Savior
Mackenzie Sanders
There is a moment in the break of morning when the sleeper is still dreaming but she knows it is the morning, and there is a signal, let it be from God, in the scent of fresh dew that carries in the first clear sun of the morning, and is received by both the sleeper and the dove. And so she doesn’t wake upon hearing the dove make its morning sound which gives it its name, but the two are called to in unison: the sleeper to wake, the dove to sing.
Jesus Man was back. This time the sign said JESUS IS LOVE and this time he was on Grant and Swan. Jesus Man looked like he had albinism or at the very least alopecia. Regardless, they had speculated, the sun couldn’t have been good for him. She had the urge to call him and tell him, “Hey, did you see that Jesus Man is back?” and hear him laugh and say, “Where the hell has he been all this time, what does his sign say?”
They used to see him all the time, at any hour of the day, which was insane, since the sun clocked 90 degrees before 9:00 in the morning and after 9:00 at night in the summer. It was 55 degrees now, and although the December day would not grow much colder, he could not have been comfortable in his cargo shorts and sandals. Lena wanted to give Jesus Man a beanie.
She thought about him and looked at her phone. They’d jokingly tried to name him. Dan? Paul? Something simple and rounded at the edges. But they always reverted back to Jesus Man.
She kept driving and jumped slightly when somebody behind her honked, lurching her car into a pothole, then realized they were honking for Jesus.
“There’s a man that came by your house the other day. I told him you were fishing on the mountain.”
Mauricio always sat on the small porch of their peeling duplex, keeping an eye on the potholes that kept getting bigger, inspecting the weeds but never pulling them. The lawn was gravel and dead hedge mustard.
“That was months ago. The lake is frozen.”
“Yeah, well.”
“What did he look like?”
“Tall.”
“Really narrows it down.”
“I think he’s come by here before.”
She fumbled with her keys. He was looking at her.
He whistled between his teeth. “Them telemarketers and Jehovah Witnesses don’t know when to quit. They’ll call on you night and day if you let them. Rack up your phone bill and clutter your porch.” He made a tsk sound and she heard him crush his PBR can.
“Which was it?”
“What’s the difference?”
She smiled. “That’s true.”
He leaned over in his chair toward her. “The trick is to let em down easy at first. Then if they keep coming back you gotta be harsher with them.”
She turned to face him. He smiled at her, and she felt like she’d lost the bet.
“But if they keep coming back, after you tell em again and again to leave you alone, in the meanest way you know how, sometimes it’s best to just let em in.”
Her face grew hot. “You don’t know what—”
“I don’t need to know what you did to each other to know that all love is the same.”
She stood there for a moment and stared at her door. He had stared at it earlier. The paint on it peeled like scabs. If she reached out and touched the wrought iron on the door’s window, it would be ice cold. “Why are you watching my porch?”
“It’s my porch too,” he shrugged and went back to his pothole inspection. “Neighbors gotta look out for each other.”
She was on Speedway and Craycroft pacing the pedestrian lines at the intersection, holding the beanie. She knew he’d be here. She had to read his sign. What did it say? The air was growing colder, and the street lights were growing taller and thicker and darker. She turned around and there he was, at the southwest corner where the sidewalks met. Not Jesus Man, but him. He looked as he always had, but thinner, and paler, and the stubble on his chin and cheeks appeared ragged, even from a distance. She looked at his sign and it said LENA SAVES. And as she tried walking toward him, the air grew colder still, and the light poles twisted, knotting into tree trunks, and the asphalt flattened and sheened into the slick ice of the lake.
She tried to run to him, but the ice was slippery and thin, and the high elevation made her dizzy. He stared at her, expressionless, holding the sign over his head. He held the sign as the ice gave out beneath him, and he plunged into the water.
Lena cried out as she slipped and fell onto her hands and knees. The ice was perfectly clear, and she could see into the lake below. Fishing poles, car tires, wedding rings, bones, him. He lay on the lake bottom, staring up at her, gripping the sign to his chest. LENA SAVES. His eyes were wide and unblinking. Bubbles came out of his mouth and it looked like he was trying to say something to her.
She crawled to where he had fallen through, but the ice had reformed into a seamless sheet. She pounded on it, but this time it would not crack. “I don’t know what to do,” Lena said. “Tell me how to save you. Tell me—”
A face appeared just beneath her fist on the other side of the ice. It was nearly her face, Lena’s face. Her hair was darker, her teeth were bigger. The other Lena stared at Lena for a long time, placing her hands on the other icy side of where Lena’s hands were. Her hands were not quite hands. The Other Lena pushed off the glassy ice and sank to join him at the bottom of the lake. Lena watched the Other Lena pry the sign from his hands and let it drift amongst the forgotten.
Lena opened the front door the way one might open a coffin: once you’ve dug up six feet of earth, you might as well lift the lid to see what’s behind it.
The air bit and the light behind him was hazy and colored from the neighbor’s tree lights. His mouth opened and there was the short soft sound of him sucking in air. His hair and skin were both a soft red and he shivered slightly. He looked pathetic. She had the sudden urge to touch his chest, right where his shirt parted, and feel the skin beneath his collar bone. It would be warm and damp.
