Simon Peter

I will tell you what I remember from high school, and I will tell you how you can follow in my sinful and lowly footsteps, that your blood might be as holy as mine. 

I remember Coca-Cola sugaring over in June, flies buzzing around the bright red tin chalice. I remember bread molding on the kitchen counter as I knelt before it, my head bowed to the cabinets. I remember heat waves rising off the pond, sizzling upward into the blinding sky, where I spent endless hours imagining those waves falling into the cool, boundless ocean.

My first memory developed late in my childhood, if indeed I was still a child then. It is dishonest to claim that as my first memory. I do have earlier memories, although they are barely memories in comparison to what came after. They are shadows on the wall behind me. When I turn to look at them, they vanish.

This primordial memory, the memory of my birth at age fourteen, is a memory that smells of rubbing alcohol and the warm blankets the doctors put on you while you swim across the white ceiling as the anesthesiologist begins to count down. I was terminally ill. It was pulmonary fibrosis, if that seems like an important detail to you. It is not an important one to me. It is another shadow of that strange, intangible before time cast on the wall.

The next moment, he was there, and the world was a technicolor explosion wrapped inside Solomon’s coat, endless streams of saturated light wiping continuously down the white walls. I do not remember how or why he got there, but I do remember him touching me on the left side of my chest, and my heart bursting wide, wide open so that I could see how red my blood was for the first time, and I remember sobbing in his arms as he stroked my hair and told me that my lungs were new again.

He had a round, brown face and black eyes that stretched inward through the back of his skull and toward some bright watery depth. In that hospital bed, I asked him if he would take me to see the ocean, and he told me that soon the ocean would be all I knew.

Although he refused to respond to the name, I knew that he was Jesus. When I used to write about him, I’d always make the fact of his godhood some grand reveal. I always felt I had to have some extreme justification for how I knew he was Jesus.

It was night when I was driven home from the hospital. I do not remember who drove, but I remember him sitting next to me, unbuckled, spilling his crystal light out of the car windows and onto the road.

He lived next door to me. His house was just a box: flat roof, no front porch, just a door and windows. He had loud siblings. His TV was always on. His backyard was a steep, smooth, grassy hill. Trash was strewn everywhere. Mountains of plastic and tin children' s toys stood high, looking over the random scraps of wood and sheet metal caught frozen rolling down the hill. Telephones and toy shotguns and real shotguns all lay unused in the hot, overgrown grass.

Jesus called it his garden. I have no idea why.

A month after I first met him, long after I had fully regained my strength, I was woken up by a babbling in a deep, bright voice. The voice lit up my room and showered me with gold. I looked to the corner, and there he was, shining radiantly and terribly. But the moment I laid eyes on him, he was silent. I do not remember thinking to question why he was in my room. I closed my eyes again, and the babbling resumed, louder than before.

“Why are you here?” I asked him. He continued to babble - his light burning through my eyelids so that my vision was red. I opened my eyes again, and again he was silent. He looked at me solemnly. I put my head back on my pillow, and he babbled even quicker now, so loud that it rattled my skull.

“Knock it off,” I said. I sat up just so that he would stop, but the moment he was quiet, I was filled with a dark, wet feeling in my lungs.

My room was still brighter than the sun with his light, but he was deadly quiet. “I’m sorry.” I wheezed. “Speak again. I will listen now.” I bowed before him. I waited at his feet all night, but he did not speak again.

The next night, he came to me again, and again, he silently radiated his sinlessness at me, unspeaking, unmoving. I waited with him again, this time kissing them and quietly whispering my apologies.

The third day, he was too bright to look at, and the longer I looked away, the brighter he got.

“SPEAK AGAIN,” I screamed at him over the noise of the quiet light. “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

He was gone. I fell to the ground and lay there coughing all night.  At sunrise, I mustered enough strength to get downstairs, out the front door, and walk next door to his house. There was nobody there. His brother looked up at me quizzically from his X-Box controller

I began going to church every Sunday and prayed to that strange man up on the cross that looked nothing like him. I was baptised. I was confirmed. On the latter occasion, I was sure that as the oil dripped down my face, he would take me in his loving arms just as he had in the hospital. He did not. He was still missing. I was empty.

Walking home from church, I saw the funniest thing: a rooster walking around in Jesus’s trash garden. It looked at me and crowed.

A few nights later, I saw Jesus in that very garden. The toys and fractures of plywood all around him caught the light from the moon and shot it away in a million different directions, only for it to be polluted by the greenish streetlight at the bottom of a hill. Gunfire from his brothers' X-Box cut into the black sky above the forest and above the world.

He looked at me with wild animal eyes. He was not glowing now. His face was blackened, and his clothes were blackened, all with something sticky and thick. The substance rolled down his glistening forehead, and where he wiped it away with a rag, the pearl white cloth came away red.

He grinned at me - a mouthy, faceless grin.

I walked toward him, slowly, slowly. He was unmoving at first, but then I noticed a slight bend in his knees, and as I drew closer to him, he crouched lower to the ground, eyes always locked on mine, same muscly, forceful smile. His darkened, sticky face stank of iron and salt.

He slowly picked up a folded piece of paper from the ground. It was a sealed envelope, and when I opened it, I found, impossibly, my confirmation certificate, complete with the official Vatican insignia at the top. As I looked at it, I heard from Jesus’ chest a shallow wheeze, over and over again like a smashed animal. He was crying.

On long sleepless nights afterward, I comforted myself that I didn’t ask him what was wrong because I thought I was dreaming and that he wasn’t real, but that explanation does not hold up. I might have dreamt those entire four years. I didn’t care what was real in those times.

I do not know why I didn’t try to comfort him.

After that night, the world receded into shadows again. I graduated high school (I don’t know how I know that. I have no memories of my senior year.) I got a job in sales, and eventually married a co-worker who said she loved me. At least, that is how I explain the golden band on my finger. I did not go to church often. I believe I did once or twice when I had stayed awake for 20 hours on a weekend because I couldn’t dream when I slept.

I waited, waited, waited.

I do have a final memory, and unlike my first memory, this one is true to its title. There is nothing, was nothing, will be nothing after this.

I was in the desert, and I had been for some hundreds of years. I did not remember him. I did not remember my own name. I remembered nothing. I knelt in the hot sun. I do not know how many years I had knelt, but I know it was many from the feeling in my knees.

Then I looked up, and he was there, clear and colorful as your brain slamming into the wall of your skull. He extended his hand to me, and I took it, and water welled up through the sand, and there was never anything again.

Hey, if anyone has critical feedback for this story I'd love it; I'm trying to make this one the best it can possibly be.