Ninety-one days after I quit smoking, my wife bushwhacked me with a brochure for Our Lady of Consolation. I was already in bed with a serial killer novel. Lake finished brushing her hair, then poked her hand into a purse hanging on the doorknob, fished out the brochure and dropped it in my lap. On the cover—an aerial photograph of a white stone monastery nestled among bushy pines.
“You need a break,” she said.
He’d always been stunned by his wife’s beauty when she slept. Sleeping, her natural beauty was undeniable, entirely uninfluenced by his feelings, her feelings, their various difficulties with one another, resentments, by their complex histories, unfulfilled longings, secrets. In repose, there was nothing to interfere with the undeniable fact of her physical loveliness. You might even say angelic. He would say Perfect, if he believed in perfection, or believed that any one deliverance of beauty, any one manifestation of it, or any one vessel shaped into some form of it, could be considered ‘more’ beautiful than some other deliverance, manifestation, shape.
Click the link for a first look at Jurgen Fauth’s Kino, a startling novel coming next year from Atticus Books.
When I stepped barefoot on the bee I was allergic to bees. The Jesus-man steadied me with an even gaze. My attraction to the Jesus-man may have had something to do with feeling like a fraud, which I’d been feeling for too long. Read the rest of this entry »