God's Truth

Some years later the Reverend Lonnie Maalik would find himself again celebrated as a preacher man, and would again deliver the word of god, watching the faces of the damned and the naive look to him with hope of their salvation. He would hold out his arms, little black book gripped tight in his right hand and stare at the blazing sky, screaming about brimstone and hellfire, his eyes shaded by the wide brim of his hat and his nervous congregation looking up and being temporarily blinded. By the time he had reclaimed his power to enthrall an audience and reforged his connection to god it would be hard for him to think back on this time, and he would have told the story so many times in so many carefully chosen untruths that he wouldn’t be able to recall what was real and what was invented. He would comfort himself with the knowledge that god’s truth is not the same as man’s truth, and that it was not his fault he hadn’t been able to save them.

Now, a young man still, face not yet worn by the troubles of the world, yet to be beaten under the endless blaze of the badland sun, he rises to his feet. Heedless of the blood seeping through the knees of his jeans he lets the knife fall to the floor of his chapel. He stumbles, blind, across to the altar and clutches the leather bound booklet that will give him his only comfort in the years to come.

“Praise be our lady, she who is merciful and just,” he mutters. A horrible gurgling noise draws his eyes from the tiny lettering. A hand reaching out to him from the carnage on the floor. The damn bitch just couldn’t let go, could she? He lifts a candlestick from the shrine and kneels down next to her. “Forgive her, for she knows not what she does,” he says, voice even, and his arm rises and falls evenly, once, twice, three times. “May she find mercy in your arms.”

The gilt candlestick, now bent beyond repair, wobbles on the floor, unable to roll away. The Reverend Maalik again rises to his feet. “They were taken in the grasp of a false god, my lady,” he says to the book in his hand. Then he breathes deep, and says the one thing he holds as truth, both god’s and man’s, that he will tell in every version of the tale in years to come: “I wasn’t able to save them.”