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| Stairway to Heaven: The Pastor | |
 © The Swartzentruber Studio | all rights reserved |
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Pastor Preacher, save your orisons for someone else. The men you read over now are starched and pressed. They look more like they’re about to get off an elevator in a tall building instead of being lowered six feet underground in a pinewood box. The world may look rosy in those glasses of yours, but do you have lenses large enough to cover the eyes of the world? The clouds act as soft cotton batting in your ears, but we, the dead, mill about your feet like earthworms devouring what leavings of faith you cast off to us. This cracked communion you offer only parches us, whets our appetite. The skin shrivels on our skulls like salted slugs. We are neither damned nor saved except what you claim. I am the lost and the dead. Do not follow me. -Valerie Enriquez; Urbana, Illinois Pastor “Uncle Charlie, I killed Pastor Joseph Brown. I had to. I wished he'd never come to this town of 'Sorrow. 'Fooled me proper. But he's the devil's own dressed like a clergy man. Black soul. Hate his Celtic cross dangling around his neck and dark glasses over blind eyes. Confess all your sins just before you die. Trust him? Ha. Repent and lament more like it. Everybody he absolved still died in sin because he wasn't a pastor. That's why I killed him, to stop the terror deed. When I look out the window-I can't sleep- I see his ghost. Haunting me. “When I hear that shuffling sound I know it's him and then the coffins drop from the sky on long threads. More still. All those criminals who made last confessions are there. I watch his ghost walk. I see the hideous heads pop up through the sandy path snapping at his ankles as if seeking blood. Wanting revenge. The pastor never cared about us. My soul. Not when he ran a muck drinking chapel wine and eating the bread. A sacrilege. Him a pastor spawned from the evil of the Devil.” “Can you prove all this?” I asked. “Show it's true.” He dropped his head and shivered though it wasn't cold. “Easy,” he answered after a pause.”Remember your son dying in an accident and making a death bed confession?” I nodded. “To a man who is not a priest,” he said. “Look out the window. Maybe you'll see what I see this minute.” I kept staring out of the window. And then a coffin , the first I'd seen, dropped from the sky. My dead son stepped out. I gasped. I started my prayers, for the dead. I said the De Profundis, with my soul for him. -Cleveland W. Gibson, (Author of Billabongo) Faringdon, Oxon, United Kingdom |
