Page 4 of Together We Rot

“Wil!”

We’ve gained an audience, but I’m fine with it. The locals have pulled away from their greasy plates, their eyes shifting from the box TV on the wall to the two high schoolers in the far left booth. WWE has nothing on me.

Lucas breathes in one long, shaky breath through his nose and then out his mouth. “Your mom skipping town on you was some messed-up shit, but, c’mon. You use it as a free hall pass to be an asshole. You need to know your place. You walk around this world like you own it.”

Anger twists my ribs into tightly wound knots. I go for the throat. “Then do it. Put me in my place.”

My world drips red.

CHAPTER TWO

ELWOOD

I’ve spent the last sixty minutes praying for a heart attack.

Or a stroke. Or an aneurysm. I’m not picky. All God needs to do is strike me down before my father drags me to the pulpit. The idea of standing in front of anyone—a congregation, a classroom, the mirror, some days—gives me heart palpitations.

But it’s official: God’s not listening.

“Elwood, won’t you come here for a moment?” my father asks, a rare slash of a smile on his face as he beckons me to stand in front of an unblinking crowd. I try to remember how to breathe again, but my lungs have thrown out the owner’s manual and left me gasping.

“Don’t make him repeat himself,” Mom snarls too low for others to hear. I know better than to go against her. Her threats have a way of tallying into scars. She reminds me of a spicebush swallowtail, wings as black as a blooming bruise, edges sharp like a mirror shattered by the weight of a fist.

I grip the back of a pew to steady myself. I’ve not only forgotten how to breathe; I’ve forgotten how to walk. It should be easy, but now it feels like flying with tattered wings.

Nothing will pacify her until I’m up on that stage. “Go.”

And so I do.

The church scrutinizes my every creaking step and tries to fit me into the same cookie-cutter mold as my father—but they fail, no doubt, when they see the two of us side by side. My father, the “Right Hand of God” for seventeen years. Me, the boy who doesn’t know what to do with his own hands. Behind my back? Wrung out in front of me? Definitely, a hundred percent, not in my pockets.

“Elwood’s big day is coming soon,” Father says with a pride I desperately hope is real. I resist the urge to smile. I must look solemn, serious, ready. My father isn’t a butterfly. He’s a praying mantis. If I’m not careful, I might lose my head.

He clamps a frigid hand on my shoulder and I risk a tiny look his way. From a distance, there are some undeniable similarities between us. I’ve grown in his image—wild, woodsy hair; eyes more golden than green, amber spilling in the center. Identical right down to the moles marring our skin. But despite it all, we’re not the same. He’s taller, broader, his personality a knife wrench to the gut. He twists my features in strange ways, making my eyes too harsh, my lips too cruel.

I’ve always pictured God with his face.

“Soon he will come of age and abandon his worldly studies for a more important mission.” He’s talking about my eighteenth birthday. The day I graduate early and life as I know it uproots.

•••

I’m not sure where my parents are shipping me away to, but I know what awaits me: intense scripture study, prayers, and painful devotion. I’m to follow in my father’s footsteps no matter how large they may be. Maybe when I return, I can finally fill them.

Devotees lift their hands to that, their fingers reaching toward the heavens. There are so many familiar faces in the crowd, people who’ve spent their whole lives watching mine. They were there when I was born and they’ll be here when I come back. Mrs.Wallace, an older woman who has been our school receptionist since the dawn of time; one of the PTO moms, Mrs.Clearwater, who stares at me some days like I’m a specimen under glass; Prudence Vrees, the sheriff’s wife, always cradling her blossoming stomach, so large now, she might easily topple over.

The church is the only family I have.

“Our final lesson today revolves around change and the necessary transformations we go through under God’s will.” Satisfied that everyone has properly acknowledged my fate, my father shifts focus. He splays his hands against the pulpit, and for a fleeting moment, beside him, I spy the key swinging from my father’s throat.

I’ve seen him open the tabernacle door with it a million times, watched each and every twist of the lock. As a child, I used to think he kept his heart locked alongside the chalice. But I’ve looked within and while there’s a torn page squirreled inside and perhaps an old cobweb in the corner, there’s no softer part of him he’s kept hidden away.

Before Father can catch me staring at the lock, I avert my eyes and gaze beyond the pews. I study the ceiling, my tongue tripping over the Latin as I hum the words to myself.

Crescimus in Horto Dei, the script reads. We grow in God’s garden. It’s a fitting quote for our church’s name. It’s carved on a wooden slab beyond the doors: The Garden of Adam. It’s nothing commercially produced, no clean lines for your finger to follow. One of our ancestors had whittled the letters freehand with the edge of a knife and the sign has sat there in front ever since.

When my father turns, his eyes swarm across my skin like flies to fresh roadkill. “Elwood, if you will.” With a pointed glance, he beckons for me to retrieve the cage in the corner.

I respond with a shaky nod, and it takes the rest of my body a second longer to catch up. I know exactly where the creature is—Father made me catch it, trap it, sit with it in the back seat the entire ride here. My heart is alive in my chest, no longer trapped within a cocoon but ready to fly away from all the guilt. The creature trusted me. It trusts me now. Run, I’d begged. Run far from here. It hadn’t.

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