The following is an excerpt from SOPHIA, the debut novel from Michael Bible (Melville House, 2016). A live reading with the author will take place at Firestorm Books THIS FRIDAY at 7pm. More info below…
________
1
I’m a nautical man on my small filthy yacht since the bank took my house. I should cruise around the blue world gazing at the jumping fish but I’ve become transfixed by a praying mantis praying on a piece of toast. The Holy Ghost touches my shoulder to say hello.
Not now, I say. This mantis is praying his prayer.
*
I’m a holy fool on the hunt for something worthy. I chase the saints of all religions and long to join their team. They call me the Right Reverend Alvis T. Maloney but things are becoming unstable in the Goldilocks zone. Dusk is a bonfire of wild sun- flowers and across the night an archer aims his bow. That which has been is that which shall be. It’s Sunday morning in America. Twenty-first century. Year of the Dragon.
*
Eli, Eli. You are my last friend. You live with your brother Boom on the edge of town. You know the day of the week everyone was born on, a calendar savant in suspenders and a black trucker hat. Eyes like blue marbles, a Marlboro dangles from your lip. Your father tried to beat smarts into you and that pedophile baptized you in the Mississippi River. Be my Sancho, Eli, my man Friday, my Robin, my Dr. Spock drunk on the job. Your hat says, Easy come, easy go. I light your smoke.
*
Everything is always better ten years ago. They say we were once the great Southern Bohemia, now it’s people eating shrimp cock- tail and complaining about the AC in the juke joint. Eli, you’ve fallen for a teenage electric fiddle player on stage playing “Hard Day’s Night.”
John Lennon was born on a Thursday, you say. John Lennon was a good man.
*
I take my meals at the Starlight Diner in town, a greasy spoon near the harbor where I keep my boat. In a back booth a woman calls her lover Daddy. A drunk fat man cries with his drunk fat son. I’m waiting for the narcotics to rush in. I’m waiting to regain the good heat. Eli, you’ve soiled yourself in the bathroom due to an excess of cocaine and Budweiser. Your suspenders are falling off. There are a thousand more jobs at the bullet factory. Alabama is beating LSU.
*
I’m the lazy priest of this town’s worst church, nearly defrocked for lascivious behavior with female parishioners. I want to die for the King of Kings but can’t quite get it right. I long to lounge with Him in that upper room but I’m losing the desire. I council Tuesday, who I’m in love with, when her mind goes wrong. She wears a single dreadlock in her hair. In the confessional I undo my clerical collar and fire up a spliff.
My fantasy is to commit suicide on the moon, she says. I would open my helmet and explode.
I see, I say puffing smoke.
My daddy was like Jesus. A carpenter and a Jew, dead at thirty-three. Except my daddy had a Tasmanian devil tattoo and a drinking problem.
Interesting, I say. Puff puff.
Go on.
*
Jesus was the first Christian saint. A martyr for the cause of himself. He was crucified, dead, and buried. The third day he rose from the dead to sit at the right hand of God the Father Al- mighty. He spoke in nonsense stories on earth—mustard seed, camel through the eye, buried talents. Wept in the garden like a wuss. He is Man and God and Word. Logos and Agape. Selah. He died, but he really didn’t. Amen?
*
Big blue awful day out there. A woman in a burqa texts outside the open chapel window, a little boy shoots her with a water gun.
At the end we’re all just numbers, you say, Eli. Height, weight, credit score, IQ, social.
Very simple machines, I say. But things can be so complex. For example, could Tuesday and I just take it to the bathtub? Get wet and see what happens?
*
The cotton is coming in huge bricks on flatbed trucks and the clouds are God’s hobby sculptures—a heart, a lion, a gun. The man on the phone keeps yelling, Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking! There’s a new girl working at the Starlight. Skin of an Aztec, long hair falling down her back like a braid of black smoke. Her eyes are sapphire. She keeps returning my gaze.
________
Sophia was written by Michael Bible and published by Melville House in 2016. Go and buy the book. The audiobook of Sophia is currently in production and will be released by Talking Book later this summer. We will be holding a reading with Michael Bible this Friday at Firestorm Books in Asheville, NC at 7pm. You can hear some of Sophia. Badass heartbreak city, my friends. Get here. 610 Haywood Rd. Asheville, NC
