Little Hells
You scrub all the checkered, tiled floors of the Catholic school on weekends to pay off suspensions. You take out the garbage while priests smoke on the balcony of the rectory next door. One priest has a porn mustache and a lisp. One priest is an ex-boxer with dementia who practices his golf stroke in the parking lot. One priest has a secret boyfriend named Bruce and steals money from the collections. His face is always flushed. You lie to them in confession. You give them sins you read about in magazines. You chew bubblegum in the confessional. You stick wads below the altar. You stick wads below the pews. Your teeth marks in the bubblegum look like people trapped in a pink hell. They dry, and on the weekends you scrape the little hells away. The lisp priest often cries when he gives his sermons on Sundays. He tells a story about when he was a kid and his friends killed a turtle. How they flipped it on its back and he could have saved it but didn’t. The turtle has something to do with Jesus. His lisps mangle each s; each s a little cross. When mass is done, you sweep and take out the trash. You drop a paper cup. “Get back here and pick this up,” he says. “Get on your knees.” “Over there.” “Scrub.” When you go outside to the dumpster, the ex-boxer is in the parking lot taking swings with his club. He’s practicing without a ball. Still, whenever he swings, he looks off into the distance as if something is going to land.
