Popcorn Church?
by Lanascopic
A preacher in a tiny Pentecostal temple way down south call’s his congregation to get in line. Gripping his microphone, he comes down the steps, arms outstretched, like the Son of God. Until this moment, random members of the congregation have each been either stomping, singing, humming, clapping, or hollering out in praise, so it hasn’t been silent for more than a few seconds here or there. But now that all stops.
This is the voice of their shepherd, their friend, and their teacher. It’s soothing so I’m almost listening.
Behind him is a band who seem like they were created out of thin air just for this hour and will vanish from the world afterwards. They don’t look at anything but their sheet music and rustling fingers on their hodgepodge of instruments. It’s almost like they’re holograms.
Since I don’t feel the vibes of this music, it’s almost like it, too, is a hologram, or whatever you might call music that’s sounds like it’s present inside your ears while falling mute on your inspiration. But who can ignore its strange impression regardless?
I’m not here quite by choice so in preserving my indifference I keep my distance. I have declined to dress to fit in among these strangers, who heed the pastor’s summoning of the members who want to give their hearts to God. They are responding to this ongoing series of invoking questions and encrypted cautions, so form a jumbled line. How many go up? All of them, as if no one wants to be the odd man out.
I’m content to be the black sheep, hanging back here, looking farther back, at the abandoned pews. There are purses, bibles, left behind, Flat dress shoes. A stuffed giraffe. The room now feels lopsided, and I’m not in place, though not exposed; all attention’s aimed the other way.
I glance at the pastor and a woman then look around at the construction details of this building, barely listening to them. She met him by the steps and isn’t old, this mother to a pre-teen. She reveals out loud that she has demons: A husband, children, and poverty.
Soon, rising voices demand my attention. I turn to watch her with the preacher, now standing at the center of a susurrant flock. The two are squalling, chiding, wailing, louder than the others. It almost seems her hair turns woolen right before her shepherd. Voices rise still higher, mostly his. On his widened stance his sunstone grip gently underpins her nape. His other hand abruptly tightens like a shackle on her forehead; he intends to perform an invasive procedure on her immortal soul.
She consents to this, closed eyes, palms up.
Her arms erupt with shakes like they’re smoldering in a great angelic flambeau, one which burns away the stains of darkness like some satisfying cleanse. These moments pass slowly in her torture. Then, each folded against her bosom, her arms capsize relieved in the River of Life as if to reveal her brightened, purified palms, which she holds out in front as holy offerings waiting for the inspection. Her tongue, once tainted by soap or worse, screams over the voice of the hostage lodged within her shadow on the floor— perhaps a captive seized from an old memory. She screams again, “By the blood of Jesus!”
But there remains a nasty blemish in her soul. The healer of her spirit knows how to doctor her disease. So, his strong hands grip her scalp more firmly. With his eyes squeezed shut in reverence for his Great I Am he proceeds. Trembling her skull, disheveling her modest bun, the man commands as if enraged by the offense, “Satan! Get thee behind me in the name of Jesus! Take your hands off this child of God!”
I step back cautiously from the intensity of this raucous scene, perplexed, and my identity is drifting like I can’t find the solid ground. The other members gather close to lay their hands on her. Their many voices spring like nets wherein they link together, and spring like coiled barbed wire snares forbidding Beelzebub to trespass, and their lips crack like battle whips in bible code. They are defending God’s abode. Of one mind like earthen spirits, each extends an arm toward heaven, and it trembles, stretches high from all their minds and souls, which appear eerily united. Now, they are ignited, burn like coal, all rattling together like one speeding locomotive blocking demon traffic in the path of Hurricane Katrina.
The jowls of some drip tears because they groan for mercy. Others are laughing in the spirit, overwhelmed and jittery. One or two are lying face down on the steps and weeping gracefully with no discernable sound, as though they long to be alone with God.
The clattering woman, now sunken nearly to the floor, is drawn to her feet by the pastor’s grasp. He is not finished with her demon, so resumes with two secure grips on the crown of her being. She sees his eyes shut so closes her own— she’s at his mercy. She howls— like she’s in labor on a tightrope above the brimstone pits of hell and must dance with him while both her ankles are bound together over sparks. His face is sweaty, ears all pink, sleeves rolled up, vest ruffled. The face of the Man of God squirms around his sturdy features— as if his foot is in the swamp though resists his fear of what he’s stirring because the child within her spirit must be saved, and he’ll take an alligator to the leg for it. Then fish that reptile with his leg. Then throw the alligator at the demon. If he must, he will— he is ready.
I hear shards of liquid glass sparking round his lips and chin, for stern language presses through his gasping. I swear I feel him blasting shredded iron out; by chance, I’m standing near its long trajectory, so it vaguely pelts my tensing brows. I overlook that; I don’t run with Lucifer just ‘cause I am unchurched. It’s not even directed at me anyway, he’s condemning the wicked who bring others down, not timid, underprivileged girls. I hope.
