By Jason Ropp

This short story is one of a series set in the fictional town of Damnatus.

The midnight air was crisp. The fog wrapped around the tombstones, the outbuildings, the small gas lantern, and the lone figure in the cemetery. The fog, sensing something amiss, attempted to hold back each repetition of the earth-hungry knife. But the sweating figure was focused, maddened by what he had decided to do.

Disparate thoughts played olympic style ping-pong in his head. But whenever the ball came close to the net he felt sane again, if only for a second; it was at these moments that he had the short lived thought that this was neither of utmost importance nor entirely insane, that it was both understandable and silly. So it went like this for several hours…Keep digging, I have to know! Yes he was a bit much. But this? Really? But no, you’ve gone crazy! They all know you’re here. They’ve known you’d do it all along.

A crowing rooster stopped both ping pong players in their tracks. The ball hit the net and bounced on the floor, sounding increasingly like a machine gun as it lost the battle with gravity. His neurosis, terrified by the thought of daylight, left him alone to devote all his capacities to digging. He was supposed to be done and gone an hour ago, but he was not the man that he used to be and never the man that he should have been. Even in his days of dedicated exercise he somehow found himself the least athletic of all the athletic people. Had there been a row of grave diggers here now, they would have probably been done and gone an hour ago. Stop! Focus! Chunk, swoosh, thud. Chunk swoosh thud. KONK. The hollow thud reverberated though the fog chamber, but he didn’t stop to see if anyone heard. He had noted with hope during the burial ceremony that while the Reverend was beloved, the local citizens were also cheap. As everyone knew, the casket and the man would slowly melt into earth anyway; why spend $3,000 dollars to delay the process? Even the mortician Davis advised against it, a kind gesture since he would benefit from its purchase. He fell to his knees, sinking below the grave’s horizon. A weeping mixed with the sound of dirt being brushed from old wood, then a creaking sound, then silence. Terrified silence. His head popped from the grave with the intensity of a groundhog. The look on his face expressed what he said anyway; “I wasn’t crazy after all.” The courthouse bell called for the people of the town to come see the sight. They were not waking with the sunrise, so it called to them again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

Daryll, better known to the town as Barber Hopkins, didn’t feel like hanging around. There was no guarantee that anyone would see things the way he did. So he ran, carrying with him a small envelope, not bothering to close the coffin lid. He just left it there exposed to the world, bags of corn seed, three to be exact. Had Daryll taken the time to weigh it, he would have found the total weight of the coffin to be 162.5 lbs. Above the wound in the earth was a slightly mossed marble tombstone that read,

Rev Martin S. Thompson
Dec. 3, 1962 – Dec. 8, 2011
A man of heartfelt friendship and devotion to God, Family, and Faith. An example set for generations to come.

The Reverend drilled a hole through the laminated paper; perhaps he was digging for oil as his gaze was fixed on a spot in the pink expanse of Texas, the most isolated spot he could find on the map. It screamed at him. He lusted after it, then turned his eyes away.

One of the more portly elders, Mark, was in mid diatribe when Thompson rejoined reality. The elder spoke with a bit of an obstruction in his throat, or rather outside his throat. Thompson could swear that at times he counted a third chin somewhere about halfway down the bullfrog-like bulge in the man’s neck. It must have pressed against his Adam’s apple, because he remembered Mark’s voice sounding less like a muppet when they used to play together in the church yard on Sunday afternoons, or when they talked about which of the fifteen girls in their school they thought were cute, or even when they worked together at the factory before he left for seminary. The man’s neck puffed in and out as he practically shouted, “It’s just ridiculous! Who really would have the nerve to leave? You don’t just leave family, right Martin?”

The question tied to his name made him blush. How did they find out? No Martin, they don’t know. You haven’t told anyone, you haven’t written it down. He’s just asking you a question, “Well it certainly did surprise me. He did buy a grave plot in the church yard a couple years ago.” But he knew that didn’t hold much significance. To raise funds for a decaying church building, plots were put on clearance. Practically everyone in the town bought one. Everyone but Melanie, the outsider, the one who had run the factory ever since they were bought up by some company from the south a few years ago. Even some excited kids talked their parents into buying them a plot. Now in high school, groups of them liked to go hang out at their graves and drink. But he was surprised that Derek had left, though it all made sense now.

