sunday after central invite

 

It is Sunday and the papers are getting thicker, anticipate the holiday rush with commercial inserts.   am limping on my route.I have been using my Journal Star paper bag. On the other side of the street I note that my father is way ahead of me. I hurt.  I should not have run yesterday, I should have taken the race off. Every step I take I am biting my lip.

“Something is not right.”

I limp when I am the Crucifier at Church leading the choir in, alighting the crucifix above my forehead so that it casts a shadow of a lower case t or plus sign across my glasses and on my chin.
I limp when I am going to the bathroom in the community room and Eggplant Elmore habitually stands over me to verify that my urethra is sufficiently juicing.  I limp with my confirmation bible under my arm.

When I get home I can't move. I am welling up tears. I should have taken the day off yesterday and not run in the central Invite.

I am in tears. Exactly two weeks ago I chronicled my fastest time ever.

That night Coach will call my parents. That night I will writhe in pain. That night I will stay in my bedroom with my leg elevated while listening to Depeche Mode. That night was my sister’s carol down the stairs relaying to me in their svelte soprano that I have a phone call I will tell them to take a message.

That night I will bleed from a place I have never bled before. That night I will suffer and supplicate. That night I will refrain from limping down the avenues of West Peoria, collecting from patrons I deliver the world to every morning slipping a tautly optionally rubber banded exclamatory mark of collated ink into their screen door every morning, I will refrain from what I am only now beginning intuit are the rather over and highly sexualized advances of Bob and Frank, I refrain from stopping at the White house that looks like the White house inwardly drooling about the golden hair daughter lavishing inside.

My leg feels like a superfluous appendage made out of lead. It feels like the stem of a rifle adhered to my femur. I grope it with both hands while setting it off the bed.

I should be studying for my Algebra quiz on Monday, knowing that getting an A would all but assure that I don’t get a D for the first grading period

The weekend when the silhouettes of the college girls next door skitter throughout the shadowy rectangle of the window like a yawn performing foreign dances before groping vectors of their body.

 That night the only person I really want to speak with for some inexplicable reason is Dawn.

I bow at the lip of the bed and begin to pray. I tell God that I don’t care about Angelina Lighthouse. That I don’t care about Renae Holiday. That I don’t care about having another opportunity to travel to Paris in the incumbent spring. I barter with God. I promise that I will pray every night. I promise that I will be kind and will tithe 20 percent of my paper route money to his name. I promise that I won’t be obsessed staring into the frame of my window lost in the drape of the college girls next door.

I tell him I don’t care if I get a C in Algebra or in Cool Joe Thomas’s Bio (graphy) class.

I tell him that I will listen to nothing but God pleasing music as to invoke feelings of lust and that I will ferry the green Gideon bible in my right pocket to curtail sins of lust.

I am addressing an inscrutable deity in the male gender. I am reminding him that he raised the dead and healed the lame. I am trying to haggle a bargain of health with a cataclysmic unknown variable.

I am praying harder than I have ever prayed before.

I am asking for the opportunity to serve and further his kingdom with the orchestrations of my limbs. That I might serve as a beacon of his light.

 

“Please, heavenly Father, give me a chance.”

Please.

 When I try to get up the next day for my route I find can’t move.