A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.
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Thursday, sad wet morning, reading the Gospels on my way to work. I’d been doing that all year: waiting for the bus on the front stoop’s top step, making my way to the same back seat, balancing the thermos between my feet, reading through the trip though it was short, so that each day I progressed just a few brief pages. Saint Mark through May, Saint John by August. Dawn, the sun going up over Spring Garden. Dusk, the sun going down. What did I learn? The bus I took one way took me home the other. My belief did not deepen. But Sundays I’d shake the dust from the dog’s rug out the open window overlooking the boulevard, then lie down beside him on the floor. I was trying to live as though someone else was watching.
Grady Chambers