"Father," the woman says with a blowy way of talking. The wind of the word inflates her cheeks and makes her lips flap flap away. She makes a face as if she were driving a boat. She is driving a boat. But the monstrous propellor behind her lopes in the wind and the sound it makes hardly hearkens to a purr—so that's no excuse! As she waggles her airboat in and out of the fists of mangroves, I'd like to take the time to clarify that her word was not flighty, as some might suppose from the breeze involved in the description. Nor is it bloviating, despite any suffixal similarities to my adjective of choice.

Father is a gusty, decided word when this woman speaks it.

The other man in the airboat, infertile by the way, leans his head back to let the dripping hot sun laminate his brow. It was in the hearing of this word that he realized that he was going to die.

"You never asked why I'm doing this."

The man stays at peace.

For a while the woman does as well. She ducks under a tree which is plump with leaves that look like marjoram but which smell like mud. It feels like a concession now, to explain herself to the mule. She bends down to the control panel of her boat and grabs something next to the throttle, thumbing it and then thumbing it again. What does it matter? What does it matter to make a concession?

"I've been reading this book, Father." She tosses a tattered paperback behind her where it lands dogged beside the priest. The cover is raw and red and punctuated with fluorescent slashes. He doesn't cast judgement on that, though some would say that's what he's paid more-or-less to do, but he doesn't strain to reach for it from the proverbial shelf either. But that's okay, Editor, he's not exactly the target demographic.

She looks back as long as she dares to from the wheel. "Fair enough," she tells the stale air in front of her. "Reading it won't save you. But it made me think." She brushes her hair out her eyes. "Of all the bad people pretending to be good people. People like you, Father." 

"What's the worst thing you've ever done, Father?"

First he doesn't move. Then he sits up and rubs his chin. "Before I was a man, and before I ever came down here, our family lived up in Omahaw..." Having made up his mind, he leans back into his basking position and tells his story to the beetles. The mouth of the waterway opens up a good amount and the woman leans into the throttle, making the wind whip and the motor scream. She can hear him talk as she skims the river, but she can't make out a word of it.

Long after the man's story has ended, the river shrinks once again and the woman tunes her skiff until it slows to the pace of a rowboat. "Then that's what I'm going to kill you for."

She steps from the airboat to a rotted and sunburnt dock, extends a hand to the priest and tells him to come. He stands up without assistance and slides his swaying feet one past the other until some sort of skip finds him also on the dock. He continues past the woman and, with more vigor now, towards the church house. The woman lets her arm drop and smiles. She thinks that he really is a good guy despite that one time out in Omahaw and that she's glad he is, because this could have been a real mess otherwise. And that the principle is the same.

She follows him to the chapel. It seems to be sinking, the chapel. It seems like no body no congregation has used it for years and years and years. Some of the supports like snakes have shed their lead skin and ribbons of curdled cream stream from their splinters. What is it doing here? The chapel seems to be asking the same question and now revolts against the dippy, god-fearing carpenter which set its station. It seems to be actively reaching toward its own erasure, peeling and twisting into the roots of a nearby tree. When the priest enters the front door, shunted open by the way, it is like he is ducking into a cave. Inside, the church is spotlessly white. It is an outstanding testament to whoever pays to have it cleaned. It must take good money to keep a house of worship as spotless as this on what seems to be an island of rot. The priest spins slowly around his arms out at his sides.

Then the inevitable happens, and I don't mean to be crass, but spotless is not one of the adjectives I would choose to describe it as anymore, Reader, no it is not.

The last thing the priest felt was the bullet nicking one of the ribs in his back and for a split he could feel two crumpled projectiles ripping through his body in refracted directions until one of them ran into his heart or something similarly critical and that was that for the priest. Everything after that was felt by somebody else.

Everything is a good word, but nothing would perhaps be more apt. It feels like everything. Father feels as if his body is fighting every known disease, and I suppose even the unknown ones (though how would he know) at once. It feels like he is exploding and exploding in infinite dimensions, each darker than the next. A seed of fear implants itself into his head and he understands it immediately to be true: this is not the stretching pain of maximalism, but the incomprehensibility of absence.

