Dig

It’s 1:30 p.m. and you’ve been here since 9:00 this morning, sitting first through Sunday School and Worship Service and now penned in with all the other grouchy-hungry kids in the back room of the Foursquare Gospel Church. Your parents are at the altar with the other adults, waiting their turn for the laying on of hands. You wonder who will fall down today—slain in the Spirit or pretending to be—and who will resist. Who will twist their tongues around the words of the Holy Ghost, and who will court Satan with silence.  

You’re peeking inside your purse at the Instamatic camera you won for memorizing the most Bible verses, admiring the black matte plastic against the shiny white vinyl, when Norma Stanley, the parent-chaperone, pulls you into a broom closet, fingers taloned around your arm. Her smoky-wet coffee breath makes a sauna of the tiny room as she spews at you, “You don’t fool me, pretending you’re innocent when you’re just as bad as the rest of them!”  

You don’t know what she’s accusing you of or how bad the rest really are, but you’re only twelve, and she has you nailed.  

You’re scared and single-minded, naive and scheming. You mean at all costs to keep the bad parts of yourself hidden, to pass yourself off as perfect, because even though they say that Jesus forgives what the Father condemns, the real lesson you’ve learned is this: It’s not Jesus whose fingers dig into your arm, not God who spits baffling words into your face.  

You are a spy in the house of God, and Norma can dig and dig, but you won’t give up your secrets.  

What you will do: Let your eyes go wide until they’re so big you could fall out the front of them (you’d rather run). Hold your ground (there’s nowhere to run) and your unholy tongue. Lock eyes with her (try not to see) until suddenly she lets go and you stumble backward, out of the closet. Forget what happened (what happened?) for a long time.    

Later, when you’ve been away for twice as long as you were there and everything that will ever happen to Norma already has, this is what you will think: When she accosted you that day, she wasn’t channeling God. She wasn’t seeing evil in you.  

You were a telegraph, her epitaph, and she saw you escaping, in time, that small town and church. Compared you to her son, who would never win prizes for memorizing Bible verses or presidents or states, would never escape his life or hers, would never even make it out of adolescence alive. And when she let go of you, it was to fall faster into the abyss that was coming, away from the god who saw her cowering at the foot of your future and decided to just leave her there.  

Lorri McDole’s writing has appeared in The Writer, Defenestration, The Offing, Cleaver, Sweet, Eclectica Magazine, and the Brevity Blog, among other places. Her writing has been selected for several anthologies, including Flash Nonfiction Funny and Into Sanity. Her essay “Storms of the Circus World,” which was a finalist for the Talking Writing Prize for Personal Essay, was nominated for a Best of the Net award.  

This essay originally appeared in You: An Anthology of Essays Devoted to the Second Person (Welcome Table Press, 2013).