Divine Melancholy

a short story by Kevin Quigley

Say, why not buy me a coffee -> https://account.venmo.com/u/Kevidently

It was a slow, warm, wet October evening when God spoke to me. He said, “I have a job for you.” God ain’t said a word to me since I was a boy in school, and though I begrudged Him His silence, I was willing to listen. I don’t know how long I had sat on that porch, watching the rain beat down from heaven. It might have been hours. Might have been years. There was a blur of dark in me deep and wide, and the last thing I remember truly is the face of a woman, red with fire, threatening to kill me as I did service to the Lord.

God told me there was demons in our midst, and that I had to be His instrument on this earth if I ever wanted a chance at heaven. Well ever since I was a little child, I knew I was meant for great things, but great things just never come my way. “That’s because the demons kept you down, Jeddy,” God said to me and that only made sense. My daddy always said I wasn’t going to amount to a pile of shit. You don’t want to believe it when your own daddy starts talking bitter to you, but you hear it enough and it gets in your bones. I guess I been messed up a lot since I was little.

“Is my Daddy a demon?” I asked God, and I hated to hear the answer because either way it would pain me. But God didn’t give me a definitive yes or no. I guess this was one of those things where God helps those who help themselves. Pushing myself off the chair on the porch where I sit on rainy nights, I found my daddy asleep on the couch like always. There was an episode of Bonanza on and I almost set to wake daddy up and watch it with him, because those times were good times. He’d let me have a sip of his beer if he was in a real good mood, and we’d talk about Adam and Hoss and Little Joe and their problems on the Ponderosa.

But I remembered in time that God had made me His instrument here on earth, so instead I woke Daddy up and he looked around at me like I had two heads. His beard had been growing for three days and a steam of St. Pauli Girl beer hung over him like a cloud of skeeters.

“Good Christ, Jeddy,” says he, “can’t you see I’m taking a nap.”

I said, “God seems to think you are a demon.” Only then did I remember that God never told me how I would dispatch a demon should I find one. Maybe I needed holy water or a pitchfork, and for a second I thought of how good it would feel to raise a pitchfork over my head and ram it through my daddy’s body, pinning him to the couch. It’s not like the couch would mind it, seeing as how it’s been on its last legs for going on a decade. And then the demon that lived inside Daddy would run off, and at last the man would be at peace. Only rarely had I seen my father at peace and I greatly wished to do so. Never in my life had he been peaceful.

One time when I was a boy I knocked a bottle of his whiskey off a shelf when I was reaching for the cookie jar. I knew I was going to have to go into the Shed with him again, but this time he didn’t hosswhip me or push me down and kick me with them boots of his. That was the time he put my hand in a vice and cut the tip of my pinkie finger off with gardening shears. I bled awful and screamed for a long time, but he wrapped my finger in a bandage and told me my lesson was learnt. I guess that was pretty expensive whiskey.

So it was good news really when I found out that he was a demon, because it explained why he was always so cruel. I had for my whole life been blessed with the Lord’s terrible gifts, but when I was a boy I didn’t know how to use them. Sometimes I remembered the face of my mama, and though I didn’t like to remember that, I was thinking of her now. There is a long black space in my memory but she was before that. Daddy wasn’t never scared of me but maybe he should have been. Now I’d woken him up from a doze and that old fear of him locked me in place. What good do God’s gifts do if you forget how to use them? He helps those who help themselves after all, and I was just about to curse myself for a fool when God stole into my thoughts and told me to bless him with the sign of the cross.

I guess I could’ve done it above him like I was performing an exorcism, but with God’s grace in me, I fell to my knees next to the couch and grabbed the back of Daddy’s head with one hand and traced the sign of the cross with my thumb on his forehead.

“What in the ever loving…” he started, looking mad like when he’s about to take me to the Shed, but by then I felt God’s power coursing through me, some deep feeling like a heartbeat in my muscles and bones and skin. The thumb that had crossed his forehead felt for a second like it was on fire, but not a fire that burns. Like something righteous in the face of unholiness. It even looked to be glowing.

Daddy opened his mouth again, probably to holler at me some more, but instead of speaking he spit up a mouth of blood. Then I got my first vision God had ever seen fit to give me: I saw inside my father’s body, like an X-ray machine but so much more powerful. Veins and lungs and bones and everything, all at once. Blood started coming out of kidneys, just leaking into the rest of his body and filling up the empty space. At the same time, those kidneys seemed to be drying up like when you leave a peach out in the sun for a few days. Then the other stuff inside, like his stomach and glands and even his brain, started leaking blood, too, and drying just like the kidneys. Daddy was screaming on the couch now, because he could feel what was happening inside him. I had to remind myself that it was not my real Daddy, but a demon I was casting out for God’s will.

