April Lindner

The burnt church up the street yawns to the sky, its empty windows edged in soot, its portals boarded up and slathered with graffiti, oily layers, urgent but illegible. All that can be plundered has been, all but the carapace—the hollow bell tower, the fieldstone box that once served as a nave. The tidy row of homes that line this block have tended lawns and scalloped bathtub shrines. Each front porch holds a chair where no one sits. Those who live here triple lock their doors day and night. Some mornings they step out to find a smoking car stripped to its skeleton abandoned at the curb. Most afternoons the street is still but for a mourning dove and gangs of pigeons picking through the grass. Our Lady of Perpetual Help is gray, a dead incisor in a wary smile. A crevice in her wall allows a glimpse into the chancel, where a sodden mattress and dirty blanket indicate that someone finds this place a sanctuary still, takes his rest here, held and held apart from passers by, their cruelties and their kindnesses, watched over by the night’s blind congregation, by the blank eyes of a concrete saint.

The worst for him was his friend turned wolf, and the blood that splattered as he ran. The worst for us: the hospital, his upper lip tugged back to show the gash—the flesh halved deeply, cleanly—while I hold him for the needle that rubs pain out. He submits to the quick stitch, the thread black against pink skin, calm now he sees the doctor can be trusted, his voice soothing, his face clean shaven, the clues that signal kindness to a child. He’s worried, though, about his pet who didn’t mean it, Mom. His voice is flat. He knows the months he’s tried to woo this dog were over when it leapt for his throat and caught his mouth. The scars, at least, will be invisible. At home, he’ll sleep, big boy between his parents, till he’s sure no beast will tear into his dreams. And we will want him there, our bodies makeshift walls. We who led the stranger to our home, fixed him a bowl, taught him to sleep under our blankets, we who taught our son to rub the muzzle that sheathes the teeth.

One rainy night we sat in traffic and, overtired in back, you saw a wind-whipped grocery bag afloat beyond the clutch of jagged branches, swept by gusts and whirled in eddies. A sudden downdraft swooped it earthward, where it danced till with a whoosh a current luffed it past the power lines. Disowned by gravity, small ghost not yet snagged by twiggy fingers, it couldn’t reach the earth. Thin-skinned, it pulsed, translucent jellyfish. You wept and pled to be let out into the dark and slanted rain, somehow to save that desolate thing. The light turned green and still you begged, Go back,go back, on its behalf, caught and held, bossed and tossed by a will much greater than its own.