---

 

This writing was accepted for publication in the 108-page perfect-bound ISSN#/ISBN# issue/paperback book “Pieces of the Past” cc&d, v339, the 11/23 issue Order the 6"x9" paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Over the River and Through the Woods the cc&d September-December 2023 magazine issues collection book		get the 424-page September-December 2023 cc&d magazine 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

Disciples

p.m. baird

    Ava had seen Asher, there wasn’t any doubt in that, the doubt was in whether she’d recognized him or not.
    He’d let his Timex go a full eight minutes and then had to breathe through the idea of actually being in the same space with her, even if the space was a Denny’s or Dee’s—it escaped him which was which from the inside. Everything turquoise and fuchsia and taupe, colors that fell somewhere between their actualities and their pastel versions. Muted.
    Up to that point all Asher’s watching and investigation had been done on the other side of a windshield at distances of half a block or so many rows in a parking lot, this was the first time he’d seen her in a state any more elaborate than walking from door to car or car to door. No, that wasn’t true, that wasn’t it, it was that she’d be seeing him for the first time since she left the farm. This was the crux of his anxiety and there was still a twist inside him about not being recognized, in spite of his fear, one still uncoiling.
    Their eyes had locked from the time he dropped down into his corner booth to the time he’d slid to its center and thanked the hostess for his menu. When he’d looked back she was doing a very good job of acting like she wasn’t bothered by her boyfriend Craig’s smoking. Maybe she’d done the same in her looking at him, hidden her recognition, as though he weren’t anybody she’d ever laid eyes on before. A very good job. Or maybe she didn’t recognize him. He was without his beard, she’d call it mandatory now, probably, they called it voluntary, obedient. His hair was short too, it would have been at his shoulder blades the last time they’d seen each other. His disguise out in this world was to reveal more of himself, Asher didn’t see the irony. Her hair was also short, not as short as his, but shorter than anyone else’s back at the farm—woman or man.
    The physical transformation in her seemed so distant at first that he’d called Peter to plead hopelessness and a return without her. She looks different, Asher had told Peter. He’d been in a state of almost intimidation after watching her jump in Craig’s car wearing baggy jeans that hung below the tops of her fishnet stockings and a purple see thru top that didn’t reach her navel, black tape her only sense of propriety. Stunned that she would leave her measly apartment dressed that way and shocked she’d enter the warehouse they drove to. A warehouse filled to overflowing with people. I bet there were fifty women dressed almost identically, Peter had said. Reiterating the weakness inherent in thinking that personal style could manifest out of a person’s true self and somehow look identical to thousands of other people’s personal style. Asher had kept his mouth closed, unable to convey the feeling he had that she’d be different, singular, even if there were girls wearing identical tops and jeans and fishnets and tape. This is why you are out there, Asher, to shepherd her, Peter had said then. It’s clear to me that you have learned and she has merely listened. It’s time for you to teach. In this way, in his way, Peter had talked Asher down from his retreat and built back his fire.
    They laughed at something Craig said, he grinned around his cigarette triumphantly until the laughing died down. Craig’s friends laughed at everything. Asher had to assume they were her friends too, if one could make friends in a span of months. Ava sat next to Craig on the one side of their booth, Asher imagined the casualness of thighs touching, and their friends, a slight, pale Japanese boy with bleached blonde hair pulled out into spikes, clothes so big Asher was genuinely curious how he kept them from falling off and a girl, skinny legged and thick in the middle, who wore black lipstick, black, profusely holed clothes, pink hair under a black leather hat and ivory skin peaking out of all those holes, sat across from them. Craig always wore the same leather jacket that looked as though it had been laid out on a freeway and showed past his wrists. His stringy blonde hair dark at the roots, his left front tooth protruding towards the middle of his chin and a gauntness with which his face seemed stretched over his skull, were all on the list of Asher’s questions about how Ava could be attracted to him. He didn’t see it. He didn’t like it, despite Peter’s steady voice telling him on their second call that it didn’t matter whether she had sex with Craig or slept with him or fucked him even, if it didn’t happen after they were sealed and signified in the eyes of their God and the other disciples it wasn’t real. Asher still couldn’t bring himself to feel anything good about her relationship with Craig or it’s meaninglessness. Nor could he find a way to stop off his jealousy or tamp down his dislike for this boy he didn’t know.
