Fiction, Kat de Jesus Chua
I recognize his face from the pamphlets. Simon, the prophet.
The pamphlets were printed on light green paper, praying circle hours listed below his photograph. The coffee shop Sara and I used to go to in college kept them stacked next to the sugar and cream. We used to take a couple of pamphlets to use as scratch paper for our accounting classes, and later, as places to scribble clumsy, blushing compliments to each other.
Simon and I meet at Sara’s funeral.
She is in the ground, and he is making his way to the chapel’s pulpit. There are more people—strangers— in attendance because of him. I weakly resolve to hate him because of this, but really, I am just trying to manufacture thoughts to fill emptiness. In the last four years since college, most everyone in town had heard of his teachings, his cult followers, his alleged miracles. Sara’s aunt, a Tuesdays-after-book club prayer circle member, had probably contacted him to speak.
He began with the tragedy of the hit-and-run: her life cut off too soon, her flame bright nevertheless, present in her art and words left behind. He said that Sara was with the Presence now; he knew this to be true. His words did not strum in me in any particular way.
“Did you know her?” I ask him, afterward, outside the chapel. This was a trick question. Besides the pamphlets, I had never seen him in the flesh before, not on campus, and certainly not in Sara and my parts of town.
“Yes. I read her column in the newspaper,” he says softly, and I hate him less. He wore all white, but different shades— pants just slightly tinged pink, a barely-blue shirt— the result of indiscriminate laundry practices. A wisp of lint clung to his sleeve. This was endearing to me. This was enough.
Simon and I proceed to date for a year. We clear the various thresholds that need passing before friend groups can comingle, parents can be met and charmed, and antagonistic roommate situations can ultimately push two people to rent an apartment together.
Our housewarming dinner party is billed as sedate and adult. We go grocery shopping together, picking up tomatoes, lemons, and just-fatty-enough cuts of meat. We do this silently: Simon manning the cart, me playing the role of claw. We are well-practiced in this ritual of domesticity.
As we turn into the produce aisle, a scarved woman moves towards us, hands reaching out, and Simon removes himself from my side. They exchange signs of peace, and it begins. My daughter … low white blood cell count… I let the horrors echo in my wake as I continue to the bins of strawberries, letting the whir of produce refrigeration overwhelm the careening rise and fall of her voice.
I did not have to listen to know that Simon would commit to visiting her daughter. He would enjoin that good health and ceaseless contentment were only possible by way of spiritual dedication to the Presence… and soon enough, the prayer circles would have a new member. I carry on shopping, gathering the sustenance needed to feed us and our friends tonight, as well as other supplies for the week. Someone needs to feed the prophet.
When we arrive home, Simon collapses on the couch, exhausted from doing the good work. I put the groceries away and feed the fish, effervescent in their tank. They had once been Sara’s and mine: our fish, in our apartment together. We named them Doc, Marty, and the DeLorean— or Lori— because those were the quirky, light-hearted things we did in order to identify ourselves as the quirky, light-hearted people we were.
I begin cooking for our dinner party. I pre-heat the oven, dutifully following instructions from an article that is mostly travel blog. I wash root vegetables I planted in the ground months ago that were meant to feed a lighter person, with a lighter soul. I slice three types of berries into pretty shapes, dip them in sugar, lay them in a pan, and cover their bodies with cake batter. I squeeze the air out of a piping bag and decide I should go home for the holidays.
When the guests arrive, all the food has been magically prepared, the table set, and I am showered, powdered, and presentable. These are the small miracles I make for myself. Simon is freshly shaved and dressed in the white linen shirt I bought him. We still have not looked each other in the eye.
The night before our dinner party, I am reading in bed when Simon approaches. He leans against the doorframe, hesitating, like a doctor with a poor prognosis, head hung low.
“Do you have faith in me?” he asks, and my heart trips and never finds true footing again. “I think you did once, but it’s been a long time.”
I spent time with him in that hotel bar, then that hotel room, after the funeral service. It felt wrong, but I thought him good and deserving, and so that took precedence. There, I had the brief flash of something beyond this world— but the flash dimmed and dimmed— and maybe it was just the hotel. Maybe it was just that day.
