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Metapsychosis

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Gasp

By
  • Gale Acuff
 |  19 Oct 2020
Features Poetry
Say yr prayers... [www/public]
 
In Sunday School today I saw Jesus move on the cross behind Miss Hooker's desk. He opened one eye and looked at me or somebody else in the class but no one seemed to notice, I alone gasped like they do in the comic books and Miss Hooker stopped her story of Him and the loaves and the fishes and feeding the multitudes, which was a miracle, and asked me, Gale, are you alright--you look as if you'd seen a ghost, and I said, Yes ma'am, I'm okay, I'm sorry, but didn't dare look again at Jesus because I was afraid I'd scream and I'm ten years old and growing so I'm a big boy now, in three years I'll be a teenager and then it's all downhill from there, Father says, and I'm not sure if he's kidding but he's a plumber so he should know, all that tin-and-lead solder and other people's bathrooms. And after class Miss Hooker called me back so I went up to her in her red chair, which matches her air, and her eyes like the green of the grass after it's just been cut, I should know, I cut ours at home and not with a Toro but an old-fashioned rotary, we're not rich, not even middle class, probably not even lower-, but we're not quite poor and our yard's not big and when I cut it you can't tell the weeds from the grass and that's kind of like cheating but it's not a sin real sin gets you Hell and that means fire, and forever, and I don't play with matches, either, except when Mother lets me light her Salems, the match-head smells like sulfur after I blow it out, it's a little like Hell smells, I guess, it's the smell of sin and it's tempting but too much of it is death. There's probably a lesson in that. What happened, Miss Hooker asked--she meant my shock--so I said, Well, please turn around and take a look at Jesus there and tell me what you see. I was looking at my shoes and God may be everywhere but He's not nailed to my Thom McAns, not even if they're my only good pair, which they are, I only wear them Sundays and twice to funerals. So Miss Hooker turned and looked, I knew because I felt the wind of her turning and again when she turned back, and she said I see the Son of God, Who shed His blood so that we can all have eternal life if we believe. I said, Yes ma'am, and turned myself to leave but then she asked, What do you see? and I said, I can't look again but I thought I saw Him open one eye and look at me, and Miss Hooker said, Well, maybe your eyes were playing tricks on you or you fell asleep for a moment and dreamed it or maybe you had a vision. I said, Thank you ma'am, that narrows it down some, but I've got to get home for lunch and it's a mile's walk, you know, and she said, Yes, you may go now and Jesus loves you and I said, Yes ma'am, and when I was almost through the door I turned around again and looked at Miss Hooker, she's so beautiful, all those freckles, no wonder Jesus wept.

Gale Acuff

Gale has published poetry in Ascent, Reed, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Poem, Adirondack Review, Florida Review, Slant, Nebo, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Roanoke Review, and many other journals in eleven countries. He has authored three books of …

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Metapsychosis is a project of Cosmos Co‑op, a community dedicated to art, consciousness, and culture. We are building a home on the web, with local roots, where people of the Earth can band together to collaborate on creative projects, while contributing to the vision of an evolving planetary society. Visit our other projects: Untimely Books, Infinite Conversations, and Cosmos.Social.

Unless otherwise noted, all rights are reserved by the individual authors. Other website content is licensed under Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Site background image by Kai C. Schwarzer, "Eine Frage der Erfahrung" (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)