A blur of pure light spills over him like horizontal snow and he begins to cry. "Thank you, Lord. Oh Your Highness, King of all Kings, the Ultimate Truth, Hallelujah! Hallelujah indeed! I lay before you a failure, a hedon and a crook. I have slipped and repented and slipped up again, all for the chance to play in your mercy." He has long since been genuflecting, but now he flips onto his back and rolls around in the light like a child at a fountain. "Had you struck me down, I would have deserved it unreservedly. I confess! I confess! I confess that not a second has gone since I nearly gave up on all salvation! I doubted. I doubted. I doubted. I was filled with nothing. Show me your hand, Lord, lead me from it!" He leaps to his feet and does a happy jig. This is everything he wanted! He throws his arms to their air in praise and spins like a Sufi. Only when a welcomingly familiar dizziness grips his head does he stop. The idea of such a sensation making it through the gates of heaven sends his imagination racing and he wonders lustfully if ginger ales and TV dinners will still taste like they used to in this wondrous kingdom. Aluminum cans and plastic trays dance around his head as he stares into an undulating white.

"Father?" he says with a blowy way of talking.

The white undulates and undulates in reply. Everything falls into wretched place.

First thing he notices when he steps back is that the ground is red. Not even the blistering brew of the devil, but a slick and tempting, liquid loam. He lifts a foot and watches as the ground stretches to him before snapping back with a squelch. When he tests with another foot the floor reacts much the same. His other leg is almost stuck and he begins to panic before he wriggles free. Wait, another leg is sore from the struggle, sweating into the slick of rust. Hold on, another leg flexes behind him. Oh God! Another leg drags and stirs the spill like oil paint. He dislocates his neck to look behind his back and cannot rightly believe when he sees a wing of iridescent foil whizzing over each of his shoulders in turn. His infinite eyes roll in rejection causing his vision to swerve and flash with violence until his vision settles cross-eyed and low, where he can only follow a long proboscis coming from where his mouth used to be and extending to the floor.

"Christ above!" he shouts, the excitement sending him ungainly into the air where he zips for a bit before landing. "I shall use your name as I like from now on, I shall. You're nothing more than an old codger. Never have been! And here I've been, poring over the ravings of a nut. Just for the Buddhists to be right in the afterlife? What a joke that is." He jumps and flutters again, cautiously twisting his body mid-air until he revolves a few degrees, testing his mechanisms. There is some turbulence, and what feels like heartburn and acid-reflux jangles around in his abdomen when he hits the ground. His mouth waters like crazy and he kneads the jam he stands in with his front precepts before dipping his proboscis into the gunk and sucking. 'Hmm,' he thinks. He swallows and his dyspepsia is coated with medicinal stickiness. 'Not bad'.

The fly hops to another splatter further behind where he originally stood. At first it looks like a range of mountains poke through the clouds of white. Rock and soil crumpled in a ball by the buddhas iron fist and dropped as soon as it became tiresome. But then he sees, in the blurry way that he sees now, that the mountains have eyes and pinky fingers and that stupid-looking collar. "This is not good," he says.

He shovels some more of the red stuff into his snout before taking off towards his body of old. 'This stuff is quite good actually,' he thinks as he smacks his lips or whatever.

It's an odd sensation—landing on your face. It's the first time he's ever seen himself with his eyes closed and the first time he's ever seen himself dead. Even in death, he still smells great. Which is a nice touch. He smells like a bakery, or a hamburger. He walks around his face and traces the wrinkles like topography lines with his entire leg. He breaks out in sweats when he climbs up and down his own brow. "This is the lowest of the low," he shakes his fly head, "but what choice have You given me?" Then he digs in.

Pocks start to sprout on the man's nose, above his upper lip, and along his whitening cheek. The same man, though altogether different now, thinks about drawing lines between the bites and creating funny pictures out of them and laughs as best as he can these days. "I'm no better than a kid in a garage band," he hums as he samples some of the flesh from behind the corpse's ear. "I'm no better than an Al Qaeda guy. All that work I put in... look at me now! If the Buddha ever saw me reading Leviticus, he probably thought 'I'd prefer it if you were rolling around in dirt'. What a chump I was for listening to you, God. God! Deep in prayer when I should have been wearing orange towels and sweeping the outdoors. What a rip!"

"You know what this is? This is just downright demeaning. A fella shouldn't—mmh—a fella shouldn't ever have to eat his own nose. You, Buddha, you are one sick man. I've just about—chomp chomp—had enough of this!"

Oh, Reader, it was a right old fit! I must add though, that if anyone were to walk now upon the scene, all they would hear was bzzt bzzt bzzt and so on.