    Asher snapped back to the coffee cup being placed in front of him. He glanced to find out what damage he’d done with his staring and mental wandering of the boyfriend and his friends and found Ava looking. Their eyes met again briefly before she cast hers down and came back up with a cheese covered french fry and the smile of someone who has no idea why they’re smiling.
    “Thank you,” Asher told the waitress’ eyes, “Therese,” he looked before she righted the coffee pot and walked away.
    Ava wasn’t looking when he peeked again, instead she’d tucked herself up into Craig’s cigarette free arm and made an implication of where her right hand was. Craig continued to talk and the Japanese boy and the pink haired girl continued to laugh. Ava smiled at another cheese fry and didn’t laugh.
    She has to recognize me, Asher thought, watching the little throw away plastic container’s worth of cream cloud in his coffee. Three years together, two promised. She’d been a late arrival for a new disciple, showing up at nineteen, her hair short then too, now that he thought of it, the skinniest she’d ever been, lost in her own body, Peter had told Asher. Asher, for the first time in his week of spying, made the connection between the two, the darkness under her eyes that had gone away, back now, the skin pristine in the air fo the farm, showing blotches beneath its new coating of makeup. We need to help her, be her guiding light, Peter had said, assuaging Asher’s initial feeling that she was too lost. Asher and most others arrived or were chosen when they were not much more than fifteen, sixteen. Asher felt at times, safe behind his windshield, watching her pull a smoke out of Craig’s hand to steal a puff or pulling her pumps off by the heels while she sat slouched on a concrete wall outside the all night pizza place, that maybe this was the real Ava. The one who’d shown up at the farm, and the one he’d known and loved was just make believe, merely an attempt. The thought hurt him, if she didn’t exist, then what had he loved. What did he love? He still didn’t know what name she’d arrived at the farm with or if she’d gone back to it now, but he imagined so. Why wouldn’t she? It seemed clear she’d rejected all the teachings Peter had passed down, why not the name? The name that linked her to him.
    Ava and Asher. The chosen ones.
    This was a test after all, her absence, her leaving with the option to not return. They all went through it. Based on something from a sect Asher had never heard of, they called it Rumspringa, Peter called it following the call or the test. A first look at the world as your new self or a forgetting of what you’d been given on the farm. If it’s true, if you are true, it will lead you back from all the noise out there in the world. If one truly believes that all good can be accomplished and cherished and held in the church, at the farm, under Peter, then they will return. Peter would correct and say, with, but the hierarchy had always been clear to Asher, some deeper sense of an order, the kind that involved souls, not voices and bodies. Although, even when or especially if you included the voice and the body and the presence, no one was higher than Peter.
    Asher hadn’t decided on his own to go after Ava. To doubt her test, even though Peter didn’t like Asher’s wording it like that. The confusion for Asher and others had come when Peter made this exception. Ava was the first instance Asher could remember in his seven years where a person, whose call did not lead them back, was sought out. Maybe it had been done without his knowledge or maybe Asher had just never been the seeker before, he didn’t know, but the way Peter had spoken of her, preparing him to go and find her, Asher was almost certain this was the first instance.
    His wheat toast arrived with more little plastic containers, one with a picture of strawberries and the name underneath, one with the a picture of grapes and the name underneath, otherwise identical. One was a jelly and one was a jam and Asher didn’t care to investigate the difference, he was just happy Therese conveyed the message that no fat was to be paint brushed across the already impure bread. He hadn’t asked for the jelly or the jam, dry wheat toast, he’d said. It was just like a person of the world to offer up such things to accompany what they probably thought of as a sad or plain order, not a pure or clean order, like they were sharing the gift of jam and jelly, not attempting to contaminate.
