Church of the Perpetual Sinner

When he was a boy Dejesus lived with his great aunt and uncle in a house no bigger than an outshed. Over the door was a sign that read, Its Never Too Late to Learn a New Trick. Each and every morning Dejesus crossed himself three times, then skipping on one foot hightailed it out the door and into the world outside. On a post in the middle of the town where he went to school was a wooden sign that read Schiphol 202½ miles Louisville That A Way. Not know where A Way was he headed for the candy store 2026½ miles from Schiphol. The proprietor of the candy store, Mr. J Stork, sold penny candy by the bag, licorice by the whip and wax cigars full of sweet juice that fit in your pocket like a severed finger. Not knowing the difference between a finger and a wax cigar Dejesus bought real Indian tobacco and bagfuls of red and black Jujubes. The proprietor of the candy store (Mr. J Stork) lived in a room behind the store and cook beans and potstickers on a hotplate he found in the trash behind the Waymart. When he wasn’t cooking beans and potstickers on his hotplate Mr. J Stork (the proprietor) sold bagfuls of penny candy and real Indian tobacco to children, one such child being Dejesus. Its never too late to learn a new trick, the sting’s in the foolhardiness. One can’t be too foolhardy.

From atop the steeple on the Church of the Perpetual Sinner Dejesus espied the world spinning round and round. He often climbed up the steeple tower and onto the balustrade overlooking the town below, overcast or brighter than a merchant’s smile, he could see into the beyond, beyond the outskirts of the town. Dejesus was a weakly boy, his legs bowed like parenthesis, and like all a boys liked to climb trees and lampposts, other people’s rooftops and church steeples, shimmying as far up from the world as he could shimmy. The herd of the Church of the Perpetual Sinner were known for their simplemindedness and lack of concern for people with gamey legs and whooping coughs. Every Sunday after the taking of Christ, the rector’s assistant handing the ciborium to the priest, the priest pouring wee drams of transubstantiated wine into outstretched cups, the congregated drank pig wine in the rector’s closet, the reek of camphor and bulb onions filling the closet with an unseemly odor. Not one of the flock had the time or patience for volunteerism or goodwill, leaving the bastard children of fallen sinners and camp singers to deal with the vagaries of life unaided by the comforts of religious piety, leaving such bastardly things to hicks and bandy-men. ‘…may God take mercy on your soul, amen…’ said the rector’s assistant, the rings around his eyes black with stink and chigger smoke.

The man in the hat mused, thinking about his life so far and that life yet to unfold. Death, he thought, is the bookend between life, the reminder that what is now will soon be over and done with, vanished like the melting snow on a warm Spring day. Its the in between that matters, what happens between the bookends. All this and more, all that was and all that will be, the time left in between. These thoughts and more thoughts, so many thoughts that the thought of thinking them was unthinkable. The sinners queued in front of the altar of the Church of the Perpetual Sinner, hate mongers and bigots, cheapskates and connivers, halfwits and imbeciles, dimwits and fools, camp singers and bandy-men, those with poor health and those with good health, the poor and the wealthy, the half-there and the fully-there, supplicants kneeling bareheaded at the altar of contrition and glad tiding.