Little Death Born Again
The whole congregation, apart from a few noobs recruited at last night’s street-preach, knows the story of Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet with her tears. How on bended knee she wiped them clean with those hot locks of hers. Pastor Bob lingers on their perfumed, ropey coils. Intoxicating. A sinner’s hair, he calls it. Unveiled too. A real Jezebel that Mary, flaunting her mane before our Lord and Savior. A few of Phil’s new sisters, sitting en masse on the left side of Koinonia Christian Fellowship’s windowless sanctuary, tuck wayward fringes into off-white head coverings. Her mom pulls on Phil’s sleeve and gives her a look like maybe it’s time she starts covering hers too. Phil, whose long curls catch auburn in the light, thinks the Bible is not specific on Mary’s hair color, but Pastor Bob knows it was harlot red. And Pastor Bob is tight with God. God tells him all kinds of stuff the Bible is not clear on. The conduct, for example, of young women in whom God and Pastor Bob seem especially interested.
To inherit the earth, assume a meek and nodding posture. Speak, like children, mostly when spoken to. Courtship, not dating, supervised by an Elder like himself. No unsanctioned attachments. For Phil, this probably means giving up Juan, her boyfriend of three hundred and seventy-one days. Most importantly, says Pastor Bob, submit to and preserve the Headship: as God’s of Christ, so Christ’s of man, and man’s of wife. Headship being sacred. Natural. The way things are.
From the pulpit, Pastor Bob storms on about Mary Magdalene’s humility. He struts across the stage; stops mid-stride; knits bushy brows together; wipes the sweat of revelation from them with a starched hankie; and launches an etymology lesson. Etymology, like the Magdalene, a favorite pastime of his. Phil reckons it makes him feel scholarly.
“From Latin humilis, low to the ground—humus.”
Phil hears hummus, and her stomach creaks like a bow on catgut. She skipped breakfast to get here on time. To please her mom who loves the pastor more than Phil does. Besides, they were out of cereal again, and the half bagel left in the fridge was rock hard.
Now, all three Pastor Bobs, one onstage and two flanking him on colossal monitors like two arms of a cross, repeat the words humus and humility three times in quivering crescendo. “Unclean and brazen, yet behold the Magdalene literally—” He swoops down, as if to prostrate himself without quite touching the humus or dais, in this case, “—and figuratively—” He reaches palms heavenward. “—humbled before our Lord. Hallelujah! Humility is woman’s purest nature. The Lord rewards her submission with forgiveness.” Pastor Bob presses palms over his heart in prayer and pauses again. Waiting.
A rotund believer, checked dress shirt half-untucked so that Phil recoils from a glimpse of shaggy underbelly, shouts, “Amen!” On cue, Phil’s sisters in the Lord lift their arms in the air. Swaying. A modest hallelujah on a few lips. Phil’s stomach rocks again, more from unease than hunger. The shouting, the failed attempt to mask coarseness with ill-fitting Sunday manners, reminds her of another man. One she and her mother had fled.
Leaving Mary Magdalene low to the ground, Pastor Bob zooms in on Jesus’s dust-and-dirt-cracked feet. Calluses worn thickly into the web of his toes by crude leather straps. Toenails split from miles of Judean desert traversed. Pastor Bob has a real thing for Jesus’s feet and Mary down there at them. “And what did she do, my brethren? She put the lips that had served Satan himself, to our Lord and Savior’s feet and—praise the Lord!—she kissed them. And Jesus said unto the woman, your sins are forgiven. Go in peace.” A rowdy chorus of Amens and Praise be to Jesus punctuates the gap between Bob’s Broadway-holy hands.
Phil imagines Pastor Bob’s feet inside his shiny black Florsheims. Sweating through tissue-thin dress socks. Bloated. A little waxen. Yes, o God, their coffin pallor. She draws a quick, disgusted breath. Bob’s corpse feet. Feet she could never kiss.
Guilt like a tractor beam sucks her gaze from his feet up the full imposing length of him landing on his face, and when his eyes lock on to her hers, Phil knows that today will not be the day she receives the gift of the Holy Spirit. Today, because she cannot humble herself before Pastor Bob and his foot fetish, Phil will remain monolingual. When the others begin to babble in secret tongues, she will have to bow her head and listen only. Her poor mom.
