Missing Saint

Originally published in BULL #8 in March 2019

I stretch out on the warped pieces of plywood covering the floor. The walls are shredded Sheetrock, faded floral wallpaper, exposed two-by-fours. Splintered wood, glass, and ash litter the space from wall to wall. Mark slumps in the dark corner with his legs pulled up to his chest, flicking a lighter. The flame stands for nearly a minute, brightening his face, before he presses the hot metal tip into his palm. His skin sizzles. He holds his eyes closed and hums a song.

I gather wood splinters and set my lighter to them. Mark looks at the water stain constellations on the ceiling. I blow on the flame, but it fades and goes out.

Mark and I were born in this house, lived here until he was seven years old, I was three. After our dad died, Uncle Bibby moved in and helped raise us. He taught us to be polite, taught us how to sew, play guitar; also taught us how to throw a punch, fix an engine, load a gun. Without Uncle Bibby, we might have starved or been taken away. It’s been three weeks since Uncle Bibby disappeared and Mark is already thinner. His T-shirt, a gift from Uncle Bibby, and torn jeans hang off him like ragged drapes.

Mark rolls his thumb over his lighter’s wheel, making the sound of grinding teeth. Dirt is packed under his nails, covers his fingers. “Let’s go to my old room,” he says, his greasy hair covering his eyes. I follow him down the hall. The floor sags and groans beneath our slow steps.

The house has been empty since we moved eight years ago and is now a strange temple for anyone who wants to slip between the cracks. It’s mostly the tattered and stained kids with lip and eyebrow piercings, and the scarred, gang-initiated guys from our school who come here to smoke stolen cigarettes, drink warm liquor from plastic bottles, and fuck on discarded scraps of carpet found behind the Big Lots. Witnessing the house’s decomposition is like watching a swarm of bugs slowly devour a piece of meat. Small holes become big holes, pieces of the floor, roof, walls, break apart, soften, and fracture.

A square of sunlight coming through the window shines on a wooden chair in the corner of his room. The chair has no seat and the legs lean at a slight angle. On two of the walls, from floor to ceiling, words have been scrawled in pencil. The lines rise and dip, the letters are different sizes, some are lower case, others randomly capitalized.

“What is this?” I ask. Mark rubs his face. Dirt is packed under his nails and covers his fingers.

“It’s a prayer. I found it in a notebook somebody was hiding here.” Mark bites his lip and glances around the room.

“Prayer?” The word comes out scornful.

“Not like church prayer, but like a, what the fuck is it called, a spell or something. It said the words create a kind of magnet. To bring people back.”

I step toward the wall and touch the word moth, then the word flame.

“When did you do this?”

“I’ve been skipping school the last couple days to come here. I don’t think I can finish it by myself,” Mark says.

I know these words, but have never seen them combined like this. Mark shuffles his feet behind me and lightly touches the top of my shoulder. We stare into each other’s eyes. Mark’s small mouth is turned down at the corners. I look at the floor. I almost say it’s a waste of time, that prayers are bullshit, that it won’t bring Uncle Bibby back, but there’s nothing else we can do right now. We’ve called Uncle Bibby’s friends, gone to the bar where he works, searched through his trailer, and his truck. Found nothing. I’m afraid Uncle Bibby is dead, but I won’t say that because maybe I am wrong. Maybe Unlce Bibby is out there, waiting to be lifted from his feet and carried through the night, over rivers and concrete, through forests, between buildings, back to us.

“Do you have another pencil?” I ask. He shakes his head.
“We can take turns.” His pencil is pocked with teeth marks and worn down to the size of my finger. The point is dull, the eraser rubbed off.

Mark drags the chair across the room and holds the pencil out.

“I don’t want to mess it up,” I say. He thrusts the pencil at me. I take it from him and he sits on the floor, blowing on his palm. I place my left foot on the edge of the chair’s frame. When I try to stand, the chair topples and bangs against my ankle. Mark walks over and picks it up.

“Go slow,” he says. “Use the wall to give you balance.” He holds the chair while I place both my feet on it. I press the tips of my fingers against the wall. The chair legs, barely nailed into place, pop and lean, but I balance at just the right angle and it feels stable enough.

