Pew

by Catherine Lacey

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. The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass.

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?

I felt this gentle urgency around her, a bruised kindness, as if something had been threatening to destroy her every day of her life and her only defense, somehow, was to remain so torn open.

Perhaps an honest feeling will always find a way to force itself through, an objector crying out in a crowd, hoping someone will hear.

They hear what they want. The more you say, the more they’ll use it against you.

Somehow our bodies wouldn’t hold us back the way they do here. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another.

Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be in this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals? The room was all white and gray and the air was warm and the air hung on me and I hung in this flesh that all those unknown centuries of blood that had brought into being. I had to tend to this flesh as if it were an honest gift, as if it had all been worth it. Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?

I was buried by night. The body is already dead, I thought. I was still smiling. The body is your tomb.

We know we haven’t always been fair to everyone. Certainly—no. But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time.

Why did we think the content of a body meant anything? Why did we draw our conclusions with our bodies when the body is so inconclusive, so mercurial?

But I just want you to know that you really are welcome in our house—you’re welcome there and I really do mean that. I don’t have any problem with you, exactly, and I really do want the best for you and you must know that if we can’t have you stay with us anymore that it isn’t a personal decision—it’s a practical one.

It would simply be a matter of what is best for you. What is decided to be best for you.

The Hindmans have been perfectly nice to me. Or at least they have not been rude.

But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?

When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, then you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest.

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 …

It wasn’t easy, he told me, for him to believe all this, but he also said it was too late for him to not believe it.

Everyone thinks that bad things only happen in a place like Almose County and nothing bad happens here, she said. But they’re wrong. They’re all wrong.

Our new jesus.

I know they mean well, or some of them at least mean well, but they all ought to stop calling themselves something—you know? Religion, yes. Clergy, no. That’s what I say.

Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting.