Harper’s hands curl into each other as his tangled fingers acknowledge God’s presence and begin to pray. His face is veiled by the sunlight filtering through the tinted glass that frames the congregation. They are all on display. Harper imagines they are fireflies. Fireflies, proud to be airborne gems in the overcast night, the envy of all ants in the grass and all worms in the soil, the only stars closer to earth than the sun, the only ones anyone can touch. They are fireflies, pursued and swung at and chased up and up and up by a curious child in mud-covered overalls and, one by one, captured in that stained-glass jar. Then the jar is sealed. You can’t fly in a sealed jar. The mother had advised the child to make holes so that air could get in and out. There are none. Harper can’t breathe.
He gasps, opens his eyes, and looks past the invisible God to the pencil resting in the holder on the back of the pew ahead of him. He has been chewing on it and his teeth left neat impressions in its yellow-orange skin. Normally that pencil is used to write on one of those little offering envelopes, to tell exactly how much money you will give to the church on any given Sunday. When Harper was a child he had always been glad to offer from the abundance he had been blessed with. It had satisfied him, even if it was only a little, or if it was actually his mother’s money in an envelope he had written his name on. But that was back when he thought it all went straight to people in need, straight to the ants and worms of the world. He always used to picture them waiting outside those huge ivory doors at the same time every week and slipping away just before he got the chance to meet any of them. They were probably embarrassed, he supposed.
Of course, Harper knows now that any of them could be sitting among the crowd within those wide, sturdy walls that hold them in, reciting the same words as all the rest. So he no longer hurries outside to be the first to greet the needy after mass because he has come to realize that he is just as likely to witness his impoverished peers trailing out of the sanctuary along with everybody else. Instead Harper now makes sure to be the last to leave. Each week he passively guards the exit on the aisle of his pew, all the way at the rear of that high-ceilinged prayer box. He watches as all of the congregants file out of the room, out of that dubious haven-turned-habit. There are young women wearing sinuous dresses, or long modest skirts paired with the humblest of blouses, displaying their ancestral jewelry and urbane high heels, in a mixed attempt to submit servitude and to woo the Lord, to make God swoon, to shift the praise. And their husbands dressed in slacks and un-ironed button-downs swelling with pride, hesitant to dress themselves in such formal attire, always afraid to admit inferiority in this competitive world, even if only to a God outside of it.
Their children too, ornamental miniatures slackly gripping the hands of their parents who won’t let them dress themselves for fear of the embarrassment of unaligned buttons. Between stomps you can see them dragging their feet across the creaking floorboards, forcing out their bottom lip, lowering their eyebrows and reddening their eyes with a glint of resentment, a faint twinge of the hatred exemplified by the antagonists found in the scriptures. Childish hatred, the first cousin of the inexplainable loathing exhibited by those evildoers referred to in such low esteem by the priest’s sermon every Sunday. And though he scolds and reprimands and chastises endlessly about the dangers of the devil the children cannot yet comprehend it. They are still so ignorant, so unaware that in twenty years or so they’ll be ritualistically hauling a temperamental clone behind them every weekend, just like Mom and Dad did.
But today, while pondering the parallel lives of insects and watching the final families trickle out onto the street, Harper sets his eyes on a child who marches out following a few feet behind in the wake of his parents, fashioning sneakers that strobe at every stride and khakis blemished with grass stains on the knees. Harper watches the child’s head rotate on his shoulders as he discovers previously unnoticed intricacies of the stained-glass murals. And even after an hour of unrelenting observation the boy lacks the standard readable expression, the scrunched face and glossy eyes that imply the boredom and spiteful reluctance that most children possess in such a situation. And Harper thinks to himself that maybe that boy is just a sliver of what God intended in the beginning.
David Joseph is a sophomore creative writing major with a minor in Editing and Publishing. Two of his (very) short stories can be found in the W.W. Norton Hint Fiction Anthology.
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