On twisted flanks with bouncing knees, hunched over beneath his reach, gaining rocket power, he shudders upward, fits in every limb, the fight of faith mounted on his heaving chest, and it looks like he might kill a beast with those two hands.
When she grabs hold of his outstretched arms the two of them look antler-locked somehow. Violently he shakes the woman by the head while she yells through a face of tightened folds, “Yes Lord! Oh, hall-e-lu-jah.” The great spirit code cracks through her howling like an apparition risen through the fractures in a geographic tongue, one which utters unlearned speech. This gives me chills, and I’m absorbed in watching her enunciate her mystery gush.
She seems enlarged, like Earth and Heaven, her voice bursting and overstepping her repeated embouchures in motion. Ain’t no proper child of God who don’t speak in un-tongued tongues, I’d heard.
She’s like an elephant which trumpets, ever esoteric though bizarre and not so fat. I might have wanted popcorn had I thought of that. I was engaged in this suspense to see the slaying of the beast and listen to the words no human ear deciphers. My own eyes might have been on display in this Circus of the South for being so enlarged that their sockets dilated.
The preacher man and all his roars press on in heavy, smoky air. He’s caged inside the ring with demon spawn unseen, unmatched in strength, and confident he goes the distance riled-and-reddened like the clays of Adams that are sweating through his mortal pores. Thunder-raptured, shrouded deep inside of God’s cognition, diligent, accountable, glorious, and maddened, the man appeals to Him, the Judge, when through teeth and lips and spit and nostrils-flexed the man proclaims, “This is a child of God. Not! Of! Satan! Victory is mine, saith the Lord! Behold my sword of righteousness!”
She endures along this trail of curiosities.
Her form, its folds and valleys vexed, sway beneath the matted cotton drape of her longish, modest, whitish dress. Her hair looks disrespected, strands and strings displaced. Her face is soaking wet in tears that I can’t understand. I wonder if she’s suffering, spiraled round and round, and round the crossroads in her unrelenting bones.
Discordant are the mingling strikes right outside my two tense ears. As the music rumbles through the little House of God I can barely see the massive cross high on the wall behind the whole commotion.
At last, the preacher bends his elbows to draw the woman close, their eyelids down. With one last command unto he who tempts and kills and steals, to the devil who destroys, the preacher man shoves the lady back.
Rapidly that disoriented woman stumbles, fainting backwards, gasping as her beloved ones, like weeping angels, catch her in their arms. An eager, praiseful member takes her trusting place within the ring, submission pressing all her bones this one yields unto the heavy Hand of God weighed down upon her forehead, like a shackle.
My oldish mother is nearby, herself uncertain. They don’t know the look, her brow too high, her lips deflated, and yet she guides her arms to lift their reaching fingers to the pouring rain that isn’t there. I swear her hair looks stringy, like she’s been in the shower, and then her blue-eyed stare skims right past me with its wrinkled lids wide open.
Mother is dressed exactly like the rest of them, and they’ve said all are sinners. I can’t imagine her confessing to that, since she’s a saint, or so she’d said. Why are we really here, I wonder. Mother needed friends. And she needed a guarantee: And she needed it from someone in the field because she had not time to teach herself, perhaps? I didn’t know nor had I considered why until today.
Of course, what else should infiltrate my mother’s home days later but plain divine women wearing flowing skirts and unrevealing shirts that choke the throat, praying supernatural prayers. One shakes a tambourine. They are blessing me like mystics in the living room’s cool, humming air, using paranormal olive oil— some dear and blessed menopausal mother’s-friend has crossed it onto my forehead, and this marking will become like the trail of some holy slug undug which will try to eat my brains out and escape the aftermath that it will lay unto my spirit. After it has laid its opalescent eggs.
God bless her friends. But all eyes are on me. On me? I’ve been overlooked most of my life, a mere baby of the family without a voice. When did I get so important? I’m just a libra on the couch, but cool. Just let me wear my make-up. They barely did, I barely obeyed, and Mother barely dragged me to that temple.
But barely is enough. This stuff is potent, side-effects aside.
I was more gullible than most, perhaps. Soon, I was twisted by religion, bedazzled by illusion, terrified of demons, accosted by reality, running scared toward monsters, bent by consequences, accused of heading hell-ward, tied into a blameful knot, dipped and bound in tar-of-guilt, cocooned without my confidence, chased by the unfair roots of true identity.
I stumbled straight through the dangerous gears of these machines only to escape so mauled into the open continent that it was as if I was never really born. Try to undo that.
I'm still trying, though I wonder how trashed I am, can I still think, or is every ponderance that I produce a product of my roots' illusion?
God wake me up. Sometimes all I think about is popcorn with a twist of meat. That gets soggy fast, so I can't linger on for days in search of truth. I may have a drink, a think, a cigarette, or just pretend that girl was never born.
But I was born. So, now what?