Several times when Martin saw Derek at the post office, which sat on the edge of town, he caught Derek looking at the horizon like he looked at Jessica—that is, before Martin had married her. He would say something disarming like, “Derek! You act like it’s the first time you’ve seen a buzzard sitting on a fencepost in Damnatus before.” Derek would blush a little (like Martin had just done), then shift the conversation. Other times Martin saw Derek at the little travel agency, looking at brochures, and he would say something like, “Aren’t thinking of leaving us for a while are you?” He would again turn red and stammer that he just liked looking at the pictures.

Martin snapped back to the meeting. He had been talking on auto-pilot for a while now, which wasn’t uncommon. The Reverend was expected to have something to say, to be the figurehead of wisdom, the representation of the town’s long-standing adages, idioms unique to Damnatus. Things like, “Going the path of a Melvin is sure to bring you the poverty of a Parker.” Which was a saying that had picked up in the 20s referring both to the laziness of the Melvins, but also, consequently, to their treacherous driveways filled with potholes. The story goes that a patriarch of the Parker family had broken an ankle in one of those Melvin potholes just before harvest and almost lost his crop and entire farm to the bank as a result. The Parkers still lived in the shabbier part of town, and only recently had begun to exit their position as the living literal fulfillment of a proverb. The Melvins were still considered the laziest sons of bitches in the county, but were tolerated as they made everyone else feel better about their own work ethic. He visited from time to time, always reporting back to the Deacons what they hoped to hear, that he had informed them of their reputation and what the good Lord wished they were.

Martin faded back into conversation. Mark had apparently shifted the conversation to a group of old ladies who were complaining about new carpet in the church. It hadn’t been walked on by their long dead grandparents and was therefore unacceptable. He was quiet for a moment, staring at pink laminated Texas wilderness. The thought of being somewhere else removed all repercussions of what he might say. Like a small gas flame it had slowly then suddenly worked him up to a boil. For the first time in thirty years of steady ministry, Martin himself, not the Reverend, spoke. “Well, I don’t give a damn! Let ’em pick out the carpet, dig up their ancestors and roll ’em all over the thing if they want. I wouldn’t consider myself a pauper if I never hear another thing about the church trimmings again in my life.” By the time he realized what he was saying, it was too late. They just stared at him as if he’d pulled off his skin and stood before them with bulging alien eyes, casually informing them that he had in fact abducted Martin several months ago and had been exploring their culture in his place. For the first time he felt clearly that he would rather be on Mars without a suit than be in Damnatus at this moment, at least he wouldn’t have to deal with the tapestry concerns of those wenches. No more would he have to see that bag on Mark’s neck inflating and deflating and hear the croaking that followed. Then he thought of Derek looking at all those brochures. He saw him look off into the sunset, only this time the pastor went back and joined him in reverent silence, in awe of the freedom from the only world he had ever known. But he couldn’t leave, they wouldn’t understand, they’d track him down. If only he’d had Derek pretend to kidnap him. They could have left at the same time, but it was too late. But those thoughts of freedom fell like rain on his dry heart and brought to life a seed planted by his now dead wife Jessie, as well as the still living Melanie, the one who had given him a taste of the outside world.

The Reverend left that meeting with smiles and handshakes, ignoring the elephant that had entered the room by way of his sudden outburst. That was the last that anyone but Melanie, and of course the now slightly wealthier town mortician ever saw of the dear Reverend again.

By Jared Stutzman

The mid-morning sun was bright. As Brian shielded his eyes with his slim-line NIV and sauntered toward the square steel erection that housed The Family Worship and Fellowship Center, he wondered if it always shone brighter on Sundays, or if it just seemed like it. “Probably just seems like it,” he decided. “All the shiny cars in the parking lots reflect the light.”