    Asher, his frustration with this small offer and its underlying implications, felt stupid about getting upset with something so incidental. It was more likely that Therese habitually put a jam and a jelly on each small plate of toast no matter who ordered it or how. Asher tried to conjure something wise, something Peter would have taught about incidental acts and their meaning, maybe their subtext, but Asher wasn’t even sure he knew what a subtext amounted to or how it got there or from whence it came. He reached up with the curled fingers of his hand to stroke the length of hair that was no longer there at the side of his neck. His frustrations were building tiers and as though she were still the salvation he once had, Asher looked up to find Ava watching him grab at his phantom locks.
    He smiled at the recognition in her eyes and she darted hers to the expanse of glass next to their booth and then, not liking that either, she made her body smaller and looked at whatever was left of their collective cheese fries. The Japanese boy, having watched this moment of distress pass through her, threw an arm up over the back of the booth to investigate and locked eyes with Asher, who was unsure of how to proceed, he didn’t want to convey either fear or aggression, but was uncertain what the timing for the in between should be, so he ended up meeting the Japanese boy’s eyes until the boy, with exaggerated confusion on his face and turned back to confer with Ava.
    Asher looked at the wallpaper where a window wasn’t, then lifted a corner of toast to examine it. He set it back down. Lifted his coffee and set it down too. He exchanged another nerve coated glance with Ava and looked away before the Japanese boy finished turning over his shoulder again. His purpose, their confrontation, was easing itself into inevitability with each glance and with each glance the uncoiling twist inside Asher was slipping itself into a knot.
    This time he bit at the dry toast and worked it until he needed the coffee. Staring at the two vibrancies of the table top made drab by the late night lighting of the Denny’s or Dee’s.
    Asher took another bite and another, hoping that neither she nor Craig nor the Japanese boy would be standing at his table looking down the next time he looked up. A not small part of him hoped that when he did look up they would be gone.
    He took more coffee and risked a glance over the mug’s rim. The rest of the table had gone back to witnessing Craig hold court, whereas Ava had tucked herself up into the wall and the booth’s corner, her eyes there waiting for him. They were pleading and Asher didn’t know for what. For him to get up, pay for his toast and coffee and leave without acknowledging the very thing he was there to acknowledge? For him to save her from this modern life and all it’s frivolities? Peter had been vehement in a desire Asher wasn’t so sure she had. Why wouldn’t she move on from there, why would she stay where it would be so easy for us to find her if she didn’t want to be found, he’d asked. Because she doesn’t think we’ll be looking, was the simple answer Asher had kept in his head.
    She looked at her knees tucked up in front of her and then her nails and the back of her hand and then she curled her nails over the front of her hand and continued their examination. It was clear to Asher she needed to look at anything other than him.
    He could leave now, he could tell Peter he’d—they’d— had the conversation and she said no of her own free will and the call was not strong enough. Peter would be disappointed for sure, but it had been very apparent he already was and would only have to trim away the hope that budded his disappointment.
    Asher pushed at the crumbs of toast surrounding the small plate with his thumb and brushed them back onto it with his forefinger. Some little dance like the one she had done moments ago. An occupation to stave off. When he looked over his mug again, feeling like a coward who couldn’t give her his full face, she was there looking, giving her full face, daring him. Somewhere in his crumb gathering she’d left pleading behind and picked up a resignation. It felt accusatory, but he could look at nothing else.
    It was in that moment Asher realized how immense her confusion must be to see him there. How the potential for fear must have been there with it, two dark clouds forming at his corner booth, without any discernible way to tell which way the wind was blowing. Especially with him hiding behind his coffee mug. He set the mug down slowly, his eyes far from the task while hers remained. Neither of them noticing the girl in black tucking herself up under the strap of her messenger bag, or Craig producing a wallet and then bills. It wasn’t until the Japanese boy took two sliding hops into the tractor beam of their stare on his way out of the booth that it became clear Asher’s decision, whatever it was, had to be made.
    He couldn’t let her worry or wish, knowing he was out here in this world, by no means coincidence. He couldn’t contribute such a weight to her daily life, he loved her too much for that and he wasn’t sure he could spend whatever days he had left, here or back on the farm, trying to do his own deciphering of the face that was still there on the other side of the Japanese boy’s standing.
