Content Warnings: Depictions of violence and sexual content

It’s Sunday and I’m somewhere south of Heaven when we meet. god is not in church this morning, he’s nestled at the bar. he's singing the blues. But you are at your father’s pulpit, your expression serene: Hattiesburg’s very own angel. I sit packed in a pew beside my mother and her rigid skin, the bone of her arm pressed against mine like the back of a cane, beside my father whose inattention is nearly a match for mine. You are reading scripture, the lilt of your voice wrapping these churchgoers like ribbon around your neck. My mother sniffles next to me, presses one of her fingers into a crease on my skirt, pokes at my father who is beginning to nod off.

And I pay her no mind, I am facing forward, facing you, because I am a poor parishioner, but an even worse daughter because I am thinking that you look pretty in your Sunday best. I think it the way I notice the ruffles of your skirt, the freckles on the arm that lifts the book of scripture. It is a thought that might have become nothing at all; no more than a page turn in the bible. But you turn your head ever so slightly, the jut of your chin visible as you lift your gaze to the rafters, and then back to your enraptured audience, just in time to catch my mother’s second jab at my father whose mouth lolls open with a snore. And I see it before it happens. The crack: a splinter of mirth breaking the still corners of your mouth.

The flicker of your eyes, shards of ocean jasper pressing into my skin, meet mine and swallow the slight of my smile. In the face of my amusement, your expression splits open and Hattiesburg angel becomes my very own nymph, giggling over that iron bible. Lilibet. The hiss is from your father, the patch of skin at the back of his head blooming into a splenetic fuschia. And I am grinning, my own giggle inescapable as it bursts out of me. “Josephine,” this is the voice of my mother, her horror pale in the face of my utter delight. She looks at me like I remind her of a ghost. She looks at me like I’ve leveled a razor at the edge of her throat. But your father hisses again and I’m looking away from her, looking back toward you and I see the conflict in your face, see the desperation hungry in your eyes. There is a beat where I wonder. Where I wonder if you will collapse into a fit of laughter, defying this trunk of a man with the dark of his roots covering the wan woman beside him, reaching toward the daughter so resplendent before him. But I am remiss.

You wrangle in your emotions, sealing the cracks in the facade. I chanced a look to my left, to my mother frowning, her consternation curling her fingers into her thigh. The beginnings of a murmur steal over your audience, this display of impropriety seeming to have unsettled the congregation. But then you begin to read once more, your voice measured, reverent. And they are so willing to forget, reminded of their faithful daughter, raised alongside the stories of Simon, Paul, Esther. And after, your father resumes his sermon, his eyes boring into the place where you now sit. But you are straight, forward-facing. I do not have to see your face to know you meet the force of his roughened gaze. And at that moment, I begin to worship, too. Just not at his altar.

I will say now it is this that begins the clandestine: a moment in another man’s house where our woman becomes animal; reaches its claws into those feral, hidden bits we keep cloistered near our liver, pressing the sharp of its nail into these pockets, where the heat leaches into our blood. And in the aftermath, you are all there is. You are all there will ever be again. My mother and father slip their hands together, bring me home, but I have already threaded myself into the fabric of your dress. And I knew then it was not god who had stitched our fates together. No man could have written what we would become.

And I still do not remember when a moment shared in a parish became a tangle of tongues, your nails raking over my back, my fingers pressing into your scalp to try to understand you, to make you an unforsaken part of me. But it never quite mattered. We smoothed out the rough edges of each other. You pressed your hands into the places where my mother had taken the sharp of her words and carved out bits of me, took your own skin into the open wounds I’d never patched up. And she was pleased by our newfound friendship. Sure of the influence you would have over me.

“You are fortunate,” mother would say, her hands raw from lye, from threadbare rags she dragged over the wooden table. “That family doesn’t associate with people like us.” The weight there was a keen stone upon an empty chest. People like us. People like my mother and father with the lines of suffering and toil aging their faces decades older. People like my brothers, with dust and ash clinging to the linen of their clothes; my nieces and nephews and their hungry mouths offering no blessing, only reminders of the Chapman name and the prayers unable to save them from their poverty. These were the people like us. These were the people like me.