Three months ago, Phil and her mom had been safely Roman Catholic. She had enjoyed absolution for sins both committed and made up. Innocuous peccadillos fabricated for Father O’Hara who had an annoying habit of nodding and prompting from behind the confessional screen. “Go on, my child.” Like her laundry list of basic sins could never be it. What was she going to do? Tell Father O’Hara about Juan fingering her on the red-corduroy sofa? Both of them frozen, because neither knew exactly what came next. How they sat side-by-side, arms contorted in a pretzel, staring at one another, Juan’s finger up there embarrassing them both. No. She knew enough about her church’s history not to confess anything as pervy as that. Still, Phil also knew the liturgy: when to sit; when to stand or kneel; when to say, Peace be with you. Her mother had named her for Philomena on whose feast day Phil was born. Neither saints nor Catholic mass bewildered Phil. Bob’s laser-like charisma and courtship of Phil’s mom did.
Soon after the good pastor bumped into her coming out of Walgreens with an expensive prescription for Phil, who had bronchitis again, God instructed Bob to marry her. What God said precisely was This woman’s redemption is your crown. Saved, she will be as a lily among thorns. Together will you march out in my name. Expel Satan. Reclaim the city. God did not have to mention that Phil’s mom was a knockout at thirty-eight, tiny waist, perfect tits, and still fertile. Naturally demure too. Phil, whose unstoppable reading habit meant she knew her Old Testament well enough, thought it a bit cheesy of God to pun on his own book and her mom’s name. Lily, on the other hand, was smitten. Pastor Bob was the gentlemanliest suitor she had ever had. He asked to hold her hand on their third date. Brought flowers every Wednesday, including May’s first sprigs of lily of the valley that filled the tiny apartment with their heavy scent. Kissed her chastely. Never sucking on her lips till they bled.
In the beginning he courted Phil too. Told her she was so special to God he knew every hair on her head; a fact Phil found more invasive than comforting. Gave her Walkers treacle toffee from his double-breasted jacket like she was five, not going on seventeen. Pastor Bob was always chewing that damned toffee. Lately though, he started chewing on her too. Her skirt was too short; nails too long. Could Lily take Phil’s hem down three inches? A boyfriend? Unthinkable. When the time came—eighteen the age of betrothal—Pastor Bob and the Elders would find her a suitable young man.
Phil may have big plans for their thirteen-month anniversary, but she does not want to marry Juan or anyone else anytime soon. And as far as she is concerned, her mom and Bob are walking too swiftly towards that particular ever after.
Pastor Bob invites the flock up to receive the savior’s healing grace. “Stir up the gift of God which is put into you by my laying on of hands. People, Jesus is stronger than sin. Hallelujah! Throw off the yoke of bondage and praise the Lord God Almighty.” His eyes pierce Phil’s soul. She pretends not to notice.
The ushers dim the lights in the sanctuary. Ripe for Spirit. A line of the faithful stands before the stage; the aisles fill with believers. The hopeful. Those remaining in their seats are praying in tongues. Arms undulating in the Spirit’s breeze. The band accompanies with a trace of Come Ye Sinners. Phil’s mom eyes her then nudges her in the rib. Her love of her mom is fierce. Her mama. Up to now, it has been the two of them against the world and a few of her mom’s shitty boyfriends. There is no question this Holy Spirit is quacka-wackado. But could it be elemental too? Phil has heard how it comes like a whirlwind, like tongues of flame, a fountainhead gushing from the belly. All things that remind her of Juan. His lips. The way her stomach flits; words clot, then rush out; a flame in her chest. The good ache of it.
Her mom already has the gift. She uses it on Phil now. “You just have to believe, Phee. Open your heart and your mouth will follow.”
Phil steps into the aisle, then retreats, but a burly usher steers her by the elbow back into line. Shuffling forward, she tells herself this is not so different from Holy Communion. But when Pastor Bob towers over her, spray from the consonants juddering out of his mouth hits her face. He presses his thumb hard into her forehead, casting out demons; Phil loses her balance and falls back. She attempts to right herself but is guided by the same usher’s firm hand to the ground. Humiliation.
“If you fall under the power of the Spirit, don’t rush to get up.” Pastor Bob, effectively tripled in height, now crouches over her. He hisses. “Close your eyes, girl. Let the Spirit fill you.” One Florsheim-encased foot close to her face.
