I think about how we would dig up our paper hallelujahs on Easter, how we freed this word from underground, like we were harvesting joy.

I think about quitting my job.

I light another cigarette. I think about what else we bury until the day someone tells us we’re allowed to dig it up.

The highway is now tinged purple with the fading light.

I pass another billboard. It says, “Only JESUS can save you from sin!” There is a number on this one. I dial 844- FIND TRUTH and am surprised when a woman’s voice answers and says, “It’s a wonderful day to live in the way of the Lord.”

My breath catches on the stale air, thick with smoke. I roll down the window and let the wind beat into my ears.

“My name is Pam,” the woman says. “How can I help you?”

I hang up the phone and turn up the radio, which is now just static. The dotted white lines on the road blur together into one. I don’t feel my eyes close, but I feel them snap open.

I start to hear a Christian Rock song leak through the static, and I catch fuzzy broken phrases and the half-words of worship of a nasal male voice.

I think about how in Christian Rock songs, the singer just sounds like they want to fuck God. Breathe your life into me, I can feel you.

I think about Jesus’s bronze chiseled body on the crucifix at my church in my hometown, hung brazenly behind the altar. I think about that crucifix for a while.

The voice on the radio keeps going. I’m falling, falling.

I think about the time ten years ago when my best friend Kat turned to me and said, “Why are these Christian Rock songs always so goddamn sexual?”

She was sitting cross-legged on the red carpet in her living room. “Breathe your life into me, I can feel you,” Kat said, grabbing my arm. I think about how when I laughed, Kat shushed me. “Breathe your life into me,” she whispered as her face drew closer to mine, eyes big and pleading. I still need you. I think about how Kat’s mouth opened wide when she laughed, her teeth and lips stained purple by what was in those days the blood of Christ, Sutter Home Cabernet.

I cough and blink through the cloud of cigarette smoke clinging to me in the car. I think about my freshman year in college, when I got two helix piercings in my left ear for twenty dollars in someone’s basement. I think about how when I went back home with those new piercings, swollen red with infection, my mother stopped me in the doorway, put her hand over my ear and, in the name of Christ, told the devil to vacate my ear holes.

I think about the nerve of my mother, to think that someone as powerful as the devil would listen to her when her own daughter did things like get helix piercings in other people’s basements.

I think about how the devil seems to be pretty comfortable in my body. It’s been eight years and the top of my left ear still pricks with pain, as if he doesn’t want me to forget about him in there. I think about whether I mind him staying or not.

After an hour of listening to static leaky with tinny music, I re-dial 844-FIND TRUTH. The same voice, bright with customer service, answers.

“Do you believe in God?” I ask.

“Only when the Patriots win,” Pam answers after a pause.

I ask Pam if she is supposed to say that and she says, “probably not.”

I think about how when I was nine years old, I would fall asleep praying the rosary every night. The beads would sometimes slip between the crack of my bed against the wall as I drifted off between an Our Father and a Hail Mary. That year I got a new rosary for Christmas, one made of dust pink pearls. I wore the pearls down as they passed between my thumb and forefinger night after night. Hail mary full of grace… hail mary full of grace.. hail mary full of grace…

My heart beat would slow.

Make me good… make me good… make me good…

“You on drugs?” Pam asks. “Most of the people who call are either on drugs – or should be.” “Not right now,” I said, “but I want to be,” I add, sensing that she doesn’t believe me.

“And why is that?”

“Well, you see – I’m almost at my mother’s house.”

I tell Pam about how my mother will probably perform an exorcism on the new stud in my nose, already puckered and sore. I had gotten it the day before, right before the piercing shop was about to close. I had found myself arguing with the shop owners trying to get them to squeeze me in, as if it was a matter of life and death that I get this piercing before leaving.

“Well, how big is your nose? If he gets good square footage he may refuse eviction.”

I laugh. “Well, it’s not exactly a button, I can tell you that. It’s my dad’s nose, apparently.”