“You want someone who worships you,” I say, stalling, aiming to carve spaces into him. He shakes his head, no.
“I want someone who believes in me.”
It was not a fight, in the way a scar is not a wound anymore, but what is left in the aftermath.
I press that I love him, but that is not what he is asking.
I fell in love with him the only way I thought you could love a prophet, safely— not so much for yourself, but to safeguard a precious thing for the masses. He would do great things, and I would be his protector, someone with a purpose… until the tides turned, until the crowds were hospitable enough to his words that he didn’t need me. This, I thought, is what he deserved.
He does not say the unsaid— that it didn’t matter, really, if I was a non-believer, that the Presence would reach me, as it would reach everyone, eventually— but that simply it would be nice, wouldn’t it, to come home to someone who believed in his transmitted divine.
“I love you,” I say again, but it isn’t enough.
“To Angela’s promotion! To Jacob’s move to the great, wild West— ” I exclaim, raising my glass in the air—
“And to life everlasting, after death!” Simon said, and everyone said hear, hear, and only I was frustrated.
Our guests need the water pitcher refilled, so I head to the kitchen, forget to check if more napkins are needed, and so turn back, towards the dining room with our guests, to Simon and the ruins of us— when lightning flashes.
It illuminates the scene, enveloping us all in holy, electric light, and I see the dinner party as a frieze: James, mouth agape, garlic bread suspended, crumbs dotting the space between like a constellation. Becca, eyes apostolic, fork gesturing some fairer point across the abyss of the dining table. Center frame is Simon. His arms are aloft, carving a shard out of the air, somehow lit from within.
Then, there is darkness. Thunder rumbles, and we feel it underfoot, like heavy stones rolling away from ancient tombs. The windows shudder in their frames. The radiator hisses at the disturbance. All of us inhale, brokenly, unsteadily, and without volition. In this fleeting and eternal dark, we fear everything and we hope for more than we think we deserve.
Then… light. And something new, some difference to discern— what is it? It was as if a record skipped and jolted us into some purer sound: full, warm, crackling and true, how the world was meant to be heard. I hear our friends gasp and cheer, raise their cups, awestruck. The water pitcher in my hand is filled now, with rich, red liquid, sloshing.
Simon had turned the water into wine.
I catch Simon’s eyes. They are greener now than they’ve ever been. His eyes say look, see the miracle, landing on me lightly, like the first steps on fresh snow. For a blazing flash of a second, I saw him the way I did back at that hotel room— when he said that she was safe, happy, and warm, and so would I be, when it was time.
I drop his gaze and feel something akin to gates slamming shut. After all, faith after proof is not really faith at all.
I return to the kitchen to continue my hosting tasks. All of it seems so pedestrian after Simon’s miracle, but the steak still needs to be plated and brought out, as do the vegetables and dessert. People cannot subsist on wine alone.
Each footfall away from the dining room feels heavier than the last, the hallway gapping and buckling under some new gravity. From the kitchen, Simon’s words are only echoes, just bells ringing in the dusk.
A devilish blur in my peripheral vision stops me like a heart attack.
The water in the fish tank is a deep, bloody burgundy. Sara’s fish— my fish— are floating— silver, like mercury. I frantically remove them from the tank, hands trembling, cradling each body like a prayer. Wine runs down my arms, dripping onto the white kitchen tile.
The fish slip dream-like into a mixing bowl of fresh water, and then there is nothing left to do. I continue playing hostess, holding the pain in my throat, and check in on the fish every five minutes. They die anyway.
Our guests leave sated and elated by the joy of never-ending life, now confirmed. They stumble down the front steps, hollering into the night, tipsy but sure-footed in their faith.
There is just us now, and our dead. Simon helps me bury the fish bodies in the yard, sealing each mound of dirt with his hands and a prayer. That night, I dream of my poor, drunk fish decomposing, their translucent, lacy bones becoming part of the black earth.
The next morning, spring flowers come up in bunches, tulips of yellow, white, and pink, where mine and Sara’s fish had been buried.
Simon is gone. There are freshly cut tulips in a vase on the dining table, one for each dead fish.
Kat de Jesus Chua (she/her) is a writer hailing from Singapore. Find her flash in Miss and Seen anthology. She currently resides in Chicago.
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