The Three Inches Beneath Him

The first one landed with a splat face down in the drying mud. It had rained the night before, a downpour, but the skies weren’t satisfied with the damage done. The second one landed not far from the first, face up, witnessing the cloud of men falling to their deaths for a moment before he died himself. I took cover underneath the church entryway. People rushed from the sidewalks to the stores, some of them being crushed underneath falling bodies.

“Why are they all men,” a boy who had taken cover next to me asked. 

“Hell is finally being emptied,” Priest Hammond said. He smiled watching them bounce off the earth. 

“But they’re falling from the sky,” the boy said.

“Then heaven is being emptied. It’s a good sign.” 

Priest Hammond rushed back inside to pray, patting me on the back so as to say, “Stay here with the boy.” I had been a parochial vicar at the city’s catholic church for the last four years learning under the tutelage of Priest Hammond in the hopes of running the church when I was ready. I had already taken on the responsibility of officiating weddings and celebrating baptisms but hadn’t yet gotten to leading funerals. I had anointed the sick but once they passed the responsibility was too great. I asked him why funerals were more difficult than speaking to the sick. People close to death don’t have much to say, he told me. Mourning families ask questions.  Falling men bounced from the roof of the church and spilled down at our feet. 

“We need to get you inside to the basement,” I said to the boy. “The roof can’t sustain this kind of a beating.”

“I can’t go back in there,” he said. “The priest kicked me out last week and told me to never come back. He told me that if I wanted to sin I should go worship a sinner.”

“I’m sure the end of days would be considered an exception.”

“It’s no use. I’ve already forgotten all the prayers.” 

“What was your sin?” I asked. 

“Look!” the boy pointed to the pile of men littering the church lawn. “Some of them are still moving.”

“All the more reason to get you inside.”

“Don’t you want to know what they have to say?”

“Dying men always say the same thing,” I told him. “I assure you it’s nothing interesting.” 

We rushed inside and sealed the door behind us. Through the stained glass windows it was hard to make out that the skies had cleared, but we could no longer hear the thuds of bodies smashing into the earth. They had stopped falling as if God had turned off a spout, or as if he were pinching the yard hose only to surprise us again with another deluge of screaming men once we put our eye to the end of the hose. The last of them still alive coughed his final breath into the blood smeared concrete before the church entryway. 

Natives used to pray for rain. This is what the nuns at school used to tell me. Their lives depended on it, they said, almost rolling their eyes. People still pray for rain - we just no longer associate it with mysticism. A farmer crying over his arid land, barely enough water in his body to push out a handful of tears, besieging the skies for no more than a cloud of well-fed birds. A thirsty hiker who’s lost herself in the Sonoran desert - her last words stifled in her parched mouth, unable to move the rock that is her tongue. A family watching their home burn into a square pile of ash, swallowing their pets within. 

“My prayers have been heard! Thank you lord,” Priest Hammond repeated over a clenched fist of rosary beads as we walked inside. 

“You prayed for rain?” the boy asked. 

“I prayed for the fall of man.”

“Didn’t that already happen when that lady ate a piece of fruit?” 

“Eve,” shot Priest Hammond angrily. “Behold, he is coming with the clouds,” he said in a low voice contemplating its meaning. He looked to the stained glass windows and saw the daylight shining through in reds and yellows spread across the floor. “Not everything is literal,” he said under his breath. 

“They stopped falling, you know,” the boy said with a laugh, his cheeks gaunt like a pillowcase holding an old pillow. The boy was dirty, a boy of the street who looked twice his age, but when he laughed it was possible to see his youth in his freshly white teeth. 

Priest Hammond rushed to the door pushing me and the boy aside and tossing the rosary beads to the floor. Their string broke and the beads scattered beneath the pews. I held the boy’s hand to keep him from slipping on a stray bead as we walked to the door. I whispered to him to not laugh anymore at the priest. 

“He’s a serious man who should be respected and if you want to earn your way back into the church this is your opportunity.” 

“Why would I want that?” 

“There are a lot of things he can teach you. He has taught me more than I could tell you.” 

“No thanks,” the boy said frankly. “There are a lot of people with answers. I can ask one of them.” 

I hushed him as we neared Priest Hammond. He had opened the door and was inspecting the bodies on the ground. People had exited the stores and houses on the street and were rushing around trying to help, covering the men with sheets that they pulled from their closets. A few men had parked their large trucks and were helping paramedics and the fire department load bodies into the ambulance. 

“Look!” yelled the boy pointing to the sky. A large plane sputtered in smoky circles, the motor grinding a metallic scream. The boy laughed at the dying plane as if it were an out of control kite. Priest Hammond rushed past us again back into the church slamming the door behind him. The boy laughed harder this time. “What did he teach you exactly?”

“We’re all wrong at times. Understanding God’s signs isn’t a simple affair. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve your respect. A man who is wrong ninety nine times out of a hundred still has one thing to teach. You should apologize. He might still let you come back to the church.”

The boy, feeling ashamed, nodded in agreement. We reentered the church and called to the priest but got no response. 

“He must be in the vestry. He often goes there when upset. He says being alone brings him closer to God.”

“Is that why he prays for the end of times? To be closer to his God?” the boy said.

“That’s something you’ll need to ask him, my son.” 

“Wouldn’t it affect him, too? Aren’t we all susceptible to falling?”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what to say. This is a conversation that I hadn’t yet been trained to have, so we continued to the vestry, calling out Father from time to time, with no response. Upon knocking on the door of the vestry we realized that the door was indeed ajar. The boy pushed it open completely. The room was dark - the amount of walls in the church didn’t allow for the light from the nave to spill into the room through the hallway behind us. The boy turned on the light and we both stood stiff. 

In the back of the room hung Priest Hammond from a rope that he had tossed over a beam. The gust of air from the door opening caused him to swing, his feet dangling three inches from the floor. But perhaps it was the residual swinging of his struggling body and kicking legs. Robes from nearby racks littered the area around him. I looked at the boy and searched for something to say but found nothing. 

“That’s the thing about the fall of man,” the boy said, laughing once again. 

“What’s that?”

“Not all men fall completely.”