He tugged cautiously at the untucked hem of his shirt as he passed through the conversational masses of humanity in the foyer and into the multi-purpose sanctuary. When left artistically unbuttoned at the top and carefully disheveled, his shirt revealed both his hemp necklace and an A & F emblem on the chest of the gray T-shirt beneath it—a nice, careless look, but the maintenance of it required his constant attention. Brian looked toward the stage. Corlin the worship leader was inspecting a microphone. His square-cut black spectacles and spiky black hair glinted in the stage spots, and his fair-trade organically-grown black Sumatra steeped in his black french press on the floor near his black Pumas. Corlin’s shirt was also black, but the non-distressed areas of his jeans were blue, as was the small Celtic cross tattoo on his right forearm. The tattoo peeked out from under his half-rolled long sleeves like a badly-kept secret.

“Must not be a pledge Sunday,” Brian thought to himself. There was a pattern to Corlin’s sleeve-length. On pledge Sundays and for business meetings, Corlin’s sleeves were buttoned down tight with cuff links (and he also wore a tie). For ordinary Sunday morning worship (like today), his sleeves were discriminatingly tousled and half-rolled so that the Celtic cross barely peeked out. At youth meetings, he rolled his sleeves all the way up so that the barbed-wire inscribed on his bicep revealed itself salaciously while the Celtic cross was in full promenade.

Around the multi-purpose sanctuary’s six double-door entrances, families arrived as units. The units instantly dissolved as they entered the room, and the resulting swarm of individuals immediately regrouped into age-segregated clusters. Kid-clusters were gender-segregated as well, and adult-clusters seemed to share hair and clothing styles. Brian felt the magnetic pull of the “college and careers” cluster forming in the module of seats by the far western wall, and headed toward it.

The college and careers people always sat in the western seating section, which offered a side-view of the stage. The youth group claimed the eastern section on the opposite side of the room, facing them. The stage jutted out between the two side seating sections into a sea of seats. Three center seating sections faced the stage and had a more direct view of the theater-sized twin projection screens, the plexiglass speaker’s podium, and the kaleidoscopic arrangement of guitars, amps, and drums in the worship team’s area. Retractable basketball hoops faced each other across the room—incongruous, perhaps, but Brian knew that FWFC had intentionally designed the building to maximize utility at minimum cost.

Brian caught a glimpse of Pastor Thom walking through the foyer and realized he was looking forward to the sermon—imagine that! He liked Pastor Thom. After 18 years in a church where the road to God was paved with King James English, fear and trembling, Just As I Am, and the Republican party, it was nice to be at a church where people were into Jesus, but still cool. FWFC people were with it. They were connected, in touch with the world around them. Identification with Providence Free Will Baptist Church had been a social liability in high school, but Pastor Thom was an asset, even in a college town. His conversational grasp of popular culture was nothing short of masterful, and everything about him—his talk, his clothes, his mannerisms, his looks—here was a guy who lived in the moment, who had earned the respect of…well, of people like Brian and the college and careers amalgamation. And their friends, of course. Especially the unchurched ones, and that was the whole, point, right? Pastor Thom was a rebel, just like them. He boldly challenged the conventions of pastoral behavior and carriage. He didn’t rock the Che T-shirt and tattoo like Corlin on weekdays, but—you got the impression that he could have if he wanted to.

Coffee infused the air; doughnuts were ubiquitous. Brian disgustedly stomped his foot as he realized his tin coffee cup was at the bottom of the pile of dirty dishes on his apartment counter. About half of the members of the college and careers cluster sipped their beverages from cardboard cups; the other half drank from colorful, locally-crafted artisan pottery mugs. Brian would have to use a cardboard cup today—not that he really minded. The cardboard cups had been standard until Pastor Thom’s environmental stewardship sermon series last year. The guilt induced by the pictorial display of African famine (connected to the excesses of western culture) led most of the members of college and careers to a wholesale denouncement of disposable products, though there was some heated debate from a few climate-change deniers.

Brian had noticed that Pastor Thom didn’t actually mention climate change at all in his sermon series, but that hardly seemed germane to the discussion. Brian himself was without much of an opinion. He had grown up hearing that all environmental concerns were a hoax concocted by the political left, but then, he had also grown up hearing that the King James Version was the only inspired version of the Bible. When he thought about the African children begging for water, he felt a little guilty, but not enough to spend forty bucks on a pottery mug. Hence the tin cup from his camping equipment—a way to show he wasn’t heartless without really taking a side. Once he’d been seen with the mug a few Sunday mornings, it was sufficiently established that he was indeed a conscientious, concerned citizen. The furor over the issue subsided a few months after it began, and some of the pottery-mug types forgot their mugs periodically. It stopped mattering because no one had seen a picture of African children for months.

