Pew

by Catherine Lacey

The reason churches have so many doors is that people tend to enter and leave churches in groups, in a hurry.

What I mean is a church is a structure with walls and a roof and pretty windows that make it so you can’t see outside. They’re like casinos in that way, or shopping malls or those big drugstores with all the aisles, music piped in from somewhere, the endless search for that final thing.

It seems that people who belong to a large church might want that church—so vast, so many rooms—to do the believing for them, but the church is just a building.

Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?

What a terror a body must live through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.

At least I know a little about what it’s like to stay silent. I don’t know much, but I know at least that one thing.

It seemed she’d been hurt very badly and was surviving it in a way I was only beginning to be able to recognize.

You have to ask yourself whether it’s something you’re doing or something that’s being done to you, from the inside, from something else.

Sea lo que sea, pase lo que pase, puedes contarme. Recuerda eso.

My whole family was killed in the name of God and now these people want me to sing a hymn like it was all some kind of misunderstanding. Must have been some other guy.

Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?

There’s all sorts of things a person can’t know till it’s too late.

And she says something about how we all need to be welcoming to you, and anyway that you and me must have a lot in common. And I say, Because we’re both brown?

People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reins for cruelty …

And what was it that made you think that Pew needed to be examined?

Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.

I don’t know how it is I can sometimes see all these things in people—see these silent things in people—and though it has been helpful, I think, at times, so often it feels like an affliction, to see through those masks meant to protect a person’s wants and unmet needs. People wear those masks for a reason, like river dams and jar lids have a reason.

He said he couldn’t see the difference between himself and the lion.

he said—Ma, they’ve got eyes like anyone else. So I told him what I know, which is that a lion’s eyes are much bigger than a little boy’s eyes, that they’re not like his eyes at all, but he wasn’t having it. He started listing off all the other animals at the zoo—ones he hadn’t even seen—and saying how they weren’t any different from him either and he was just so sure about it. It was causing him pain, this idea, it was clearly upsetting him, all those animals locked up,

Maize found out from her sister they found the kid sleeping in their church and they take it upon themselves to be the saviors, to take the kid in and try to figure something out on their own—don’t even alert child services or nothing, which I know because I know some people who work over there and I looked in on it—then they give up once it gets too complicated, that is, when half of them start saying maybe the kid’s not white or not white enough and then what happens, huh?

It takes something, you know, it takes something from you to take care of another person and there’s only so much a person has to give.

Nobody’s mother should ever not be there, but my mother told me all mothers eventually are not there. I can’t understand it. I don’t even want to.

the older you get, the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.

Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting.