Page 219 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 207

My vocation was absolute surety. A fact. But toward that fact I had
so much to do.
I trembled, head to foot. God was speaking to me. This was a
sign. I would be a priest.
The ceiling revolved, going round and round, spinning faster and
faster around the light fixture. The transcendence was wonderful.
Like the last time, the first mystical time, I ate a stale Easter
egg and threw up all over the shower room. Only this time I didn’t
throw up.
I remembered I had only one mystifying Easter egg left in my
shoe box.
I passed out, halfway, or fell asleep.
Perhaps only minutes, seconds, later, an hour maybe, the door
opened. Rector Karg stood there. I saw him, felt him, two hundred
pounds of him, staring down. I could not move. His enormous chin
protruded out of all proportion. The rest of his face, his eyes, peered
down from behind his chin, like peepers over a huge cliff. The light
burned in his eyes the way it had when he preached his sermon
about self-denial, telling us how one day, years before, a house where
he lived burned to the ground destroying all his books and papers
and dead parents’ pictures. He had offered his loss up to the will of
God. But standing, watching everything burn, he had clenched his
features into an expression of hard resignation and when the fire was
out he could never remember how to unlock his face.
Looking down at me, he seemed to be seeing the fire engines of
hell arriving again and again too late.
He looked immensely funny. I could not care to move. I was
inside the transcendence of egg.
“Why aren’t you in class?”
He put his huge hands on my shoulders and sat me up on the
bed.
“I didn’t feel like going.”
“You didn’t feel like going? Is that a reason or an excuse?”
“I have a headache.”
He yanked me up from the bed.
“Get up. Get your cassock on.”
“Get your hands off me.”

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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