The air was stagnant, I could taste the presence of hundreds of pastors who had led services years before. The congregation rustled— shifting weight, creaking pews, the soft drag of dress shoes across the hardwood. Pastor Sheridan’s voice rolled from the pulpit, controlled but thunderous through my unsettled ears. As he lifted the wafer he spoke: “This is my body.”
The golden plate floated to my eyeline, gleaming in the tainted ray through the stained-glass windows. A wafer was placed on my quivering tongue. The bone dissolved in an instant, at first tasteless but lingered with the flavour of a bitten lip.
Next came the cup. Crimson trembling at the brim weighed down the pastor’s grasp. I brought it to my mouth, and with a delicate tip, the blood flooded in. The sharp wine burned down my innocent throat; it was bitter and sweet at once, like absolution and regret sharing the same breath.
This Sunday had not been like the others, I felt a shift as the wafer and wine settled in my stomach. Something had changed; I cleared my throat to rid the resentment brewing inside me.
I had a pending guilt; I had lost the touch of God.
The service had ended and much like the weeks before, I took myself to see a friend. Our paths collided like magnetic poles. But unlike the rules of nature, we couldn’t be apart. She was older than I and moved through the world as if the mountains and trees were humming, only to her. She smoked weed, filled the quiet with Nirvana, and read books about sex.
I had a devil on my shoulder, her name was Paige. I didn’t need to use drugs, listen to blasphemous music, or lustful books, she did that to me without any coercion. I was addicted to her company; every instinct warmed me she was harmful, but I kept coming back.
Our time was spent in the outskirts of town. We’d trace the city’s pulse from the quiet edges of the hills.
There was something contagious about her, she unlocked a version of me I didn’t know existed. With every lull in conversation came the same gnawing feeling from hours earlier. I could feel myself hiding something, not from Paige, from myself. The twilight creeping over our domain deepened the blue of her eyes; a soft smile crossed her face as we sat in a silence heavy with unspoken questions. She occupied my thoughts in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
More days were spent with Paige than ever before. And even when we weren’t together, we wished we were. Our time ventured out of the countryside and into reality. I began to notice things. How when she laughed, she leaned back as if to give her joy the room to breathe. I would watch her flex her wrist to tuck stray hairs behind her ears. How when she read to me, she developed a devilish grin when she prepared for me to cringe at the smut. When she was tired her voice rasped, and when she was excited, it braked. I never noticed her unpainted but well-groomed nails or how she applied lip balm every few minutes. We had always hugged but now I noticed the vanilla and sandalwood notes in her perfume.
All these details captivated me. It unfolded with a subtle revelation, each fragment aligned in its own time until the entire picture emerged. I caught myself smiling at her arrival, while a weight pressed down on me at her departure.
I knew what they called thoughts like those; I had friends isolated because of thoughts like those. My thoughts were the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and I was Eve.
Paige was my devil; I was the one to put her in that place.