Then blood started to squirt out of the pores in his skin, slicking his arms with long red gloves and painting his face crimson. Instead of screaming now, Daddy could only gurgle, and when what was in his mouth overspilt, it was blood. So much blood.

“I didn’t know a person had that much blood in them,” I said with wonder, standing up by the wall and watching Daddy try to scream as he writhed on the couch. And God’s voice in my head said, “He doesn’t. But he has plenty of water.” And that was right and just so. I even remembered it from my schooling, what little I’d had. We’d learnt that a person’s body is mostly water, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first.

That was when God helped me make a connection I mightn’t have made otherwise, as thinking crosswise has never been my strong suit. Thick rivers of blood were spilling from the couch now, running down to the floor and spreading into thick pools, drenching the threadbare carpet and seeping under the couch. I was going to have to rent a steam cleaner downtown. Daddy was still shrieking under the ocean of blood, and of course that meant he had to be a demon because men can’t live that long after they’ve lost more blood than they should rightly have in them. It hit me then: the plagues, the ones God sent to Egypt. The first one was where God turned all the water into blood, which I always thought was a funny plague, seeing as Jesus turned water and blood into wine later on. But now the plague was working inside my father, or at least inside the demon that had possessed him. All the water in his body was changing into blood, and bodies aren’t meant to handle that much blood.

I watched until long after I heard him stop screaming. It took more time than you’d think. Bonanza ended and The Bionic Woman was on, one of the good ones where Jamie Sommers fights the fembots. But I didn’t dare sit on the couch now. It was too soaked with blood. Eventually the blood stopped and so did my Daddy. He wasn’t moving and so I guessed the demon had left him along with all his blood. God said, “You’ve done well, my son. I knew I gave those abilities to the right man.”

“Will my Daddy live again?” I asked God, and for a long while I did not think he would answer.

But eventually he told me that Daddy wasn’t strong enough to survive a demon leaving his soul, and was the unfortunate side effect of holy work. I tried to feel sad about it, but I didn’t really. Truth be told, I was really more sad about the couch, which I would now have to replace.

“There’s a fallen nun,” God whispered to me as I ruminated about the couch. “She needs to be rescued from the demon that has infected her for so long. You know her of late.”

Her face swum into my recollection, and the pieces fell into place. Her red flesh. The fire, long ago, some place burning to cinders. I didn’t want to face her again. Back before the long black void in my memory, she had tried to murder me. Now I knew why. There were demons everywhere. Sister Helen, now just Helen McReedy, working as a waitress at the diner downtown. When I was little, she haunted all my nightmares. The beatings she gave me in front of the class for not knowing math or how to read great followed me into the night. I used to write with my left hand but she put paid to that. I could still feel the ache in my knuckles most days, and I never could write with my right hand. Things were quiet when I showed up in the parking lot of the diner, because it was full dark out and most people were asleep. The rain still came down steady but I didn’t feel it.

Everyone turned around to look at me when I came in. All their faces were guarded, because there are rumors about me in town. Most men won’t approach me. Women never look directly at me. Some of them may know that I am God’s vessel here on earth, or at least sense it. That scares most folks because they can’t talk to God with the same forthrightness that I can. People get jealous and then afraid, and sometimes they hurt you because of it. I saw Sister Helen before she saw me. She was wearing a red knit sweatshirt and her gray-blond hair was a mess. When she turned she almost dropped the tray she had. I haven’t looked in her eyes since that time at school when she held out that letter opener and told me she would cut my throat if I came closer.

“Get out,” she said now and her voice was like cardboard. One or two guys looked at me and left without paying, just walked off into the rain and dark. I wondered if they were full of demons, too. God would tell me. God knows everything.

“I’m here because God wanted me to talk to you,” I said to her.

“You lie,” she said and when she put her tray down I saw that her arms were covered with liver spots. She got old since we was in school together, since she tried to kill me with that letter opener. “You’re the devil.”

Her boss came out from the back then, a big fat guy with a cleaver in his hand. He was bald but he had big muttonchop sideburns and he told me to leave or there’d be trouble. I said to him, “There’s already trouble. There are demons in this town.” Then I looked at him closer and said, “Ain’t you one? You sure look like one.”