    The decision had been made for him. Nonetheless, he stood up afraid. The fear he hadn’t seen until it was there climbing down the front of his shirt. The fear that he might discover in her misgivings that he had some of his own. Looking now at the clear memories of her fading happiness on the farm, knowing the whole time that to examine her changes was to look deeper into his own, to make the mistake of seeing something he couldn’t unsee. That the dream he’d lived in wasn’t her reality. Not even close.
    Craig had his eyes on Ava, still huddled in the booth’s corner. The Japanese boy stared questioningly at Asher, unafraid of Asher’s five inches and thirty well placed pounds. The girl in black didn’t notice any of it as she dug for something in her bag.
    The only thing that changed on the Japanese boy’s face as Asher made his way to their booth was a slight tilt of his chin. Craig eyed him with more curiosity and smirk than anything else, fortifying the thought Asher had had several times over the last week, that Craig felt either secure in Ava’s attachment or secure in his own detachment. More likely, his struggle with such a thing was that even the whiff of submission coming from Ava was antecedent to the girl he knew and loved.
    “Who’s this guy?” The girl in black said, joining her friends.
    “Hi, Ava,” Asher said, she finally broke her stare, quickly held up the back view of her nails again and must have felt foolish in the cliche gesture, because she shoved them in between her legs and clamped down her thighs. Then, as though she’d formulated a plan in that passing second, she looked up and smiled at him. Resignation tipping up the corners of it, sadness right behind the lights bouncing off her eyes.
    “Ava?” Craig said, Asher finally seeing him anything other than relaxed. “You know this guy?” he asked her.
    “Yeah, it’s cool,” Ava said, sliding herself to the edge of the booth, she pulled at Craig’s wrist and kissed him as he bent down. “This is my old friend Asher,” she told him, looking between the two as they eyed each other. The word almost knocked Asher backwards in its clear separation of a past and a present.
    “So can we go?” Craig asked, Asher’s torment at this boy being chosen over him swelled to bursting somewhere at the center of him.
    Asher looked at the Japanese boy and found his demeanor unchanged, the girl in black looked more confused than Craig and the resentment had come back into Ava’s eyes to the degree that her smile didn’t do anything to camouflage it.
    “Who’s Ava?” Craig asked both of them, eyes bouncing.
    Ava was the catalyst of purpose in Asher’s short life, the undeniability of gratitude towards simple acts like laying down at the end of days and getting up at their beginning. Ava was the culmination of prayers that he’d cast about like wishes through ages where one wasn’t discernible from the other. A promise kept. A person Craig didn’t know at all, and yet still...
    “Don’t worry about it, babe,” she said, tugging at Craig’s hand while leaving her eyes on Asher like a hammer apexed over a nail.
    “I feel like maybe I—”
    The second tug stopped him and the look she gave him had him setting his jaw and keeping all the questions he had for Asher in his eyes. It was the first time Asher felt like he saw some sign of a genuine caring in him and it threatened in ways Asher hadn’t anticipated.
    “We gotta talk, that’s all,” Ava said.
    Her eyes swept over to Asher and the hope he’d carried with him all but evaporated, “I’m sorry...” He didn’t know how to finish, he might’ve ran if Craig hadn’t been between him and the door.
    “It’s ok,” she said, it took Asher a second to realize she was talking to him, “we should talk. We need to talk.”
    “We’ll go sit at his booth,” the Japanese boy offered, pulling hard at the straps of his overstuffed backpack. “We can wait,” was meant as intimidation.
    “Yeah,” Craig seconded, unable to take his eyes off Asher or hide what was in them.
    “No, it’s cool,” Ava said, she waited until they all looked at her instead of Asher. “It’s safe, I swear. You’re not gonna do me any harm are you?” She looked right dead in the center of him and couldn’t have said the words any softer.
    It was the same look and the same tone that, sometime in the not so distant past, would have raised his soul up, as Peter would say. But those words spoken in this context damn near crushed whatever was left of it.
