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I bring a gun to church just to see what Pastor Mike will do.
They say the best way to know your enemy is to see him in a stressful situation. I don’t know who they are, but I think it’s true. Makes sense, anyway.
Remember the story about that daycare supervisor in Albuquerque who had to let go of two employees due to budget cuts, but she couldn’t decide who? Throwing the fire alarm without warning right in the middle of snack time did the trick. Four of her fifteen staff charged outside without a care for the toddlers they left behind. Made the supervisor’s job more difficult in the end — she had to fire four and replace two — but you get the idea.
Fiery trials test our mettle.
But waiting periods are damned inconvenient. You can’t just walk into a gun shop and buy a 9mm semiautomatic and walk out with it cased on your hip. Not in California, anyway. Not legally. The gang bangers, sure, they get a hold of military-grade automatic weapons with armor-piercing rounds, but the average citizen like you and me? Nope, we’ve got to wait two whole weeks, just in case we’re planning a crime of passion. They think we’ll cool off after fourteen days if such is the case.
Not me. I’ve been planning this for a while.
After my mom passed, I kept on going to church. Everybody expected to see me there. Sure, they knew I was going through a rough spot, first year in community college, living alone, working the night shift at the local stop-n-rob gas station to pay the bills. Good thing was Mom had owned the house outright, paid it off when I was a baby, when my dad died and left her a big wad of life insurance. So the bills I paid were your average get-by variety: gas and electric, water, groceries. I always biked to school and to work, so I sold Mom’s Civic and put the three G’s in the bank, figured it might be good to have a little back-up in case of emergencies.
On Sundays, they expect to see me there in the front row on the right side. That’s where our family’s always sat, Mom used to say, all the way back to my great-grandmother.
But it’s just me now. Me and my grudge in this otherwise empty pew.
I watch Pastor Mike give the benediction, and I just about leap to my feet before he’s done. In some small way, I know what convicts feel like on their last day in the pen; that antsy animal urge to flee has been vibrating in me through the whole service today, but it’s stronger than ever now. I’m so close to freedom I can taste it, and I can barely keep it together.
Maybe that’s why things go wrong.
“Gun! He’s got a gun!” The shouts and screams go up like slow-motion firecrackers all around me as I charge the stage.
I’ll tell you what I expected: Pastor Mike throwing his Bible at me and running off scared, or Pastor Mike ducking behind his pulpit and screaming his fool head off. But that’s not what Pastor Mike does.
He meets me head on. Tackles me to the floor. Breaks my lip open with a spurt of blood across his knuckles once, twice, then again, whipping my cheek to the cold floor with his fist.
Too bad he didn’t show that much gumption beating back the ol’ Reaper when it came for Mom.
“What’s wrong with you, boy?” Thirty years my senior, he’s got the right to think of me as a kid.
I grin up at him through the slick coppery mess my mouth’s become. I fight against the hold he has on my arm, easily overcoming it. I’m stronger than he is, and he knows it, and it makes me glad.
Shrieks erupt from the congregation. Men’s shoes storm toward me.
“You don’t want to do this, son.” Pastor Mike grimaces as he struggles against my gun arm. Beads of perspiration sprout from his tanned brow. This close, it’s obvious the man uses a spray to look like he spends his free time in the great outdoors. This close, I could count all the lines on his face if I wanted to.
“You let her die.” My voice bubbles and croaks.
He frowns, then seems to understand me. “It was her time.”
“Now it’s yours.”
There’s no ear-splitting pop or blast from the gun. Just a stupid jet of water that splashes the side of Pastor Mike’s face, his eye, his ear, the parts of him that would have been a bloody mess if I’d had the patience to wait for that 9mm.
He blinks down at me, his knotted shoulders relaxing with relief in the same way his face, all cringing and twisted when he saw me pull the trigger, smoothes out and sags in disbelief.
“Are you out of your damn mind?” he gasps, releasing me and dropping back on the bottom step of the stage, out of place there all sprawled out instead of well-composed like he usually is, just a part of his pulpit.
Well-muscled members of the congregation take hold of me, nearly ripping my arms from their sockets as they haul me up onto my feet and snatch the squirt gun away.
“You didn’t let go of me,” my voice murmurs.
“Get him out of here!” orders one of the deacons. He looks like he’s carrying a pair of tires under his flabby dress shirt.
Pastor Mike stares back at me. “What’s that you say, son?”
He didn’t run away. He didn’t even back off when he saw me pull that trigger.
Maybe he knew he should die, that he deserved to, after letting my mom pass away like she did, all alone with no holy man at her bedside.
Good to know.
A successful dry run. Or wet one, I guess.
Milo James Fowler is a teacher by day and a writer by night. His work has appeared in Cosmos, Daily Science Fiction, and Shimmer. In his spare time, he collects rejection letters.
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21 Responses to “BLESSED BE THE PATIENT • by Milo James Fowler”
Comments
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September 14th, 2012 at 1:46 am
Great story – terse and tense, not a word out of place. I loved the spare, idiomatic style and the ambiguity at the end.