The manager’s eyes lost the hard look and he dropped his cleaver. God’s power was in me again, like it had been in my daddy’s house. Something sharp and strong was running through me and I jumped over the counter lickety-split. I didn’t even know I could jump that high. When I put the sign of the cross on his forehead he started to scream. There was a flystrip hanging over the window between the kitchen and the counter and soon I started to hear the buzzing of those flies’ wings. I could not resurrect my father like Lazarus I supposed, but flies were a different tale. They ripped themselfs off the flystrip with this sound like Velcro coming apart from itself, and flew into the manager’s face. He was still screaming, so they started flying into his mouth too.

Now it was true that there were no more’n a dozen flies on that strip, but maybe they multiply quick when it’s God’s will, because soon they was a swarm around the manager’s head. Some of them was still flying down his throat and up his nose, and some I think were laying eggs in the wet space just under his eyeballs. He was making this awful sound like a blender with a thick cut of meat inside it, trying to upchuck the flies but they kept coming more and more. Soon it was a whole tornado of them and you could hardly even see the guy’s face, but you could see enough to know that the eggs were hatching in his eyes and maggots were squirming and eating what they could find. The last thing I saw was one of his eyes deflating and a mess of gunk dribbling out down his cheek and chin, and he was still trying to scream but I was pretty sure those flies was going to eat him alive. I would have liked to have stayed and watched to make sure God’s plan had worked out to the fullest, but then I heard the chimes above the door tinkle and I saw Helen run out into the night.

The other fellows in the diner were too busy watching the manager to see what was happening on their plates. They’d been eating late-night burgers and chicken sandwiches when I come in, but now all of the meat was getting spoiled, all at once. This guy named Walter Embro I knew from the movie theater in town had his cheeseburger in his hand and then it started to ooze out between the buns. The smell of tallow got thick around him, and also the stench of rot. But it didn’t just ooze. The putrid meat spread out from Walter Embro’s hands and over the plates of the other diners, strings of spoiled meat like animal tendons stretching out to the living flesh of the rest of the people there. Almost like the rot was living. I think it was stupid but aware, and when those strings started to reach out, they were like blind worms seeking nourishment.

The rotting meat liquefied except for those searching tendrils, and when they touched the other diners that’s when they started to scream too. As I watched, a twitching vein of wet, rancid meat wrapped around Walter Embro’s hand, and in an instant the hand started rotting too. The putrescence raced up his arm. The flies had done their job on the manager and swarmed toward the new spoils of dying flesh. That was when Walter Embro looked into my eyes and said, “I ain’t been nothin but kind to you Jedediah. Why ain’t you…” But then he started screaming and the words didn’t make no sense no more. It was true that he was always kind to me, and let me see movies I couldn’t afford because we was poor and Daddy didn’t want to be on the dole. But you had to trust God’s will. If God said there was a demon in someone then you had to believe Him. I ran out the door then and when I looked back, all the diners in there were breaking down like when you leave a chunk of meat out on a hot, damp day. Maggots were blooming like spring flowers, starting to feast on the rotting men before they died exorcising the demons from themselves. I was almost certain that God had waited for tonight to send me on His holy mission because so many of the demons would be all in one place.

But now I had to find Helen because she was a fallen nun and that was the most important maybe. The next time I looked back, the windows of the diner were black with flies and I could hear them, loud and buzzing even on the sidewalk, even over the sound of the rain on concrete with the weeds coming up through the cracks.

She hid from me, Sister Helen, just like once she hid from me in that school. God told me even then to find her, drive her out, she was abomination. Her face had been red because the school was burning around her, and I should have known then that she was only the skin of a woman with a demon living inside. The fire in her eyes came from Hell itself. I never remembered how I escaped her then. There is too much blackness in my memory. Maybe God called me for a time, and then realized I had more important work to do here on Earth. Deep in my memory are the faces of angels, dozens in red robes, mouths open to sing me to glory, all against a dark winter’s sky.

Thunder now ruptured the void above. The streetlights were on and for a moment they flickered. Small houses lined the street I found myself on, all shrouded in shadows because it was the middle of the night and most people was sleeping. Later on, I would go door to door to all the houses that don’t have blood marked on the doors and rustle up the demons and offer God’s terrible mercy. But now I had to find Helen, had to. As a fallen nun, she was not only a demon but a devil. The Devil, maybe, and maybe that is why God was so set on me finding her. When I was only a boy she saw into my soul and saw God’s light and it feared her. Why else would she have beaten me so soundly and so often as the other children in class laughed and called me stupid?

