LISA THORNTON: The man with the brown suit says I’ll have to see it

Flash Fiction by Lisa Thornton

 Saved

The boy with the red hair holds your hand under the water at the hotel pool. His mother brings baked goods to all the youth group events. His younger brother and sister are around here somewhere. He’ll call you on the phone later, once you all get home from this trip to New Orleans for some kind of youth group convention and sing Bohemian Rhapsody to you in his basement bedroom. It will be the first time anyone has ever sung you Bohemian Rhapsody, so you won’t mind. His hair, in the hotel pool, is wet so the curls are tighter to his head than usual. His body in his swim trunks looks older than yours somehow even though it is a boy body and yours is a girl body. You don’t imagine boy bodies your age looking like his even though he is only three years older than you they are big years, all the high school years. He is as old as your sister and the five or six red curls on his chest prove it. 

When you get back, right around when he calls you from his basement, you will feel so filled with the Holy Spirit that you walk down to the front of the sanctuary at the end of one of the sermons. Walk down right in front where everyone can see you which means that you are ready, that you have accepted Jesus as your personal lord and savior. A few weeks later you will show up on a Sunday morning with a change of clothes and a blow dryer in a plastic bag so you can rejoin your family after the pastor puts one of his hands over your mouth with a cloth folded in it and another on the small of your back and you think this must be what it feels like to die, to be killed by a stranger in the park with a hand over your mouth and he tips you backwards under the water in this pool that is usually hidden behind the choir bleachers but today is open and uncovered like your neighbors’ hot tub on the weekends. 

The boy’s mother smiles at you as you return to your pew with freshly dried hair. It was the Holy Spirit that made you feel warm all over in New Orleans. Not her son. Not the five or six curly hairs on his chest. Not the date he took you on last week when you told him you couldn’t ride roller coasters because they made you throw up, but he didn’t believe you and you got sick right there at the county fair in front of everyone and he picked you up with those arms with those muscles and carried you like a princess to his car. 

Walk the Line

The man with the brown suit says I’ll have to see it. I’ll have to read it every week as he hands you a small bound journal in the hallway by the reception book. Near the windows in the front that overlook the parking lot. In the hallway with the tile floor unlike the carpeted upstairs with the rooms for Sunday school classes where you sit in a circle of folding chairs with your friends. His shoes are the same style of men’s dress shoes that Johnny Cash wore on that variety show he hosted in the 1960s or 70s, the one your grandfather liked to watch reruns of when you and your sister spent the night at his house. They are flat and long and made of shiny leather. Johnny Cash’s must have been black, but the man’s are brown. The lapels on his suit jacket are also brown and big like the sails on pirate ships. He bends toward you. 

You had wondered at times what deacons did beyond seating families in pews on Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings and sometimes Wednesday evenings. You’ve never spoken to this man before. Is he also checking the homework of the other people dunked on your day? The lady from the third pew who didn’t return to the congregation afterwards maybe because it would take more than a quick blow dry to get her hair to look that soft curly way it does on Sundays or maybe because she was overcome with the reality of her new life in Christ and spent the rest of the service sitting in an upholstered armchair in the rectory staring at that picture of Jesus, the one where He is gazing off to the side of the frame and Himself has soft, wavy brown locks?

You can’t get up the next Sunday. The journal has questions and blank lines following those questions where you are to write your answers. Questions about your feelings before and after being dunked in the pool and the differences between those feelings. Your intentions now that your life is going in a different direction since you pledged your soul to God’s Son to eschew sinning to adore Him and fly right. Your legs are iron trees in your bed. 

You hide behind a fern at the intersection of the tile hallway and the one leading to the nursery on Wednesday evening when you see those brown shoes. When you hear them approaching. You join a club that meets on Sundays. You have so much more work to do for school. You stay up too late the night before. You can’t see those brown shoes. You can’t hear them on the tile click clicking. Your life is still yours. 

The Old Rugged Cross

is your favorite. The worn place on the pew where the red fabric stops and is punched into the wood with some kind of very old nail feels soft on the palms of your hands as you rise per the pastor’s request. The rumpled sound of all of you standing at once travels through the air of the sanctuary like a flock of sparrows released finally. Knees creaking. Joints popping. Babies whimpering. 

You stuff the donation envelope you and your sister have been playing that game on, the one where you draw dots in a matrix and then connect those dots one at a time and whoever makes the most four-sided boxes out of the dots wins, you stuff that into the little shelf on the back of the pew in front of you and put the pencil in its carved hole. It’s the short kind of pencil with no eraser only half tall the same as at the mini golf course with the windmill and the waterfall. 

You pick up the blue fabric covered hymnal and turn to page 220. All the voices are slow to begin but warm up by the chorus. The hairs on your arms stand at attention like the rest of you. It is the same tickle you will feel years later at the Paul Simon show, the Broncos game, the Flaming Lips concert when Wayne Coyne floats through the audience in a clear plastic bubble under a starry sky and you will wonder has the Holy Spirit followed you all this way or is it the power of music is it all of you worshiping together, holding up the lead singer of the Flaming Lips the way you once held up Mrs. Adams from nearby Fithian who came all this way to kneel at our altar or the little Jones kid who turned in a prayer request for his sister to pass her final exams. 

Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has work in SmokeLong Quarterly, JMWW Journal, Bath Flash, Pithead Chapel and other literary magazines. She won the WestWord Prize in the flash fiction category in 2023. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net anthology and can be found on Twitter/X @thorntonforreal. She lives south of Chicago with her husband and son. 

Flash Boulevard is edited by Francine Witte. Banner photograph Wes Candela.