“Ah well. The devil was probably in there long before that piercing of yours, I imagine. Men do tend to leave some devil behind them, whether they mean to or not.”
I don’t remember telling Pam that my father had left.

I change the subject and tell her about Kat, about how when Kat and I were altar servers together at the church across our street, the only two Catholic girls who went to the public school. We would smoke cigarettes in our cheap, pearl white cotton vestments and leave the butts in the porcelain outstretched hand of the Virgin Mary statue in the church courtyard. We returned our vestments to the church closet sprinkled with ash, with the waist ropes undone after we had whipped them at each other. In the summer we would dip our bare toes in the holy water at the statue’s feet, re-baptizing ourselves from the bottom up.

Pam laughs at that, which doesn’t surprise me, even though she probably should’ve scolded me for blasphemy or for defiling holy objects or something like that.
“And where is Kat now?” Pam asks.

I pause.

Breathe your life into me

When I say, “why do you work this call line anyway?” it comes out as an accusation.

Pam responds that she needs something to keep her off her feet for a while, until her broken leg heals and she can get back to her job at the construction site. She has a husband and has been trying to have a kid for ten years.

“Hell, if God gives me a kid, maybe then I’ll believe in him.”

The initial candy coating of her Customer Service Voice has melted off, revealing a rough hewn drawl underneath. When I ask where she’s calling from she says, “Heaven, of course. The heaven between Subway and Jenny Craig, right off of I-85.”

I hang up when I turn into my mother’s neighborhood. When I pass the grotesque inflatable bunny in Mr. and Mrs. Arnold’s yard I think about Easter at my mother’s house again. I think about eyelet laced socks and white patent Mary Janes stained reddish brown with dirt from the baseball field behind our house, the field where the Easter egg hunt was held after church. I think about the dress that I wore but had protested against. It was pale pink, streaked with reddish brown after Tommy Patterson elbowed me down between second and third base as he pursued the egg on home plate. I think about how maybe I should’ve gone after the eggs hidden from plain sight, like the ones under the benches in the dugout, but the dark, dusty dugout filled with spider webs had scared me back then. I think about the bitter, metallic taste of dirt, how its grit mixed with the soft sunbaked jelly beans in my mouth, washed down with lemonade in paper Dixie cups.

“How many calls have you gotten today?”

I was sitting on the bench inside of the dugout on the baseball field. Upon my arrival, my mother had promptly stopped me in the doorway and prayed for the devil to vacate the brand new stud in my nose, then sent me to the baseball field to hide the eggs for tomorrow’s hunt. I placed one under the bench in the dugout, sat down, and kicked an empty soda can in the dust for a while before re-dialing 844- FIND TRUTH.

“Just some boys who’ve been pranking the line lately,” Pam answers. “Sometimes they call and just hang up.” She pauses, suppressing her irritation. “I hope they find salvation in Jesus.”

“Are you supposed to say that?”

“Probably. You know, even then sometimes it’s just nice to know that someone else is on the line.”

While Pam continues on about her calls from that day, I think about my first confession in a church. I can’t remember what exactly I confessed to, though, really, what can an eight year old confess to? Not finishing my broccoli, spilling glitter on the carpet? Or maybe I preemptively confessed to my mother’s murder, which I had been plotting at the time. Or maybe I just hoped the priest could remove the indelible stain I had been born with, the one in the lower left corner of my soul.

The sun had almost set, but I could still make out the fire ant mounds that pockmarked the outfield. I interrupt Pam to ask her why she thinks God created fire ants. It seemed as though the regular ants helped the soil out or whatever they did just fine, so I could never figure out the need to pump some full of venom. It seemed as though fire ants served no purpose other than to aggravate the humans that had the misfortune of stepping on their homes.

Pam says by way of an answer, “Well, God created useless creatures that serve no purpose but to aggravate, like fire ants, and, similarly, also created my ex-husband. Even He can’t help but let some things slip through the cracks I suppose.”

