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Darcey Steinke

Jesus Saves

For my brothers

David and Jonathan

But to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is nourished for a time and times and half a time from the face of the serpent.

REVELATION 12:14

One: GINGER

Oh she was high as they flew nowhere in particular in Ted's white Ford with the harelip fender. Her dirty blonde hair whipped around her face. A single strand caught on her tongue as she sucked the sweet pot smoke. Her lungs tightened and she coughed a little, ran one finger down her cheekbone and set the taut hair free, then pressed the joint into the ashtray. Tears swamped her vision and the car swelled gently around her. The light changed from red to a textured leaflike green, as if life itself gestated behind the curve of glass. It was a sign for her to levitate off the seat, slip out the window and fly up, like a piece of paper caught in a whirlwind, high over this place until the houses looked like strings of Christmas lights and the mall a Middle Eastern mecca.

Ted turned his head from the road and grinned. He liked watching pot wing her back into a kid philosopher, when she spent whole days lying on her bed figuring how the earth got here, or wondering if raindrops could be souls falling from the gutters of heaven.

Beside the highway on a treeless hill, between Gold's Gym and the black glass Allstate building, was her father's new church. Ted said the cross on top of the pie-shaped building looked like a satellite fallen from the sky. Her dad's car was parked near the trash Dumpsters, overflowing now with altar flowers, limp gladiola and brown carnations. He was writing tomorrow's sermon, pen poised on the yellow legal pad, willing an angel to guide his hand across the page.

He'd scribble for a while, then look up at the bronze bust of Martin Luther. Sip cold coffee. When she was little he'd write about her funny questions. “Was Santa God's brother?” “Was heaven on the moon?” Now he'd decided she'd fallen out of God's favor, he never actually said it, but she could tell in the way he always spoke to her in his church voice, the same officious tone he used with the trustees and the ladies’ guild.

Ted turned onto Brandy Lane, dipped beneath the underpass. Cool air rushed in the window and the car tugged out of the dark into a stretch of scrubby pine, a trampled, trash-filled forest, but still charming to her in its familiarity. Her house was in the subdivision just beyond the trees and she'd played in these woods as a child, knew the spot where bloodleaf grew near a dogwood tree and the mossy niche in a covey of rocks where you could keep dry in the rain.

She put her hand over Teds’ crotch, felt his rubbery cock tighten. That's what she was after, the dumb thrust of life, like the films on PBS that showed a seed sprouting, peeking through the dirt and lifting itself up. A tiny wet spot bled through the denim — that first pearl of come. She smiled slyly at him and he rolled his eyes in a way that meant You're too much. From this side his profile was normal; you couldn't see where the flesh had been torn away or any hint of the thick keloid scar.