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This writing is publishe in the May 2010 issue
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Rumours of Paradise

Simon Anthony Prunty

    I was a child sitting quietly in church.
    My legs hung from the wooden bench, kicking back and forth in a bored, monotonous rhythm. The congregation gathered like livestock, sitting obediently in near-silence; some young, but most old and tired looking; a few so decrepit that a state of near-mummification seemed upon them. I was led through the main doors of St. Kanices church that Sunday morning, as always, by the hand of my mother, only to be met by a familiar carpet of grey hair; a mass gathering of senior citizens no bingo tournament could possibly attain. There were, however, random specks of brown and black dashed upon this white landscape, others like me, I suspected, torn away from their Sunday morning cartoons to be told how wicked and nasty they were. I didn’t feel very wicked, neither nasty for that matter, and so, in distracting my indifference, I kicked loose the laces of my shoes and watched them wriggle like fresh spaghetti. Sitting at my side, my mother turned to me and smiled; her face full of warmth. She loved to make me spaghetti, I thought.
    With one collective hush the crowd stirred and glared in attention to the altar, holding their gaze with military discipline. I stretched out my neck, imagining myself as a giraffe, or a dinosaur of some sort, but my eyes never rose above the cardigans and head scarves that cluttered my view. Suddenly, the entire congregation stood up and engulfed me like an ocean, and with that I sunk into my seat defeated. Curiosity haunted me. What could they see that could draw them so easily to their feet? I nibbled my finger nails and kicked my legs. An elderly woman poked my shoulder from behind and motioned me with a bitter face to stand up and pay respect to whatever it was everyone else could see. I refused, of course, and looked to my mother to tell the old crone to buzz off, but she too glared at the altar with eyes transfixed and vacant. I thought about things that are hypnotized: zombies, vampire zombies, sometimes even normal people who volunteer themselves to some elaborate act of illusion. I tried to click my little fingers together, attempting to end the mass hypnosis, but to no avail. I had yet to be educated in the art of finger-clicking and inevitably, with a bitter sense of defeat, returned to chewing my fingers nails.
    An inaudible command mumbled from the altar. The congregation sat down, and once again the church interior revealed itself. I was inside the belly of a whale, sitting beneath a giant rib-cage of concrete adorned with stained glass apparitions and spider-leg columns. The atmosphere chilled my bones and made visible my breath. Spring was unusually cold that year. Outside, among blustering gales, the wind fought a war with itself, and as the church fell into silence, it whistled and whined through the main doors, pleading its entrance to the building. Sometimes, on a stormy night, I would lie perfectly still under my bed-covers and listen to the tortured wind, tuning my ear to whatever voices came from its ghostly howl. The wind had a way with words, for what little words it had to give. It would often speak incredible nonsense to me. “Potato bread onions,” it would sometimes babble, or “why do birds sing?” on more vivid nights. On that bitter Sunday morning, some 18 years ago, my eyes trailed from one tired face to another, and I questioned whether everyone listened to the wind as I did. After all, no matter the age or intellect, incoherence has its charms.
    “We were once in paradise... the lord’s paradise, but we lost it... lost it in a moment of wickedness and spite,” a voice bellowed. The crowd momentarily parted ways and dug a path for my eyes that led to the scarlet altar. There, standing behind a mahogany podium, was a tall, broad-shouldered priest, dressed from head to toe in black; his appearance brightened only by a single red satchel draped around his neck. A million protests were scrawled across his forehead. Although elderly on closer inspection, it was obvious his body had been kept strong by an old-school Catholic rage that was to become so unfashionable in later years. He began barking and jabbering about a garden called “Eden,” where a young couple, who had lived there long ago, enjoyed eating rotten fruit, and glued leafs to their naughty bits; a practice that brought immeasurable confusion to my young mind. The priest’s baritone roar rose to a deafening volume, rattling inside my skull like a meandering echo. I shuffled in my seat, craving an escape. He was conducting a ferocious rant, howling about “original sin,” and talking snakes, and apples that were never quite ripe enough to eat, or something of the sort. His wails bounced from wall to wall and swam around stone pillars like some lost, tortured spirit. Right on cue, as if part of the theatrics, the luminous glow of the church windows appeared to pulsate as passing clouds fought with the April sun, creating an illusion of life within the stained glass figures; a frightening puppetry of chance. A sudden yearning to confess to a million sins, whether true or false, overpowered me. Yet all I could offer was an enthusiasm for my shiny new sneakers, and assurance that I’d never made my mother cry; at least not since the very pain of my birth, which, according to the priest, was the fault of ‘Eve’, the lady in the garden, and her unusual appetite for bad fruit. Why God would create a paradise full of rotten apples and devious serpents seemed to me an utter mystery.