And yet there was you. It wasn’t understandable to my mother when I carried those threads of my father’s anger, wore my face bare and hard, never lowered the ice-chipped eyes she’d gifted me in her darkened womb. But then you’d never quite seen the same girl she had. You took pleasure peeling tank tops from my body, shimmying me out of my brother’s hand-me-downs. You loved my unruly curls, the way they danced toward my shoulder blades, over the broad of my back. My mother could not have understood such love, not even if she’d been baptized in it.

But we’d been baptized in your father’s fount. Holy water washing over the rind of our gleaming foreheads until it found its way down our throat, a seed of guilt. We’d been idiots. We’d been sixteen. And this was the town of the twister: of a toppled steeple, clasped hands stripped of skin, raw muscle and opened veins, all of us praying to one another. This was the town of the twister. And we were holding some above our heads, like priests, or gods not yet born, gleaming idols with their humanity and avarice to a yawning sky. You were light as a feather. I could not be lifted. I was a stone in the bottom of a river, moss had already begun to take me down.

You knew. You were always smarter than me. You knew what awaited us, had all but chicken scratched the days left into the letters we wrote to one another. “Of course I believe in us,” you’d say, and there was something there I should have seen, the flicker of your eyes away from mine, the clamminess of your palm. But there was the I love you. And I was undone by those three words, undone by your body over mine, I was undone by so little. I talked of escape. I talked about my ring on your finger. “It sounds lovely,” you would say and you would smile, with tears threatening the corners of your eyes.

But when the letters from you I’d stored under my mattress had made their way into my mother’s calloused hands, your I love you had not mattered at all. My mother had realized us in the same way she’d known I was wrong, conceived in rotted soil. The same way she’d done her best to beat her own mother out of me. But she’d known she’d failed with the parchment shaking between her pallid fingers. Her anger ate them, took the words you’d pressed to paper like kisses peppered on skin and mangled them into sacrilege. And it went down the way I did: pulsing capillaries in unfocused eyes, the scent of rot and pine permeating into our suffocating pores, splayed out with our hands at opposite ends of the Earth, the cross of our bodies cradling one another. Our reckoning is without reason, or scripture, blasphemy in the face of Hattiesburg’s beloved.

And mother is dragging me into a chapel, into a pew, her hand a manacle on the thin of my arm. I am begging her, and my skin is flushed and hot, and there is pain from where her rage has steeped into my limbs. I call for god. I call for you. But you were already halfway to Heaven when the storm hit, when mother left like Judas, when I kneeled in front of your father, when angel tears wept and rained against the window pane of my skin. The sky split open with my lip. The clouds swelled with my eye.

No one came when I cried out. Where were you? Why didn’t you hear me? Your father made me recite scripture as he stood over me. Isaiah 3:11. Psalm 58:10. His belt cracked in the air, a whistle before the blow. When it split the skin of my back, I saw the first rupture of lightning. I remember a high keening, the image of my mother staring at me over needlepoint, and the searing heat. Unbearable, spreading from the places I opened to him, blooming forth like your poppy. I do not remember crying out. I do not remember. I do not remember. I kneeled in the warmth. He baptized me in crimson. Again. And again. I do not remember. I do not remember.

I meet god somewhere south of Heaven. It's the spiral of church where you once swayed at your father’s pulpit; it’s the pit of the oil well; it’s a Sunday. god finds me sprawled out, a slain lamb, my blood shed between the ripe musk of pews. he looks like my mother. When he kneels beside me, I do not beg him. I do not believe in forgiveness. There is nothing to be said between us. As his knees caress the floor, there is the plume of sharp oak, of mulberry wine. The smell of him is Hattiesburg. The smell of him is tar swelling in my lungs. And he is granite in the way mother is.