September 14th, 2012 at 3:09 am
Great story! 5 stars.
September 14th, 2012 at 5:03 am
The anecdote about the day care centre didn’t really ring true for me. That aside, a competent, well constructed story. I thought it needed an unambiguous ending, though.
September 14th, 2012 at 6:40 am
Good one, Milo! I love the line about “Me and my grudge in this otherwise empty pew.”
September 14th, 2012 at 6:41 am
Wow, those are wonderful descriptions of the mc’s state of mind, and the idiomatic language is over the top. so smooth that style seems part of the organic whole. The reveal was especially surprising. Now, excuse me while I go read it again.
September 14th, 2012 at 9:03 am
Very thought provoking if you’ve ever
walked that walk !!
4 stars
September 14th, 2012 at 10:34 am
Riveting. I was glued from word one. I loved the daycare analogy as it added some amazing texture to the protag’s thinking.
The “so close to freedom” part didn’t ring entirely true as it turned out to be a practice run. So that seemed more like a set-up for the readers rather than a truth for the protag. But the tension you created was sincerely palpable and so my quibble is minor. The protag’s conflict is so very, very authentic and believable, and that’s what instantly draws a reader in and sticks us to his plight.
Very well done.
September 14th, 2012 at 10:47 am
#7 – my problem with the daycare anecdote was that those employed in this sector are generally there vocationally. Meanwhile, those who aren’t, are still unlikely to leave their charges to burn to death, especially when most fire alarms are false alarms.
September 14th, 2012 at 10:56 am
Fantastic story. Five stars!
September 14th, 2012 at 11:08 am
Excellent. Like most stories EDF posts, it’s about 50% longer than it needs to be, but otherwise solid and engaging.
September 14th, 2012 at 1:09 pm
I’ve come to admire your work, Mr. Fowler. This one is exciting, humorous, and well written. Nice!
September 14th, 2012 at 2:36 pm
#8, valid argument. But I’ve seen a paid supervisor leave a kid in van on a hot day because she was in such a hurry to go to lunch. Negligence isn’t always intentional but I do see your point.
September 14th, 2012 at 2:36 pm
Held my attention from the start. Love the character’s voice. Not quite sure we needed all the financial background—could have given the necessary info in a much shorter paragraph—but that is a minor quibble. Nicely done!
September 14th, 2012 at 3:34 pm
I have to admit I’m not sure I enjoyed it.
Kudos for attacking a topic that is “hot” today – granted I am guessing this was written well before the recent tragedies – but it just didn’t feel right to me.
I think my biggest question was why the guilt was placed on the preacher’s head. Religions of all sorts promise eternal life, but eternal life is life after death, not immortality in this life.
There is a line about the preacher not being there when the mother died, but again, what difference would it have made?
I know people in grief are irrational when assigning blame, but to me, this story opens several questions that are more suited in a drama, yet it is written with witty and almost care free repose in parts.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved a lot of the lines, as a person mentioned above, the line about being alone in the pew was great, but it felt like the wrong tone for what really is a deep story that had the surface just barely scratched the surface.
Just my two cents.
September 14th, 2012 at 4:27 pm
I’m with Tim #14 here, but less generously. I admire Mr. Fowler’s previous stories but found this really unpleasant. To me, the gun turning out to be a water pistol was pointless, because having it could have precipitated injury and death to others or the MC anyway. So that twist felt pointless to me.
September 14th, 2012 at 5:56 pm
Very nice. Original and stirring. While the end felt a bit anticlimactic, it was really only just a bit. All in all, a good read. Four stars.
September 14th, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Exciting and gripping, but agree that the ending didn’t seem altogether too logical.
I love stories where the bad guy wins, and that’s kinda what this felt like, but this guy will never sit in the front row and try again with a real gun, so it was not a dry or wet run… It was a senseless squirting and he’s the one who caught a beat down.
September 15th, 2012 at 11:15 am
Nicely done. This establishes an unreliable narrator who is not TOO unreliable to identify with, and a situation with great relevance today. Tension leads us through the scene, and takes us somewhere important. I’m torn on the ambiguous ending, which resolves the scene, but promises another. As standalone flash, I think a sense of closure would have served the story even better, but it’s a small point against the strength of everything else.
September 16th, 2012 at 9:17 am
Ha! Enjoyed the twist. Doesn’t come across as pointless to me, since the MC figured he’d fail anyway–and he did. But now that he has the jitters out of his system… well, who knows.
September 17th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
A great story, Milo. I think this was a complete flash. The ending does hint towards more action in the future, and that’s how I like my endings, because life really only holds one ending.
I also thought the daycare back story set up reasoning and speculation for your MC, and was a clear stepping stone for the action taken. Actually, what I thought could have used a little more detail was the story about the mother, why Pastor Mike let her die alone, etc. That may have enriched the end, but I rather enjoyed it how it was. You do non-speculative well : )
March 17th, 2013 at 8:19 am
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