Now

Brother Jack, the Father, speaks from a pulpit as crooked as the Tower of Babel.

“And the Parable of Saint Joe and his Devils goes like this: once she lived as a murder of crows or more like a row of pulpless teeth. You’ve known the type, my children: the keening of electricity from a generator, or a telephone pole, or maybe even a satellite. The kind of keening you hear from a trident of ichor between heaven and hell, but you turn the other way because it’s not for you to defrock His mysteries. When she rubs her optical nerves against the rough iron rotting, o my children, she rubs them and she – this devil – says it’s so good to be in love with that kind of swarming.

“She’s been made a madman of sound, this devil. She churns around and around and she spitrattles: can you stand the cutbreath so heavy from these damned trees? She, the devil, just one of many devils, says: someone has to love the ugly things, and I am a calf’s liver, I am a black mass on a ripe organ.

“When Saint Joe comes around he’s dead as can be: all, that means everyone, turn their palms inside out and bleed catechism on his white wet feet. Saint Joe rips the ribbon of his tongue out of the thick blossom of his mouth and he screams REPENT but it’s spelled like undress me, it’s spelled like a paper cut on God’s eyelid. A devil of many devils goes tongue-wagging and the devil to her right warns her: suck it back up, suck it back in, who knows what will stick to that flypaper in your mouth? 

“MERCY cries Saint Joe and the devils pitch their bodies forward like hot cement’s on the soles of their feet, like the smell of asphalt or burning black tar in the bed of a spoon. The devil to the left starts shivering like a lost eyelash on a sticky breath. The devil to the front says ACETONE and the devil behind them opens up their colon and pours the sacrament in stiff peaks like Zarathustra’s mountain.

“The devils are hopping on one foot, the devils are speaking in the tongue of tongues. Saint Joe rips a snake out of the top of one of their heads, out of the small of one of their backs, out of the dips of some of their hips. 

“Saint Joe asks, SISTER, DO YOU KNOW THE PRICE OF LOVE and the devil is choking on rattler-tails but the question’s rhetorical anyway, because he’s pulling the crosses out of her red feathered eyes with her domino pupils. Saint Joe answers: TOO COSTLY FOR THE DEVIL! EVERYONE KNOWS THE DEVIL’S BROKE!

“The devils are crying and Saint Joe is laughing through a shepherd’s crook for a mouth. The devil to his back keeps pleading: someone’s got to love the ugly things.”

*

When Brother Jack, the Father finishes his parable his congregation removes their red cotton blindfolds from their eyes. They always wear the red blindfolds for Brother Jack’s parables, because it helps them listen better. He tells them that to truly see one has to pluck out their eyes so that sight doesn’t interfere with vision, but too many blind (and eyeless) followers is bad for business so just covering the eyes works well enough for now.

“Nine times the day and night which measures mortal time,” Brother Jack says, “what is dark in me, illumine.”

“Illumine what is dark,” they respond, folding their blindfolds neatly and placing them in their pockets for safekeeping. 

Brother Jack’s ten apostles, divided as they were between his Supernal Council and Stygian Council, flank him from either side. They remove his crimson chasuble unceremoniously – he insists upon this, a gesture of humility before the congregation – and he bends over, himself, to brush the dirt from the pointed toe of his black snakeskin boots. 

He walks toward the center of the makeshift stage where an old, spendthrift wooden chair rests. He sits down slowly, deliberately. The congregation forms a singlefile line that weaves, ophidian, through the red tent and its assemblage of chairs. Brother Jack, the Father, nods at his apostles. 

These apostles approach the congregants and instruct them, in reverent whispers, as to what the congregants are to do next. The air within the tent smells of damascus roses blushing with a fist-clenching heat that arrives from nowhere in particular. The heat seems to swell up within the quivering bodies; the heat tastes like tarry, pitched ardor. The congregants begin to cry, one at a time, though none of them are able to articulate why, exactly, they are so overcome. If you asked them why they weep, they would say that standing before Brother Jack, his black haired combed back in a mock pompadour, the flash of his many signet rings capturing the pooling gold light within the tent, they feel immaculate, incalculable, utterly sublime joy.

The Devil is broke, but he gives his love away for free.

__________

Sasha Ravitch consults, presents and teaches on, and writes fiction, theory, and creative non-fiction about the (posthumanist and otherwise) gothic imagination, quiddity vs haecceity, and monster theory. With a forthcoming manuscript with Revelore Press, she’s published by Strange Horizons, Cosmic Horror Monthly, ergot., Bloodletter Magazine, Cursed Morsels Press, Infested Publishing, and more. She attended Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity’s Science Fiction Writer’s Residency, is the EIC for antilogos press, and is completing her Masters in Writing degree at Sarah Lawrence College, where she’s genre editor for the MFA’s literary journal, Lumina. She’s a member of Codex Writers and the Horror Writers Association, and a reader for Bloodletter Magazine. Her current academic research specialty is tracing what she refers to as the “eschatological gothic” in the Berlin, NYC, and London post-punk and no-wave scene, and reading creative subcultural figureheads and fashion as literary text. She lives in NYC with her spouse, her many biological children (stuffed animals), and a very committed Dungeons & Dragons party.