The impenetrable force of his disapproval is thick in my throat, my blood a lump I cannot swallow. It stains his hands when he leans forward to touch the hair that falls over the devastation of my face. he shudders. And though I am laid out here, though I am no more than flesh and the spear of agony, it is an act so unlike god I wonder if it is truly him. But then he speaks. “Why did you do it?” and I know who he means. I know he means you. I want to tell him not to say your name. I want to tell him he can’t touch you. But there is fresh hurt when my teeth shift to form the words and the taste of metal curdles against the piece of muscle in a mouth too thick to speak. I think this is what it is to die: suffering this degradation again. Not by the hands of your father, but by the one who will not grant me absolution. And I wish desperately if this is how it is to be that god was my mother; that she would hold me.

When he shifts closer, he comes more into focus. his features are mother’s, as well: the sharp planes of her face, her eyelashes kissing her cheekbones as something drips down her cheek. “I’m sorry.” My words force themselves out, but they are garbled, rusted over, a nickel lodged between my teeth. I say this to you. I say this to my mother. I say this to the dust slipping towards me on the cement ground, forming fingers, a hazy tendril reaching to brush shut my eyelids.

“Just wait, Josephine,” god is weak. he is breathless. A whine. I am slipping from him, pulling out of his arms, betrayal is stuck in my nostrils, in my chest, choking the air reaching my lungs with its smoke talons. he has forsaken me twice.

When I think I am gone, when I think I have slipped between the folds of quiet, somewhere beyond this church, my mother appears. She is gathering me, hoisting me half into her arms, burdened with my weight, unable to drag me from this ground. I do not know what I’d see if I attempted to open my eyes. But I recognize the hollow of her clavicle like an infant, and she’s saying something. It’s her voice now that reaches me, half sunken into a prayer. I’m sorry.

And it doesn’t matter. There are things that come too late. There are things it does not matter if you repeat, it does not matter if you beat into the skin of my hollowed chest. But I suddenly am desperate to tell her, to let her know, desperate to let it be known.

She needs to know.

“I wish I’d been your son.”

god is quiet. god is always quiet. And then, then, that tone, that dead thing pressed up against the dark bits of me speaks.

 I wish you’d been my daughter.

I am somewhere south of Heaven when the sky swallows half of Hattiesburg. And you are gone, leaving me to be picked up and dropped back down several years later, in a town with a different name, with a cross beat into the back of me. And I do not know how I find my way back again. I do not know why. But somehow, I am here. And it is the same, but so different in a way that age or the passing of time cannot capture. The past has slipped through my hands like water, becoming something I no longer can grasp even on a day where the colors are still bold, where my body moves like liquid instead of a machine I have worn thin. I am no longer sixteen, and I imagine you aren’t, either.

Though this is still the way I remember you: the softness of your hair splayed out on a beaten pillow, a feather against the solid of my body. Perhaps this is the way I will always remember you. We are captured there. Pressing our hands together in the ink of night, letting ourselves be swallowed up whole by my mother’s pupils, the pulpit your father leans into: his face the shade of purple I like you in best. We are sixteen. But this body I own now is not. I shrugged it on like a tattered sweater after they pressed the gavel to my neck, and it hangs too loose now. I think I wasn’t quite ready to grow into it. But there is no illusion of choice with these things.

So I am back to show you what I’ve become, or see what’s become of you. I tell myself this is the only reason I’ve returned. Only for you; slipping letters underneath your windowsill, pressing myself into the siding of your home, becoming the frame. But despite this, I do not wait for you there. I’m in church this Sunday. The ice of stained glass rises behind me like the back of your father’s hand, mottled crimson and deep purples biting into the soft bit of my nape. And the light that dances here illuminates the colors I did not see before: shades of rotting ivy, the blush of a virgin’s cheeks, pale ivory peeking through like freckles.