I said as loud as I dared, “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, and the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them in justice.”

There was a noise behind a bush and as I approached, her scream pierced the night like lightning did. I saw her and she tried to run, but the Lord compels, and instead she turned to face me.

“Why didn’t you stay gone?” she shouted at me, and I could hear everything even though the rain pelted down so hard it was like applause of devils from underground.

“I always been right here, Sister Helen,” I told her.

“I haven’t been a Sister since you were last in town,” she said, and I knew she didn’t want to come closer but oh, the Lord is strong, strong.

“Why did you try to kill me?” I asked her, and these were not words that came from God. These were my words, coming out from that blackness in me.

She stopped coming and for a second, she only stopped and looked at me. The rain was slacking and her face was damp and old under the streetlight. She had some of them liver spots on her cheeks too. One of them started moving as I watched, but she didn’t feel it.

“You really don’t remember,” she said, staring at me. The liver spot on her face wasn’t just a blob of brown anymore. Now it was almost like the shadow of an ice cream cone, round on top with a long pointy end. I wanted to watch it change because it was the Lord’s work. Something rapturous, I thought. Then Sister Helen said, “You killed your mother. Doesn’t that at least stick in your head?”

I had to drag my eyes away from the changing shape of the spot on her face. Now four small branches stuck out of it, moving by themselves. “I never killed my mama.”

“Jedediah, I was there. First day of school and you didn’t want to go. When she collapsed, I thought she was epileptic. But that wasn’t it, was it?”

The rain fell off more and now she did come closer. “The locusts, Jedediah. You were only six, but I know you remember the locusts.” Just like that, God opened a window into my memory. My mother, so pretty, flopping on the ground like a fish until the bugs started flying out of her mouth and nose, the opposite of the flies in the diner. Before I was of schooling age, Mama had me kneel in the Shed and study the Bible every day. I guess she made me lean reading just so’s I’d know the words of the Good Book. I knelt for hours in the Shed, and there was blood on the walls that Daddy never cleaned off. Sometimes I think God’s gifts came to me there in the Shed on those days I had to kneel until my bones hurt and I cried in quiet. But sometimes I think I was born with His will in me, and the Bible just showed me how to wield it.

“They tore her face off in the end, Jed,” she reminded me. “As Father Andrew and Father Saul tried to exorcise her, the locusts burst her face open. Do you remember that? For too long we thought your mother had been possessed. But it was you all along, wasn’t it? I should have killed you then. I have asked for God’s forgiveness daily for not killing you then.”

“Only a demon would murder a child,” I said.

“You were no more a child than I was. How old are you? Are you ancient?”

We heard the next sound together. A hailstone the size of a golf ball fell from the sky. It made a cracking sound when it hit the cement, like the sound of a person’s skull when they have a seizure in front of a Catholic school.

I said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

“So now you’re Jesus?” she asked. “Tell me, Jesus, what part of the gospels told you to give every child in class lice? That was when I really knew. Everyone but you. Did you know that Margaret Obishon died? Died of lice. They burrowed into her brain. Ernest O’Leary is still in a coma. Don’t you feel any remorse?”

“God lives in me, Sister Helen. He told me I had to cast demons out. If Margaret Obishon died in service to God, then she is at peace now.”

“Fuck you!” Sister Helen screamed at me, and two more hailstones came down by us. “You should have stayed in that coma. I should have killed you when you were small.”

I got up close to her and looked her in the eye. The mystery of the dark void in me was out in the open now. Maybe that was why God wanted me to exorcise Sister Helen the most. Because the demon in her put me in a coma when I was just a boy, and that meant my holy mission had to wait till I woke up. Maybe I was Lazarus, not Daddy. Maybe God was just waiting until He knew I could finish my business before he resurrected me.

The dark spot on Sister Helen’s face changed again, and now I knew what it was. It was a little funny because it was Sister Helen who had told the whole class all about metamorphosis. The Bible teaches us about flesh and blood becoming bread and wine, and about how God made Adam from dust, but it was Sister Helen who showed us tadpoles for the first time. “They change, like when caterpillars become butterflies,” she said all those years ago. “They become frogs.”

