Abrahamic Religion
Novel · Southern Gothic
1965, Alabama. June left the convent looking for God, and Something else found her first.
From Chapter Two
“Where are we going?” I speak quietly when I first wake up. I’ve been trying to be louder, I miss the mornings I would spend entirely in the disciplined silence of prayer. I hear the quick inhale of smoke before he says anything to me. He holds it in his lungs but I can already smell the smoke leaking out of his mouth. “Just the industrial district across the way. We will probably end up stayin’ there for the night.” He exhales the bitter air into the space between us, but it quickly filters out of my window.
The Chevy rolls past the magnolias and the bare twiggy persimmon trees with wild brambles below them. They usually have forgotten fruit lying below, but now they stand alone in the cold. Sometime in August, the fruit will return, hot and left to the ground, some of them will even be split open and pregnant with wasps gorging on the pulp.
I pull his jacket tighter around my body. The soft fabric slides over my shoulders and lower neck. The rough texture swallows me. I reach into the pockets for my rosary. The purple glass beads slip over my fingers as cool river stones might. I can almost feel them hum in the mornings, beads can’t hum, but mine do, they always have.
My thumb brushes over the silhouette of the holy broken body still nailed to his cross.
I believe in God.
I lean my back against the window, my head finds a good spot by the crook of the bench seat and the window frame. I watch him as he drives from somewhere else in my body, I let him become the background of the creed. The Father Almighty. I continue praying.
His freckles deepen in the sunlight as it crests over the trees and I begin to wonder what it would be like to be hated by him.