Reprint: In The House of God

I stole candy as a kid and shoved it in, inhaled it and later aspirin and then finally smoke, a long hard cool thirty a day. And I believed that the outside could never touch me on the inside, "Oh my Lord.” Believing that someone would return, that something would be invented. I threw balls against a wall, caught them and watched the gate for that someone with a belief now unfathomable. But this body of mine was there. I housed her as I house myself.

The women tossed between all their sheets and turned their faces to their pillows.

I believe. I cannot lay down quite comfortably with myself, not yet, though from the beginning I've believed. As has my mother Gillian, as has my grandmother Hilda. Brightly colored lives of belief. Belief that someone would return, something would be invented, the truth would come out in the end. We believed. But I couldn't lay down quiet at night in my own skin. It wasn't that kind of belief.

And the women, folding linen all day in hot dark rooms, feeding small pieces of cheese to their caged birds.

The forward linear has seemed eternally to be a source of trouble. All along I have been holding my breath, waiting to turn the page, to get to the page that has the picture, to get to the end of the story. To relieve myself of the inherent wait that comes with plot and exhales into understanding. To let go of a belief in the future.

Standing, unmoving, for hours, considering their mirror image wondering at the importance of a countenance.

At twenty-one, my first massage broke my heart. With her hands inside my back she found a small girl, bouncing a ball at an unused bus slop. Her eyes on a gate. Watching a gate, inoutinoutinout.

Through rivulets of running mascara I was baptized at this time into the faith of my body. She recommended quiet teas and long baths, but my belief kept me from things like that. Kept me from the cold water, the green grass, and the quiet room with the well kept floor. My belief gave me only a long, hard, cool, thirty a day and a tight promise of a return. I danced. I thought dancing would get me faster from one place to the next. I thought I had far to go. I should

have just laid down right then. I could have worshipped my home right then.

The women part the curtains and blink, their eyes watering with the brightness of the sun, small beads of sweat forming in their palms.

You see the floor is so well cared for here and this is crucial. My breath is in me as it was in her. Diaphragm, my life's parachute. Simplicity. I, nothing more than a woman in a room, not watching the door, or the clock, not waiting, even for God. No need to wait with a floor so well cared for and a simply perfect diaphragm.

Slowly removing their gowns I believe. I believe that all I ask for, I need only find in the map of my own body...that on the seventh day there shall be.. ..that in the beginning there was...a small quiet exhale. And in the palm of my hand all the evidence I need of a birth....a small first inhale. I will say, my body is my church and I inhabit the house of god. Say a prayer, please, for the woman wailing at the gate. I believed and I believe but slowly I return from the need.

Letting the birds one by one from their cages, the white, hot house, fingers of the naked women reach for the window latches.