to be—but I did not want to eat Jesus, that was for sure. The paper, wafer, body, whatever it was, went down like sand, and I still did not understand what was to be celebrated about eating a person. It tasted nothing like the sweet tarts they had made us practice with, burning burned in my throat in its dryness, and I wonder if my insides were now branded like some of the cows were at home. 

--

At least it was over, now, I thought, as if completely convinced I would never have to eat what was deemed the Lamb of God. The rest of the ceremony was monotonous, excessive, and seemingly incessant, or at least my stomach’s chastising had convinced me so; breakfast seemed like days ago. My little heels clacked against the Church basement tiles like off-key piano notes, briskly walking towards my friend Sarah as we entered the Church basement after all the after-ceremony formalities and photographs. The room was beige with something sterile, but warm like flowers, yet all I knew was that this celebration allegedly had food, and that was enough for me. I at least deserved a damn cupcake to wash down the flake of flesh sitting uncomfortably in the pit of my stomach. 

But before I could speak anything to Sarah, of worth or even courtesy, her hand put a wall between us to display a loud crackling of saran wrap and crumbs, a flurry of motion that left a loaf of bread practically dangling between her teeth. I stepped back, caught off my small heels, stumbling. 

“Hi!” she said, excited eyes beaming as she spoke through a mouthful of her teeth’s hostages, an erratic wave in her other hand. Her voice was strong against the background of murmurs that started to warm the basement.

Though, all I was looking upon was the wrapper she held clutched in her hand and its familiar decoration of blue and yellow upon its front. I held the same bread held across my stomach, noticing how comfortably it rested there with its crust shining beneath the basement lights. It was the gift from our religion teachers—I had taken it from Bernadette with quick and greedy hands, avoiding her eyes—and presumably the Church: a loaf of bread doused with the holiest of water. But my insides twinged momentarily.

“We can eat that?” I asked her, a hushed whisper blanketing my voice. “I thought that was supposed to be to shared with our families, or something.” Bernadette’s red teeth glowed in my mind, chomping at my mind’s eye. I winced when my stomach growled again. 

She shrugged, her tanned shoulders gracing her earlobes, knocking her little silver hoops dripping from her ear, just dusting the blonde tufts of hair that fell among them. Her top teeth clacked against her bottom ones. 

“I’m hungry. It’s just bread.” she said, and I was leaning towards disagreement until my stomach sounded again. 

Sarah always had a way of her, where she glowed in a different way than my other nine-year-old friends. She felt like summer and yellow, and maybe pink. But her house was tense air and muddied green walls and doors slamming and dinner tables and fancy plates coated with dust. Her house was down the street from ours, but I don’t think many people ever went there, and I don’t remember much of Sarah being at our small and infrequent neighborhood gatherings down at the Kruglik’s. She was dynamic and mysterious, plagued within her own home, but her friendship was innocent company. 

Thus, she convinced me to sneak up the staircase above the Church basement and into the Church’s nave, where children pushing children and parents’ fake-smiling could not be seen nor felt. My cheeks glowed with laughter, and I tried to quell the ache in my stomach by inhaling the loaf of bread, the one that I started to crumble between my fingers as if the offering was a burden. It fell to the rug upon the floor, brown droplets among the red knit, the crumbs upon our shoes like snow. The poor bread—it had been wrapped so prettily, with a prayer card tucked into the twine around the crust, now long forgotten in the trashcan at the base of the stairs before our feet padded upwards. 

But as soon as we had settled into the light above the people below, Sarah was grabbed by the arm and hoisted up with a jolt. My chew paused. 

Her mother’s eyes, always a wrong shift of blue in them, snapped and bore into her daughter’s matching ones with the twist of her neck. Her posture was stiff, yet crooked, fingers brown with white wrinkles and cracks as Sarah’s skin pulsed between them. Her eyes did not land on Sarah’s face, but her hairline, before dropping to her chin, then her shoulders, thighs, shoes, up again, then down, up and down, finally resting upon her moving mouth.

“What are you doing?” her white blocks of teeth fought for space among the yellow ones as her question was laced with something malicious. 

Sarah was caught in silence: a fly caught by a black widow. She shoved her mother off her arm, wincing and hissing in her throat, crumbs spewing from her lips as she did. Her mother touched her bicep this time, softer but still pressing, her eyes barely flicking towards me and the lines around her mouth sinking further into her face and drooping towards hell. 

“What on Earth are you doing?” it was spoken at Sarah through a low voice, in a seemingly calm composure, laced with rage, but the girl only chewed harshly of what was left in her mouth, eyebrows furrowed. Her mother, Michelle, suddenly became aware of the bread clutched in her hand.

“...Eating” she responded slowly, and my knees twinged and I wondered if I should run but I do not want to be seen as prey. Sarah shrugged her whole back as if to shake the being that felt like it rested there. 

“Sarah Michelle,” she said her name warningly, ripping the bread from her hand, knuckles white with dryness, as if her daughter’s and her own name were a curse together, “This bread is blessed—you were supposed to share it at dinner tonight.” Her glowing eyes trailed around the Church, always searching in warning for someone’s disapproval or unwanted attention.

Sarah’s father had then, in an irony of timing, came in a light jog from the basement stairs, and his soft smile fell to match the deep scowl of his wife’s mouth. Immediately, he refocused his eyes to pretend he was listening as she noticed his presence, and to apathetically give attention to the conversation—beats late, per usual. His frame was stunted by his unmoving place on the top stair, eyes rolling slowly between his daughter and wife. Sometimes he would throw out a small, “C’mon Michelle”, either in embarrassment or urgency, his periphery floating towards me in weariness. Sarah had a version of her father’s soft, lazier eyes but quadrupled the brightness of her mother’s blue.  

It seemed unimportant and, well, unnecessary as to why her family was challenging her over bread halfway to her stomach already, but maybe because the blankness in her father’s eyes and the rage in her mother’s were too regular to spark any attention, Sarah did not blink once in alert. 

I wonder if you’d expected for her to scream back at her mother in the same voice she gave her, birthed her with. That is what she normally did, anyways, when I would visit her house. The house was always overwhelmingly loud or deathly quiet, but either way it always seemed red with anger. This was anything but atypical, but it still never sat right in my bones no matter how often it happened. 

But this, this was different. Sarah’s face had hardened over the agonizing seconds of her mother’s scolding, her words so deep in anger and intensity that they became incomprehensible to my ears. Sarah’s face went completely flat, teeth gritted subtly, but eyes open and blank, also intense. Something was in there, but I am not sure what. I shouldn’t know, I think. 

I fled to the bottom of the Church basement stairs after Michelle had broken the tension with a careless knifing question of where my parents were. I did not mind her flatness, and the bottom carpeted step, soft and hot, was no match for the cool under my foot as I stepped off the stairs and onto the tile. I looked through the room for the hair of my mother’s or the curved back of my father’s. 

And once I spotted the soft green of my father’s sweater, my legs moved toward the circle of people, loaf of bread still clutched in hand. I bring it up, again, to my lips, and take a piece hostage between my teeth, the color of Sarah’s eyes glowing in my mind.