Phil’s cheeks burn. She has plans to let something else, someone else, Juan to be exact, fill her on their upcoming anniversary, and she feels Pastor Bob assail these intentions like they are about as impenetrable as white organza. Shame hotter than the Magdalene’s hair makes her wriggle down there on the floor. When is she allowed to get up? An elderly, whiskered woman to her left moans. Everyone is just lying there. A row of undead imbeciles muttering. She tries to roll away from the moaning woman but is pinned to the floor. Not by Pastor Bob. Nor his henchmen. Another force has her. Phil wills herself to rise. She cannot. She opens her mouth to cry out. No sound. Only an aspirate. Repeated, -aH, -aH, -aH! Does her mom see? Phil panics. Hyperventilates. Loses the struggle and free falls, slipping into an interstice. A space between. Conscious but otherwise. It is not luminous. Not heaven. Thank God. Phil is not ready to die.
She lands with a dust-raising thud but no pain on hard ground. Overhead, a kaleidoscope of stalactites whispers something joyful to slip in her pocket for later. Phil could stay on her back, looking up, listening in like this forever except the shackles have come off. No longer pinned but free to rise, she does. Everything is changing. The cavern now a boulevard, handsomely lit. Each bulb, inside its iron lamppost, a galaxy. A rhythm in her feet says dance. Tap shoes on. Not dreaming. What spirit is this? Jazz hands praise the Lord. Praise everything! Dewdrops on mulberry, broken cobblestones in Boston, the mote in her eye. The cleansing rain. Step ball change, shuffle ball change. No more two-left-feet Philomena, she is Gene Kelly. Doo dah-doot doo-dah, doo-dah doo-dah-doot doo dah.
When the music stops, Phil is kneeling in the rib-vaulted apse of a cathedral. Now the light is gilded. The Virgin Mary sits cross-legged on a silver bishop’s throne. To her left, Mary Magdalene unveiled, hair the sleekest sexiest black, is also cross-legged but smiling on solid ground; Saint Philomena to her right, veiled, like Mary, in indigo, refusing marriage. They do not speak, but each signs No, with a finger pressed straight like a hush against her lips. A gust of wind sets veils and hair billowing. An amber glow envelopes them. This is beautiful. This is the most beautiful thing Phil has seen. They point in the direction Phil must go. OUT. Eyes up, Catholic Christ still on the cross. A reminder: love’s suffering. And a pang, but not for want of celestial bridegroom because there is no lack here. No hunger. Only grace. Freedom. Phil for herself. She gasps. Ecstasy then. She shudders on the floor of Pastor Bob’s evangelical church.
Yanked from the afterglow by an usher pulling her upright, a fluorescent bulb twitching overhead, she blinks hard. Pastor Bob stands waiting, brimstone lock on Phil. His mustache moves, but his words are submerged. Watery. She cannot make sense of them or this windowless place that offers no sanctuary. And no salvation from the horde of Christian soldiers probing Phil’s next move. All eyes waiting. She looks back, searching for her mom. Her mom who needs her to open her mouth and show her future stepdad how pure she is. Phil finds her mom’s eyes in the crowd. Pleading. Go on Phee, open your mouth. Phil needs to tell her what she just saw. What is really down there, low to the ground. A trinity of women who know better. Christ on the cross. That other love. Christ’s mama.
But Lily’s eyes remind Phil of the cross they have borne all these years. Instability, the cramped apartment that even the smallest bouquet of lily of the valley makes sickly. Prescriptions her mom cannot afford. In the cathedral, the answer: a beatific No, but her mom needs her to say yes. To say—Phil opens her mouth, begins with a sh digraph then a hard k, a b sound, another stop consonant, liquid l, and soon she is full of imbecilic joy. Trapped by circumstance, liberated by nonsense words. She raises her hands to the roof and hollers Amen! Nuh-uh-uh! Shebedah shebedah shebedah, dah-doot-doot-doot!
Eleanor Fuller (@eleanorfuller.bsky.social) won The Malahat’s Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist in The Fiddlehead’s 2023 fiction contest and the 2024 Cambridge Short Story Prize. Her writing appears in The Moth, The Waxed Lemon, The Temz, The Manchester Review, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, and The Vassar Review. Fuller completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia where she volunteered on the Editorial Board at Prism International. She was a 2024 Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence and is a grateful recipient of SSHRC, Ontario Arts Council, and Canada Council grants. She lives in Toronto.