I tell Pam about how one of our Sunday school teachers taught the ten commandments very literally, and included “all of God’s creatures”- “yes even your sister’s hamster, Michael”- under the umbrella of Thou Shalt Not Kill.

I think about that Easter that Tommy Patterson had elbowed me down directly into a fire ant hill on the baseball field, and how my mother scolded me when she saw the bright pink stings covering my legs. I hadn’t tried to kill them. I had laid on the ground, all God’s creatures, all God’s creatures repeating over and over in my mind as I watched their red bodies crawl up my shins, as I fought the urge to end their little lives.

I had the same thought many years later when Tommy Patterson took me behind that dugout after a date that had turned out to be a dare. All God’s creatures, all God’s creatures, all God’s creatures played in my mind when his hand reached my thigh. All God’s creatures played like a broken record after he whispered, “I always knew you weren’t such a good girl.”

I think about that night, how I drove so fast down my street that I didn’t see Kat’s deaf bulldog Mingus waddle out from her driveway. She loved that useless lump of a dog more than anything. I think about the sharp bump that I felt from inside the car, how I kept driving anyway, how I wiped the blood off of the front of my mother’s sedan the next morning. I think about how I never spoke to Kat again, how I looked away from her red, puffy face at school, how I wiped myself off of the internet after seeing the puppy photos of Mingus that she posted online.

I become aware of Pam’s silence on the line, and I realize that I’ve been thinking these thoughts out loud. I quickly hang up and try to ignore the heartbeat in my ears. I had never spoken about that night to anyone.

I walk back towards my house but keep walking past it, ending up at the house five doors down. It looks the same as ours, except the lawn runs more wild and the mailbox tilts slightly to the right, never able to stand exactly straight since Kat had “tapped” it with her car in high school.

Kat answers the door. She looks the same as she did ten years ago, but her face is softer in some places, sharper in others, and is unable to hide her surprise. She invites me inside after a quick “oh!” followed by, to my relief, a smile.

The dark red carpet and teak cabinets are the same, and I am overwhelmed with the unidentifiable, unmistakable scent of my childhood. I find myself wanting to tell Pam about it, to ask her if installing red carpeting counts as a sin.

I’m falling, falling faster.

Kat pours Sutter Home Cabernet into two tall plastic cups.

“If I knew you were coming I would’ve dug out the fine China,” Kat says.

We talk about our respective good enough jobs and no good bosses, our voices too bright and halting as they try to paint over years of silence.

“At least you got out of here though. At least you’re somewhere,” she says.

I still need you

I reach for my cigarettes and as the room melts into itself I realize that we had finished our second bottle of wine.

I look at the Charles Mingus in Concert poster framed above her dad’s old record player. I float on the wine red carpet that’s now a sea of blood. Kat says something.

Her laugh again rings like church bells out of her purple-teethed open mouth. My nose fills with smoke, the cigarette I’d forgotten I had lit.

Breathe your life into me, I can feel you

“I missed you,” Kat says, but Kat is no longer Kat. Her voice is deeper, slowed into a drawl. Kat is Pam, sitting next to me on the carpet. Pam who holds my confessions inside of her, whose very phone number promised the truth.

“I missed you too,” I say.

The fluorescent light in Kat’s living room casts its holy glow, flickering ever so slightly. The Glade plugged in the corner diffuses lavender that mingles with the clouds of cigarette smoke, the incense hanging in the air as if from a thurible swung back and forth.

I lie down and Kat who is now Kat again lies next to me. I picture fire ants crawling up from the soft ground and covering us like a fiery blanket, consuming the sacrament of our venom-blessed bodies together as one. My phone starts ringing, the bright tones echoing off of the inside of my skull, and I knew who was calling even though the screen flashes with “No Caller ID”.

I can feel you

Here was Pam, here she was to finally save me.