“I saw Jesus Man today,” he said.
She stared at his face.
“Do you wanna know what his sign said?”
She stared at his hands.
“I haven’t seen you in a year,” he said.
“Is that what it said?”
He shook his head. “You know what I mean.”
“You’re still having the dreams.”
“Are you having them too?
She said nothing.
“Tonight in my dream we were lying on the bed in a house, but it wasn’t the house I lived in in college, with the front gate that didn’t latch,” he said. “It was our house. And you got out of bed and walked out the front door and I couldn’t find you. I walked through the neighborhood for hours. The sidewalk burned my feet. And when I finally got back to our house the front door was open again and I couldn’t see you, but I could hear you laughing inside. There was soft music playing. I was too afraid to go back in.”
She paused.
“You ended it.”
“I know.”
“I know about the girl you’re fucking. The one who looks like me.”
“It hurt too much to be away from you.”
“You ended it.”
“It hurt too much to be with you.” He shook his head. “You think I’m naive and I am, but we both know I’m not dumb. I know I’ll never be happy.”
“I made you happy. You should have let me.”
“People struggle to accept the gospel of Christ.”
They both turned away from each other and smiled.
“I don’t know how to not talk to you,” he said.
She thought about the day he ended it. It was a year ago, it happened yesterday, it was happening right now, it happened in a dream. He cried for hours in her driveway, telling her to go, then begging her to stay. He took up so much space and all she could do was touch him and affirm it. And when even that became too much he pulled out of the driveway and wove them through the city, into the mountains near the lake, crying quietly the whole time, running red lights on the way down. She had to look out her window so as to pretend that she was crying the same amount, or not crying at all. And then his hand would find her thigh again because he needed her to still be there, and she leaned into it because she needed to know he was real. And when he pulled back into her driveway their voices were hoarse from all the silence.
“You lived a whole life before me,” she said. “You’ll be okay.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right Lena, I did. I guess you’re right about everything. But you know what? I don’t remember a single goddamn thing.”
Lena found Mauricio wrapping lights around the naked ceramic monkey on his side of the porch. The monkey wore a sombrero and held a beer and had a plaster dick that looked like a cigar.
Mauricio looked up and waved at her. “Feliz Navidad.”
It would not snow but the morning air was crisper than snow and bit into Lena as she stepped onto the porch. She stared into the yard, and if she stepped into the yard and took a piece of gravel between her fingers she could crack it. Everything was covered in fog, so that you could see everything and still not be sure that you had. Had he stood here yesterday?
“Think that pothole by the mailbox got bigger last night.”
“He doesn’t love me.”
Mauricio whistled. “Jehovah, he came to witness bright and early.”
Lena sighed.
“He does.” Mauricio nodded.
She crossed her arms and exhaled plumes of fog. “If you know everything then you’d know if I let him in he’d just leave.”
Mauricio paused, kneeling in front of the monkey, one hand on the sombrero, one hand on the string of lights. “Suppose he does. Why do you think that is?”
“He thinks I’m what he wants, but I’m not.”
He made the tsk sound. “Don’t be dumb with me. He leaves because he’s afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Same thing as you.”
“Afraid of what? I’m not afraid.” She thought about the frozen lake, about seeing him and the Other Lena underneath the water. She thought about how four months from now the lake would be thawed and the rainbow trout would be released. To swim, to be hunted, to be eaten. She thought about being a trout. She thought about eating algae off of his skin. He could hold her in his hands and feel her gentle weight and touch the pink thread of scales along her side. She thought about swimming, about floating, about being ripped from the water on a hook, on a tooth, on a claw. Ripped fin from skin until her pink insides coated her scales and his mouth. Or placed gently in a cooler, on ice, the cooler shut, unable to see him, unable to see anything at all.
“I told you not to be dumb.”
She opened the front door at midnight to an aching cold. Perhaps to look at the ceramic monkey and see if Mauricio was able to fit the string of lights around its ceramic dick. He stood there in fleece pajamas with his back to her and turned to look at her.
“I saw Jesus Man again today.” He nodded, hard and for too long and puffed out his cheeks. She realized he was crying. He exhaled again and looked at her. “You were wrong.”
“What was I wrong about?”
His face scrunched and then burst, and his voice cracked like ice. “You told me it was going to be okay.”
She stopped and looked at him. Really looked at him. He was pathetic. “I hoped it would be,” she said. And she felt the emptiness and the urge to reach out and touch him swell within her, and she knew if she did he would be warm and soft. She knew what he was going to say because she saw it in a dream. And she knew what he’d mean when he’d say whatever it was he wouldn’t mean to say. Everything was years in the making and sometimes would never be. What were they supposed to learn from that?
He looked at her. “Will you lie to me again?”
She paused and took a deep breath before standing aside so he could come in.
They looked at each other for a long time. There was no fog.
“What did Jesus Man’s sign say?”
© Variant Literature Inc 2023