Brian snapped out of the pottery-mug drama that had been replaying in his head as he settled into his padded chair, tugging again at his shirt hem with one hand while he held his coffee in the cardboard cup with the other. Corlin was already beginning his pre-song spiritual banter over the background of a soft electric guitar. The bass drum thumped, the lights dimmed, and Corlin’s voice dropped into a coarse vocal fry. The bedlam of conversation in the multi-purpose sanctuary dipped momentarily beneath Corlin’s amplified voice, then surged back to a dull roar, then began to drop away again. The whine and hum of distorted guitars immediately flooded the aural gap left by the diminishing conversation. The decibel level in the room was a constant; the babbling cacophony decreased in inverse proportion to the band’s volume.

Brian reflected briefly on the stiff, artificial quiet that preceded services during his childhood at Providence Free-Will Baptist Church—the request the song-leader would call with a plastered-on smile—“please turn to number 141 in the hymnal—number 141.” Brian was glad those days were behind him. This worship style really fit his personality. It wasn’t exactly “emo” or “punk”— more indie/folk, but plugged-in and edgy. Definitely contemporary and relevant—music for his generation, with hair and clothes to match.

The techies at the sound board spun their knobs, dimmed the lights, and worked their magic on the projection screens. Green meadows swam by; a human silhouette trudged up a hill. Suddenly, there were words. The youth group cheered as it recognized the song. Corlin approached the mic, hands churning on a plugged-in acoustic, black Pumas placed precisely side-by-side and touching, knees slightly bent and flexing to the beat, eyes closed behind the square-cut black frames, spiky hair cocked to one side and undulating hypnotically. Emotion and intensity pushed wordless feelings from deep within his being to the surface, where they forced their way unbidden to his lips, formed almost by accident into English verbiage matching that on the screen. His passion revealed itself in breathy tones; it rubbed his voice into a raw, edgy, clarity; it pulled and tugged at his melody, weighing down the beginnings and ends of his phrases and distorting his pronunciation into a quasi-Australian accent.

Brian knew Corlin’s stage presence was a cultivated skill—a form of showmanship. But that didn’t necessarily make it wrong, right? What was the alternative, creaky, old-fashioned hymn singing? Three-chord campfire Kumbayas by some kid who “learned” guitar over the summer? With 500 people in the room, some polish was a good thing, especially if it reached people—especially if the people it reached were unchurched.

It occurred to Brian as he tried to sing along that, after two and a half years, he was still trying to justify his presence at FWFC. It was as though a piece of his brain was afraid that Providence Free Will Baptist might have been right all along—that God really did care about girls wearing culottes instead of pants, and that He really did frown at the very idea of movie theaters and eating out on Sunday, even though Brian knew better now. One of the best parts about moving away to college had been the chance to start fresh with church. Though he never rebelled outright against his parent’s church while he had been in high school, he was glad of the opportunity to go to a more relevant, contemporary church. It just took a while to shake off the false guilt complex he’d inherited at Providence.

Family Worship and Fellowship Center was a good church. It was. He knew this. He could tell because it was growing. It was reaching people. It was successful. It was a church you could bring your friends to, even intelligent, sophisticated friends.
Pastor Thom was a dynamic speaker, and he was a having a real impact on the community. The way he talked about Jesus—it made you want to be His friend. He preached about tough, real-life issues like poverty, racism, and the environment. He spoke about what mattered now, here, today—he knew what was trending on Twitter, and he talked about it. His sermons were full of references to the movies, to the news, to sports, to politics, to the things that Brian’s generation cared about.

At FWFC, Christianity was—well, Brian would have called it “cool,” but that sounded too juvenile. Hip, maybe. Culturally conscious and aware, socially engaged, sophisticated, growing, successful, relevant—it was perfect. What more could you ask of a church, anyway?