Page 18 - WTP Vol. XI #6

Imago Dei (continued from preceding page) friend, but only as the opposite of enemy.
“Could always switch to plowing...” Allison says, hoping that is the right level of acknowledgement and diffusion. Carly shows her a peace sign, but sticks her tongue out between her extended fingers at the exact moment she opens the heavy bathroom door back to
the gymnasium and licks upward into the air, dropping her hand and smiling as she turns and becomes, again, a Good Christian Girl. Esther laughs, briefly, as though the joke, new to Allison, is already tired. Allison is not sure what Carly is suggesting, but she knows that she should know, and she exhales a sharp little laugh.The door closes. Esther asks Allison if she ate lunch, and Allison fights to remember if she did, but she feels the little burn on her tongue, remembers that—of course—she brought leftover pizza and microwaved it a little longer than she should have, and that she enjoyed the taste of it while watching the boys skip lunch to play basketball.
“Of course, why?” she asks back, as though she does not know.
“Just checking up on you. I worry, you know?”
Of course, Allison does know, and it makes her heart break. She will not be able to protect herself from herself. Allison considers Esther to be her best friend, but she does not know if Esther feels the same, and more importantly, she knows that she is not a good friend. And it’s better that way. Esther will have less to miss if, and when, Allison can no longer tolerate the feeling and seeks relief in the outer dark.
Before leaving the bathroom, the last of the nine girls in their ninth-grade class, Allison lifts the back of her shirt and digs her nails into the trenches beside her spine. She will not have to take off her shirt again for a few days, and she is satisfied to see that there is a little bit of skin under her fingernails. The pain of the scratches against her chair during math class grounds her in the room, but the way that a millstone grinds wheat into flour.
~
Had she been left to her own devices, she would not have come to the front, “closer to the anointing,” she and Esther would joke. She was desperate for things to change, but on the walk toward the altar, Allison had only wondered if she’d remembered to eat breakfast or dinner, or once again eaten only in communion.
As a child, shortly after her baptism, her parents were busy saving some soul after the second Sunday morning church service, and Allison’s stomach was rumbling.
She did not want to wait for whatever lunch her mom would come up with—last minute, never satisfying, as all of their love and attention for the day was poured
out in the two or three hours they spent in service at the building—and remembered that, of course, it had been communion. She could taste the old Welch’s grape juice on the tartar accumulating on her back teeth and feel the crumbs in her molars. She knew there would be more; there were always leftovers at the holy table. Without thinking, she crept into the back room, where coffee was brewed for the giant pots and cookies were transferred from Safeway containers onto glass trays, and saw the gleaming silver circles full of rings of tiny cups of grape juice surrounding saltine crackers lovingly crushed into irregular, bite-sized pieces. She prayed a blessing over herself, and ate.
She took the crumbles by the handful and drank cup after cup of juice, repeating the same old words as though they were a spell, “This is my body, broken for you, this is my blood, poured out for you.”
The first ring of cups left her ravenous, as though her hunger had awakened with the mere taste of food, and she drank and ate even faster. It was when she moved
to the second tray’s crackers that one of the ladies who prepared the communion glasses caught her. She moved swiftly, pinching the muscle between Allison’s shoulder and neck with her strong right hand, her long nails digging into her shoulder.
“Allison! Fo’ shame! You cannot treat the communion like a snack! How dare you!”
Allison was confused. It was Christ’s body, given for her. It was saltine crackers from Safeway. On both counts, it should have been clean. But somehow, eating it alone had made her dirty.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” she said, tears springing to her eyes. She did not want anyone to see her sin.
“Neva let me catch you at this again! Fo shame!” the aunty, one who Allison didn’t know well, released her shoulder, leaving light imprints of her nails on Allison’s church camp tee shirt.
In the car, she asked her parents what happened to communion after communion.
“We usually throw it away, or feed it to the birds. It’s important it doesn’t go to waste.”
“Why can’t we eat more after, then?”
Her father turned around, the red stop light leaving a
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