Contributor: Ron Riekki

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I used to love churches and then I dated a Christian
and she pierced my insides with a spear, so then I started hating
Latin and stained glass and life and carols. It was an eternal time

of drunken birthdays and the great courthouses of loss.
I was pretty much moronic in all those years, where you waste
dancing and collapse on driveways. Life, I’ve found, is something

that rolls away from you, like the tire that ended up going out
into the highway, the cars slamming on their breaks to avoid hitting
1/100th of an automobile, the ghost of a car, gone. I wish

sometimes that I could have been Christ. She would still be
with me in Heaven or Cincinnati. Something like that.
I have a new girlfriend now. She could care less about the politics

of God. She falls asleep at my side during funerals and weddings
and fireworks and plays. I look down at her and think how peaceful
atheists can be when they have given up on debates. She took me

to a cathedral in Lille, France, and I only went inside because she
treated it like a museum. I was ready for something ancient
and forgot that you can walk into some buildings and feel like God

is there, happy, high, up above you in the ceiling, with His own heartbreak
and mistakes. I stared at a statue of a monk who looked so calm
that it was like a feather on my spine, thumbprints of peace and forgiving.


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Ron Riekki's books include U.P.: a novel, The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), and Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, http://msupress.org/books/book/?id=50-1D0-3479#.VKZ4kmTF-PU.