The prayer is one sentence. Seventeen words long. Glancing over at what Mark wrote, I carefully shape each letter. I try to keep my lines straight. I repeat the prayer on the same line until I’m stretching so far the pencil is barely clasped between my fingers, the letters barely legible, then I drop down to a new line and write the words clear and bold.

The muscle between my thumb and first finger starts to cramp. I keep writing. I write faster and say the prayer to myself. At the bottom of the wall, I kneel down to fill in the space near the floor. It feels like a person is standing on my hand, but I finish the last line and drop the pencil.

Mark jumps on the chair, whispering the words to himself. The muscles in his arm flex as he presses into the wall. The chair does not budge underneath him, the words appear on the wall so quickly it’s as though he is not writing them, but revealing them from under a layer of dust. Mark reaches the floor and I start to get up, thinking he’s going to stop and tell me it’s my turn, but he climbs on the chair again and keeps writing. Sweat trickles down my stomach. Mark’s shirt sticks to his back. Outside, the tree tops move in the wind. The painted shut window overlooks the kudzu covered backyard. Bees and dragonflies zoom in and out of the shadows beneath the leaves. No buildings or roads are visible from this window and it feels like we’ve tripped into a dimension all our own.

When it’s my turn our hands touch, mixing the sweat trickling down our arms. A smudge of Mark’s blood is on the pencil. I don’t wipe it off. I hold the pencil tight and let it sink into my skin.

I say the prayer while I write. Mark paces between the door and the window, nodding his head, murmuring the prayer. The scraping of the pencil against the wall is like a whisper, like the wall is reciting the prayer. This is our quiet chant. We glow with heat. A blister on my index finger opens. Puss leaks onto the pencil. We drop blood on the floor and track it throughout the room with sticky steps. We shift our weight from foot to foot while standing on the chair to keep our legs from going numb. When I stop writing for a second the pain in my hand disappears only to return when I start again. We stretch, reach, crouch, bend. The words are repeated so many times they lose their meaning. It feels strange to say them. My mouth is dry. It feels like I’ve run a hundred miles. At one point, I forget what I’m doing and I stand perched on the chair, frozen. The room tilts like I’m on a boat in the middle of the ocean. I press my body against the wall so I don’t collapse. I feel my ribs and the bones in my hand. I keep writing.

The square of sunlight moves around the room, turns orange, fades. Eventually, we stand in the dark, the walls completely covered. Our bodies throb like bruises after a fight.

Mark lights a cigarette he stole from mom. The cold menthol bites my throat.

For days after, the rhythm of the prayer plays like a jingle in my head. I dream that I’m standing on the chair in a field of burning grass. I wake up hours before my alarm with the words pulsing through me. I hope they are moving through Uncle Bibby as well, bringing him back toward us. I imagine him walking through a silver moonlit field that extends forever in the darkness. I imagine him laughing at a joke he hears at a bar. I imagine him sitting alone in a trailer. I imagine him drowned in a muddy river.

One Friday evening, two weeks after we wrote the prayer, we go back to the house. All the debris in the front has been cleared away. The broken pieces of glass are gone from the windows. The scraps of drywall have been pulled down.

“It’s taken me a couple days to get everything ready.” He holds his breath, jaw tight, not letting the tears fall from his eyes.

The door to the room where we’d written the prayer can barely open because of all the moldy pieces of lumber, broken wooden furniture, smashed doors, stacks of ripped cardboard and yellowed newspapers. The ceiling is now covered with the prayer. I guess Mark climbed the heap to write it there. I feel left out, like somehow he thought I couldn’t help him do what needed to be done.

“Why’d you bring all this in here?” I ask, bringing my shirt over my nose.

“Smoke will spread the words further.” Mark throws a piece of two-by-four into the room.

“What if that doesn’t work?” I ask.

“Then this is his funeral.”

He sparks his lighter on a brown wool blanket crammed between two pieces of a broken door. He flicks it and flicks it and flicks it, but the lighter just sparks.

“Look,” I say, pointing out the window. A figure, a bulk of blurred shadow stands among the trees in the kudzu. Mark stops flicking the lighter and stares. My heart punches hard, shakes my whole body.

“Is that him?” I ask.

“It might be,” Mark says, squinting. “It might be.”