Deliver Me: Or How I Believed God Could Bring Me Closer to You, You to God

May 18, 2022
2 min read

by Wendy Oleson

I. A child, decades before I’ve met you, I climb my father’s wing-backed chair to be as close to Heaven as possible when the light passes through the stained-glass circles and breaks over Reverend Mother. She glows. On our TV she sings to Fraulein Maria — nun or governess, I’m not sure which woman I love more — about finding her dream.

In a dream I’m wearing a white t-shirt so large it must be a nightgown. Bloodied and torn, I stretch it over my knees when I see you in the hallway. The door is dark and highly arched, Gothic, like a convent. You see my atheist father behind me, and I realize that although I’m in love with you, I’m a postulant ready to give myself to God. I don’t know whether to introduce you to my father — would the two of you fall in love? — or hide, ashamed of the little I’m wearing.

II. It would be easy to say it begins the night you take me to Verdi’s Requiem. You lean close, whisper about good and evil, then criticize the conductor, to whom you are married. You’re both good Christians.

In my dream your husband wears a pirate’s hat instead of his conductor’s suit. Wood-beamed angles hover over his boat’s immaterial bottom. No treasure. I’ve encountered his vessel while trying to deliver the blood book — its pages reveal your tainted lineage — the cover dark and rough as a scab. When I’m holding the book, the truth of you feels so close I worry I believe in you instead of God.

III. I offer you sacrifices and prayers, but you believe I’m going to Hell. You aren’t concerned about human suffering because Heaven’s the consolation. Dissolve the world in ashes. Dissolve the ashes in your gin. Why does it feel like you’ve promised me something?

IV. The Devil has been with us all along: my longing and your wide jaw, wicked smile. The Devil would crawl down its own castle walls. Like Dracula does. Like you, the Devil would dance, all glorious hips, in its moonlit backyard.

V. It began in the beginning: Hi, kiddo, you said.

VI. You touched my arm.

VII. My blood glows.

Wendy Oleson is the author of two award-winning prose chapbooks. Her flash appears in the Adroit Journal, Fractured Lit, No Contact, SmokeLong Quarterly: Best of the First Ten Years, and elsewhere. She serves as managing editor for Split Lip Magazine and lives in Walla Walla, Washington.