Faith and Guts

I don’t know what it was about you. You weren’t the prettiest girl I’d known. Perhaps it was your compactness, the way you seemed to carry a whole other world inside your body. Though how you could cut out a flounder’s guts, scrape its scales, and chop its head off in seconds was what first made me notice you. And those pictures on the walls of your apartment, all those photographs of black and white movie stars long dead. I still don’t know what makes someone want to watch silent films, to revel in a past without sound. You had a mystery and I was determined to find it. I know you thought I was shallow, that the two of us wouldn’t work, but I disagreed. I felt that if I could cup your face in my hand, turn your head at just the right angle, show your eye the light, you’d agree.

It was Friday night and we had the weekend to ourselves. Like even the most faithless of atheists, you called God’s name on Saturday afternoon. It disappointed me, but the green, viscous gob you spat in my eye that night upheld my original feelings. Which is why it shocked me on Sunday to find your eyes glassy already, the choir in the church across the street belting out the first hymn of the day, windows open for the summer morning to let everyone hear.