A River, Baptist

Reach to the ground and pluck a stone from the earth beneath your feet. No criteria must be met, any piece of gravel will do. Now, catapult it into the expanse of water before you. After witnessing the repercussions of the act, repeat it. Do this with as many different stones, bodies of water and methods of propulsion that you are able to implement. At some point you will realize that these factors are just extraneous details, and the result will always be the same. As the baptized rock is engulfed in liquid, a geyser of teardrops shoots to the sky. There is no longer proof that the rock, the catalyst, ever existed; and yet, ripples dance outward from the crash in all directions. The cause has disappeared, but the effects are a testament to its existence.

A perfect parallel of this event is the ingestion of a fifteen milligram oxycodone capsule. The pharmaceutical heroin is gone, but the resulting ripples still pulsate from the original source. I dosed myself merely twenty-eight minutes ago, and feelings of weightlessness are already beginning to permeate my body. If it were not for this manufactured feeling of euphoria, I would dive from the front of the riverboat so my body could be mangled and shredded by steel propellers.

This morning began the same as every fantastic morning, ever since I dropped a copy of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphose at a beautiful woman's feet. Sunlight crept through cedar blinds and gently illuminated my love. Her skin was like coffee with an overly generous serving of cream, her nostrils flared with every breath that kept her blood oxygenated. She stirred to life because of the sun and instinctively pulled me toward her; it was as if she was relieved to find me still lying next to her. I think she expected me to sneak away into the midst of night. She graced my lips with hers and our separate bodies became one in a bout of passion. Afterward, bathing under a stream of gushing water cleansed me of sin. After that, my heart was shattered in a way that I thought preposterous twenty-one minutes earlier.

The sun shines differently than it did this morning. It glares through the porthole and reflects off the burner door, piercing my eyes as I screw the panel shut. With each burst of flame entering the cylinder, a dense heat pervades the boiler room. Once the opening is properly sealed, I escape the vexing warmth and retreat up to the starboard deck.

If only I had made such a cunning exit from the choking steam earlier. While drying myself with a towel, the door creaked open and my love slid into the bathroom. I lunged for a kiss, she turned her head. The kiss landed on her cheek. Twenty-one minutes ago her lips were inseparable from mine; her hips clung to my own. She was now putting a finger to my mouth, and explaining that my child, my acorn, was growing inside of her. We were flies trapped in amber. For a moment, time was frozen in place. I soaked in the news and was stricken with joy. Our love would be consummated by the utmost means. We would be married on the seashore, and our peers would pelt us with rice. Our child would grow and speak and walk and call me father and her mother and would smile for a family portrait that would sit on our mantle above the fire that filled us with warmth as we opened Christmas presents from each other and we would laugh together when the dog wrestled our child and we would be a postcard family that loved each other endlessly until the end of time and earth was undone. We would be happy together, steeped in love.

I told her that was the best news I had ever heard. I told her that I had never been as happy as I was at this moment. I grinned and I told her that I wanted us to be married, and make the idea of our family become actuality.

She told me she was going to slaughter our baby. She told me that she was going to spread her legs and let a doctor dilate her cervix so that he could fit a hollow tube into her womb and vacuum our child out of her body. She told me that she didn't love me, and didn't want a family together.

Two hundred and thirty-eight minutes later, a black cloud of smog floats from a smokestack. The oxycodone isn't numbing me me the same way it did earlier, so I lean my head back back and swallow two more. The weight of the day rests heavily on my shoulders, and suddenly tears are slipping off my nose and into the river beneath. Every drop makes a tiny little epicenter that causes waves to ripple outward. The burner fires up and propels the riverboat forward to its destination.

Earlier, I was speechless while standing in steam. My lover proclaimed she
was not worth the worry, and that I was not worth the trouble. Emotions overwhelmed me in a fashion I was not familiar with. I had to prove my love. I needed to show her I was the perfect one for her, and she was the only one for me. Most of all, I had to persuade her not to destroy our masterpiece. I reached out for her coffee colored face and called her 'darling'. Without pausing to reconsider, she pushed it away and turned to make an exit. Suddenly, there was no longer love or affection or sadness within me, it was all replaced by rage. Before I paused to escape clouded fury, I put all the energy I could muster behind my fist and rammed it into the mirror. Glass shards filled the air, as the fluttered downward the sun created a stunning refraction of light. The impromptu light-show ended abruptly as the pieces smashed on the floor and the love of my life dove for cover.

The day we met, I was walking down the biography aisle in the local bookstore when I tripped on a large, misplaced tome: The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The copy of The Metamorphose leapt from my grasp and hit the floor directly in front of her checkered Converses; within seconds, I was lying right next to the book. In an attempt to gain back any shred of lost dignity, I jumped up and apologized. Before I tripped on an ancient, irrelevant text, I had no idea that Kafka was her favorite wordsmith. When we went to drink lattes after our chance encounter, I got a better glimpse into the minute details of her life. She was an aspiring playwright. She worked part-time at a corner deli making delectable sandwiches and cookies. She did not believe in love.

I did not believe in love then.

I do not believe in love now, either.

In between then and now, I knew for a fact that love was true.

Now, I stand at the bow of the ship and reluctantly allow the sun to turn every tear that slides down my cheek into a prism. My hands tighten around the handrail, and my mind races through memories of the past. I ponder times before I lost my faith in love.

The first time I told her I loved her, she stared into my eyes for hours attempting to detect my dishonesty. She was afraid, and I was as well, because a year ago neither of us thought that love was possible. She had reservations, because she thought that all men were the same in nature as the man that put her through immense turmoil. After seeing unbelievable hate in the eyes of a man forcing himself inside her, she was convinced that every man held the same rage deep within his heart. I thought love was a myth because I had never seen it in any capacity. Falling in love when you don't even know what it means is like learning how to walk for the first time. We took our first steps that day, and within weeks we were running together.

Under the guise of moonlight, we followed a trail of crumpled clothing to my bed. Our lips waltzed and our bodies followed suit. With every thrust, she winced. I wanted to be the one that cured her sadness, the hero that liberated her from terror. She never got over her past, and she never truly loved me either.

The last time we made love was this morning. Bits of the fractured mirror lay scattered on the linoleum. I pounced at her with a jagged shard of glass, and as I neared, she saw a glimmer of her own reflection. As I reached her eyes with my glass scalpel, the last thing she saw was the burning rage deep in my eyes. I spent years trying to prove that I was not like the man that violated her, and now she realized that we were one in the same. She saw the same hate she had feared for so long. Then she saw nothing.

None of this would have happened if she had yearned for a family as I did.

Every stone that is thrown into the water is a baptism. Cleansed, re-birthed, the stone has changed, but there are consequences that must be paid for the change to be undergone. The ripples that float through the water are only rumor of the crash; the evidence is slowly sinking to the sand beneath.

I went back down to the hull of the ship, into the boiler room. I had been there this morning carrying transgression in a blanket, before any other crew-members had arrived yet. It was swelteringly hot in the room, and with every flare of the burner it intensified even more. The scent of sulfur lingers in the tiny space, and you could feel the past burning away inside the inferno.

The silence was stagnant and still, until the clinking sound of a screw fell from the burner door and hit the floor. A moment later, another hit the ground. Each screw created a metallic thud that reverberated off of every wall. When all the screws landed on the ground, and all the echoing had ceased, I took the panel off of the boiler and stared into the flames. I gazed at the destruction I had done; I watched the ripples as they danced off into the distance.