    The air was full of shame, and guilt, and words I had no hope of understanding. For a split second my mind fled to fantasy as I pictured my many action figures sitting at home in silence. They must be lonely if no one plays with them, I thought.
    “We have brought these dreadful sins upon ourselves!” shrieked the priest, his sweaty, red jowls flapping like slabs of meat, “we will never make it back to paradise as long as these sins are with us! No one in this modern world of ours can grasp that simple fact!” I didn’t understand his doom-mongering; Spain was simply a plane journey away, and Hawaii seemed to be a very nice place as well. Why not go there? Why would anyone return to this “Eden” place, with all its talking snakes and rotten fruit, it sounded like an utter nightmare. I rubbed my belly, attempting to calm the nervous critters that bounced around my stomach. Watching an episode of Transformers with a big bowl of cereal in my lap seemed to me the only paradise worth having at that age.
    Just then, my daydreams were dispelled by the sound of a soft giggle poorly disguised as a cough. “Hehe... hum hum... hehe,” it spluttered in a clumsy manner. I whirled my head around in search of the culprit. Every face was solemn and conservative. Old women with thick glasses glared at the altar in silence, while men with faces like aged rhinos fought their dwindling concentration. I spied every face of the congregation, but not a soul stirred under my suspicion. Maybe I was hearing things, I thought. Besides, who could possibly find amusement in this horrifying tirade?
    “Heh, heh, hum hum hum...” There it was again. I turned to my mother, and as I prepared to ask her whether or not she too could hear the giggle, I noticed her hand quickly dart away from her mouth, revealing beneath it a humble, trembling smirk. My mother: the giggling heretic. At first I was startled with embarrassment and began a frantic inspection of each face that surrounded us, dreading to see someone glare furiously at my mother. But no one had noticed her devilish chuckle, at least not yet, and upon turning my attention back to her big, grinning face, I suddenly felt a delightful tickle rise from my belly to my throat; a fluttering creature born from infectious relief.
    “Buh-huh, heh, heh...” it said as it left my body. I immediately clasped my mouth shut with my hands, for fear of another fleeing fragment of laughter. What in the name of God had come over me? What was I laughing at? “Hee, hee, hee, huh, huh...” my mother spluttered again, almost in response.
    “Heh, heh, a-cuhh, huh, a-huh,” I chuckled.
    “Buh-huh, huh, heh...”
    “Hah, a-heh, heh...”
    “... Ha, a-ha, ha, ha...”
    Before long our infectious giggling drew a number of unwelcome stares and sour expressions from our fellow Catholics. We shook in a spasm of badly contained laughter, exchanging swollen expressions. A vocal patter of disapproval grew around us. At times, a stray chuckle would lodge in my throat and send me into a spitting-fit of splutters and coughs. I turned to my mother in the hope of finding some reason within this madness, gazing at her with a vague morsel of plea in my eyes. But I was met only by a face that shun like a ripe tomato.
    I descended the steps of the church that day with a fantastic grin plastered across my face, accompanied, of course, by my mother’s relentless smirk. Never before had I left Sunday Mass so full of rapture and abandon; an unlikely change to the usual cloud of dread and frustration that so often hung over my head in the wake of Sunday service. Only then, with muscle cramps sewn around my ribs, and eyes blood shot to near-blindness, did I realise that a story would always remain a story, no matter the man who tells the tale. And laughter, wild, abandoned laughter, would remain the song that’s sung only by a mind curious and free. My mother never did fully explain the hysterics that seized us that day. In some ways I didn’t want to know. Her very laughter was the explanation itself.
    I climbed into the passenger seat of the car and buckled my seat belt. My mother wiped the windscreen clear of condensation, started the engine, and began the journey home to paradise.



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