    “No,” Asher said, trying not to blink so he wouldn’t spill over, “never.”
    He did blink and he did spill over and when he looked at Craig for some sign that he would relent, he saw the kid’s shoulders drop some and his jaw loosen.
    “You’ll gimme a ride, yeah? When we’re done talking?”
    “Of course,” Asher was helpless. It was as though she’d shown up to have a conversation with him that he didn’t want to have.
    “I’ll catch up with you guys,” she gave a smile to the whole diner and a squeeze to the back of Craig’s hand.
    Then she straightened her back, slid herself to the middle of the booth’s bench and rested her elbows on the table. When she looked up to Asher, indicating she was ready according to the ways of deep communication Peter taught on the farm, Asher had to look away. He saw himself there in the expanse of night darkened glass and lifted a hand up to his cleanly shaven chin to make sure he was him.
    Craig and the Japanese boy begrudgingly took steps in the direction of the door as the girl in black first gave Ava’s arm a squeeze of some female solidarity and then gave Asher a piercing look of some female distrust and aggression he was convinced he deserved. He really would have rather left at that point.
    Asher stared at the thin carpet tile in front of his shoes long enough for all of them to clear out and didn’t raise his eyes past the turquoise and fuchsia table top until he’d sat himself down, both physically and spiritually.
    When he managed to look up at Ava, she was staring out at the glass, he imagined her trying to look for the version of herself that he’d shown up to find. It wasn’t until the lights of Craig’s old beater flipped on and finally pointed themselves at one of the parking lot’s exits, that he realized she was waiting for there to be no witnesses. Then she straightened her back, straightened her arms at the elbow and laid her hands down on the table, palms up. He looked at them, unsure if he was being mocked or genuinely invited. He got no clarification from her eyes as to whether she was offering him a new beginning or one last go at deep communication with her. It was a vital part of their worship, both of their God and each other, which, to some, to Asher, at least in regards to Ava, were one and the same.
    “You don’t have to do that,” he said, his words sank the sadness into him like a brick being placed in melted chocolate.
    “Have to, need to,” she enunciated her thought by stretching her upturned palms at him.
    Asher lifted his arms at the shoulders and stopped short, putting his hands back down on his side of the table. He peeked around at the two thickly built, middle aged men who looked as though they were built for the stools they occupied, he felt the quiet coming off the elderly couple who sat on the same side of a four top table across the diner. It had all been easier in the sanctity of the farm, which may have been the very root of the problem.
    She brought him back to them by slipping her hands under his and dragging them gently to the middle of the table. He knew she wouldn’t let go until they finished or until he looked at her.
    He looked at her.
    “Why are you here, Asher?”
    Her slight squeeze of his left hand threw him. It was a preparation, but he was unsure of who she was preparing.
    “Peter sent me,” he watched some delicate buckling in her face. He knew instantly the other answer that wouldn’t have done that to her, the real answer. His priorities were beginning to stack themselves in truthful order: her, his life on the farm, his worship and Peter, always elbowing his way into Asher’s mind out of some bludgeoning habit. But it was too late to correct himself, it was no longer his turn.
    “To do what?”
    “To find you, to bring you back, to show you that you should come back. We’re the only two chosen,” he said it, skeptical though he’d become.
    “That’s not normally the way of things,” she finally broke eye contact and looked at their hands. “Why me? I know why, but what does any of it mean if my choice doesn’t mean anything? If the calling doesn’t mean anything?”
    He could hear her placating and some pride he held wouldn’t let him tell her she didn’t need to anymore. He wanted to tell her it didn’t mean anything to him if it didn’t mean anything to her, but instead he tried to pull away from her, she didn’t let him go.
    “No,” she said, a twirling leaf to break bones.
    “I don’t know,” he said, the twisting voice of a hurt child. “I didn’t—I don’t understand either. It was just...” Another squeeze brought the heat of her into focus. “I could see you again... I love you, Ava.” The tear on his cheek remained static in relation to the world when he lifted his eyes to her. While her tears were pulled by gravity.
    “Rachel,” she said.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...