The shadow on her face quit moving. I don’t think she felt it. Before I could say anything more, she shot her hands out and squeezed them around my neck. Now I remembered she did this before, after the fire in the school. Had I seen the demon in her then? I think so. What did she see in me? God’s light shining on through? Something else? Could it be something else?

That day when I was very small she tried to choke me to death. But she was weaker now and I was a lot stronger. Her thumbs poked into my Adam’s apple, but those thumbs belonged to an old woman whose inner demon had retreated. Then the dark spot on her face bulged out, then when you push a stick inside a dead woodchuck to make it look like it’s breathing. She felt it then, and let go of my neck. More hail fell from the sky, and Sister Helen’s eyes were wet. Then, the bulge on her cheek pulsed again, like it was breathing on its own. She screamed then, her first scream. Over the sound of the hail falling down, I heard something rip, a low sound like pulling apart old denim. It was her skin, tearing itself off her face in a wet lump. Blood gushed out of the hole it left. But it wasn’t just a lump of flesh, anyone could see that. The thing fell to her shoulder in the shape of a frog, made of her own skin and the meat from inside her mouth. It writhed there, a mute thing that shouldn’t live, maybe wanting to die. Its blind eyes, built out of the lumpy pink muscle inside her cheek, swelled up like tiny balloons. When it tried to hop, its misshapen pink legs wouldn’t hold it. It opened its mouth and its tongue rolled out, like a child’s idea of a flycatcher. Then it fell from Helen’s shoulders to the cement, still twitching on the ground, a thing born into pain.

And still Helen screamed. I could see her teeth and tongue through her cheek but I could not look away. If I was gonna turn into a pillar of salt, so be it. Hail battered her head, her face, and while I was watching, the age spots on her arms started moving, too. Frogs yanked themselves away from her body, made of her flesh and blood. They were haunted, horrible things, small but shaking with the fury of hell within. One had eyes of bone, amd it crawled from out from the top of her shirt. It still had that long tadpole tail, like it was in such a hurry to get out of her that it didn’t bother finishing its change. When it reached her neck, it fell backward and splatted onto the cement. It was the only one I could hear, the only one that made any sound. It was shrieking. Quiet but shrieking all the same. I might have stepped on it but the hail fell harder and squashed it in the street. Its guts exploded and soon it was just Sister Helen’s skin and muscle and bits of her collarbone instead of that insane frog.

Now she reached out for me like a beggar woman, blood streaking her hands. Most of her face was gone. Mutant frogs clung to her body. Leeches did that in the summer when you swim in a lake sometimes. She was a skull talking to me. Frogs were forming from the last bits of flesh and veins and soon they would come out of the bone itself. They would be like porcelain figures, trying to scream. I could have told them that being born into the world is a torment you must bear, and that soon enough, the meek shall inherit the earth.

“You don’t know God,” Sister Helen croaked. “The devil is lying to you, don’t you know that?”

“I was sent here to kill demons,” I said to her. It didn’t bother me to watch her disintegrate. If she was against me, she was against God.

And besides, she used to hit me like my daddy done. Before she knew what I could do. She hit me in class and everyone laughed. Some of them kids growed up and had their own kids. The sins of the parent are the sins of the child. I was taught that long ago.

Sister Helen took a long time to die and I was glad. I liked watching it. She fell to her knees, maybe in supplication, before me. She wanted God to love her again. God didn’t want to love her back. She fell face-first into the cement, and a score of frogs jumped out of the back of her head. Clumps of hair grew out of their bodies like hellish tumors. They died quick.

When she was still, I looked up at all those houses through the hail. There were kids in there, firstborns. If I was going to carry out God’s plan, I would have to visit all of those houses. Later tonight, I would have to go back to my daddy’s place and reckon with the idea that I was a firstborn, too. Something would have to be done then, something I didn’t like. Maybe The Bionic Woman would still be on when I did what I had to do, and then I could go to my reward letting God know I did my job best.

In my head, Sister Helen said, The Devil is lying to you. For a little while, I stood on the sidewalk and thought about that. I thought long and hard and soon I got to feeling sad. Then I smelled incense in the air, good smoke in my nose that reminded me of church mornings. I didn’t smell brimstone under the incense. I was almost sure of that. God’s light was in me and letting me do what I was born to do.

I found the front door to the first house unlocked. When I came in, a baby in a back room started crying. I smiled. It was going to be a long night, I say hallelujah.