There is a slick relief to be found, like my mother’s palm on my cheek, grounded only by a damp thigh against these splintered pews, the echoes of a disparate chorus soaking into decaying wood. I am the only parishioner. This is because half of this church’s roof is missing, lost to wind, lost the day I kneeled. Somewhere on the Northside, the other worshippers gather, seams of dresses still intact, hair sprayed into an impenetrable veneer. They do not kneel. Somewhere, my mother is straightening my father, his tie, his shoulders. They will walk the short distance to the newly built chapel, they will hold hands and I will remain: a mile away, among shards of wood and scattered branches. The town does not belong to this church anymore. Not in the way I still do. Not in the way I always will. I look up and I am greeted with the gray expanse of nothing. A mercurial ceiling: heaven’s door. They cannot say the same. They hide from god under fresh oak rafters. They hide from god all the time.

You used to stare at the sky and find pictures there. I look now, but all I see are altostratus clouds. My throat thickens, the back of my eyelids itch. Even now, closer to you than I’ve been in years, the loss of you is a visceral ache. I think to close my eyes. I think to let it slip past me, through me, till the pain becomes someone else’s; some girl with stars in her eyes, a penchant for recklessness, for coveting that which she cannot have. When I open them again, I imagine I am no longer alone. You are there, sitting in the front pew again and the light illuminates your hair: a halo. My heart stutters, catches on the image. Your hand lifts, rakes itself through curls, and gets caught in the frizz. I think you must feel my gaze. I watch the narrow of your shoulders straighten against the wood, the pale blush of your muslin blouse flirting with the edge of the bench. And I am waiting for you to turn and see me, my vision blurring. I am always waiting for you to turn around.

But the scent of decay brings me back to the empty church. The one half torn apart, aching for you in the way I do. Loneliness, something I have grown accustomed to in the time since god took my skeleton from my broken body and gave it to some other, swarms me: locusts to the corpse. I push myself up, unable to be content with my patience. I think about going after you. Back to that house you used to watch me in, over calculus, your sketches, the pink of your lips rich against the tip of a pencil. But I do not. I give you your space. I give you time still.

I am good. I have always been to you. Even in the months where we weren’t quite anything to one another: only a meeting of bodies and flesh, our limbs tangled in the passion of youth, of something unholy. Our abomination wasn’t the sex; the sweat beneath your breasts, my teeth an imprint behind your ear, your fingers dipping into the place my thighs met. Our abomination was the more. The want, not the need. The held hands and lips pressed into chaste, girlish kisses. This was the wrong. We felt it behind the town’s library, in the reeds of Hattiesburg’s only river, on the twin mattress that was too hard for the softness of your body. Wrong. Wrong to cherish something this much, to crave it. To give ourselves over to the taste of heady desire, to grow more familiar with your tongue on my body than my own hands.

I know better now. I should have known, then. All things still end. Even when every part of you felt like a limitless beginning. It was my mistake. My loss. My fingers trace the scars of raised welts on my hand. Some things are better left unresolved. But I am older now, and I have not yet stretched to fit into this new skin and I am growing tired of waiting to be healed. I make my way to the altar, the place where my broken body was offered up: lamb in a lion’s jaws. A smattering of damp leaves lay against it now, and I hoist myself up onto it, my joints aching in protest. I think of what your father would say if he saw me now: a resurrection from the depths of hell.

I think of how it would be to melt into the stone. I think of Mary. I think of mother. And I think of you, but this is not a revelation. My calves lick the edge of the altar, bone to bone. And I wish it had been this body broken instead of the last, I wish it’d been this flesh violated, torn, given away to some other hapless girl to be worn. And I will never forgive. And I wait. I wait. I wait. I wait for you to come. I make my own peace. I spill my own blood. I lie with my back to the bone, my hair nesting beetles, my breasts decaying into rib, into lung, my bones splayed against the altar. And when you finally do arrive, a still angel illuminated against the open chapel doors, halo intact, breathless, whispering my name, I wonder. Have you finally come to save me? Have you? Have you? Have you?