Offering
By Patrick Roland
By the third folding chair from the back, the dark-haired woman has already lifted her arms. Not in pain. Not in prayer. Just raised, like she’s stretching before something she knows is coming.
Her mother sits beside her in a fox-fur scarf that still smells like a department store, even though the place we’re in used to sell canned corn and discount cereal. “Polio,” the old woman says to anyone who will listen, nodding at the hands her daughter keeps clenched tight, like fists holding mysteries.
I’m ten. My lungs are already failing in ways I don’t have language for yet. A baggie of pills bulges in my left pocket, so I keep a stuffed penguin in the right pocket to balance out.
“Cystic fibrosis,” my mom says, because she’s learned that saying the words out loud sometimes makes people behave better.
The dark-haired woman glances back at me. Just once. Her eyes flick down, take inventory, then lift again to the peeling ceiling tiles. I stare at the floor where the cereal aisle used to be. I can still smell it if I try hard enough. Cherry, chalk and the promise of toys I was never allowed to have. When we shopped here, I’d rub my hands on the colorful boxes, knead them along the thick seams of my clothes, and sleep with the smell clinging to my shirt.
The microphone squeals. The preacher raises one hand, asks who wants to be healed, as if that’s ever been a real question. He doesn’t wait. My brain is still processing the question. He goes straight to the dark-haired woman.
She stands quickly—too quickly—and her mother gathers her hands as if they might break off if left alone. Together they shuffle down the wide aisle between the beige folding chairs, right where carts used to turn toward the chocolate milk.
The preacher leans close. I can’t hear what he says, but she nods once, small. Her mother’s scarf winks slightly before she jerks it back around her bosom. He presses the wax side of a candle to the dark-haired woman’s neck. She doesn’t flinch. When he pushes her backward, she falls neatly into the arms of two men in starched collars. Her smile dulls the white in their shirts.
They lift her. She stands. Strong. Balanced. Her fingers open wide, stretching toward the lights like she’s waking from a nap instead of paralysis.
“Miraculous!” her mother shouts, already crying, already bending to retrieve the scarf before it’s trampled. Someone claps. Someone else says “Praise Him,” and means the room, not God.
I try to raise my hand, but my mother’s already standing on her chair, already saying my name like it’s a password to unlock freedom.
When it’s my turn, the preacher bends close and whispers, “Do you believe?”
I don’t know what he’s asking. In God. In him. In the grocery store coming back. I nod anyway.
The candle drags along my chin, sticky and warm. His palm presses into my chest. Dirt under his fingernails smells like my dad after work. He pushes me back. The men catch me late, hands slipping, shirts damp under the arms. One man hooks a finger under my collar and hoists me forward.
“Do you feel Him?” he asks.
I think about my grandfather telling me how he floated in the Pacific for hours, shark fins cutting the surface, how faith kept his muscles taut, his breathing steady. I think about lying in the field behind his house, waiting for God to come get him after he died. I wait now for the same tightness, the same strength.
Nothing happens.
I nod anyway.
After a few more healings, I tell my mom I might need another dose. She shouts. The preacher looks annoyed this time. He presses two candles to my neck and shoves harder. I slip between the men’s arms this time and hit the linoleum. My shoulder stings. I smell cereal dust and metal. A different pain burns my neck, kneecap, toenails.
The preacher sprays holy water from a pink plastic bottle and reminds everyone to leave spare change and checks in the bucket by the door.
On our way out, I look back at the dark-haired woman. She’s standing apart from her mother now, hands lowered. She isn’t looking at the ceiling anymore. She’s looking at me.
Her mouth opens like she might say something unscripted. A tear slips out instead, fast, accidental. She wipes it away with the side of her index finger, flicking it toward the floor like a reflex she learned years ago.
For a second, I think she might follow us. That she might say she’s sorry. That she might kneel down and tell me not to believe any of it.
She doesn’t.
She turns back toward the bucket, as I watch my mother’s freckled hand reach toward it.
THE END
Author Bio: Patrick G. Roland is a writer and educator living with cystic fibrosis. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in journals such as Rattle, Jersey Devil, Rejection Letters, scaffold, Maudlin House, and others. Twitter: @pg_roland