Jesus Saves Read Free

life, that all the women in the Ladies Guild could go to hell if they didn't like the way she dressed. God was nothing to her and the idea of redemption was bullshit. She never swore, so when she did, it was like a demon inside her. She didn't believe in God anymore. The body, she'd say over and over, was just shit and you can't turn shit into anything else. Liquid built up inside the stitches and when they changed the gauze, it was wet and fetid.
    She leaned over, pulled the side table drawer, got her cigarettes, knocked one out, then flicked the lighter, watched the paper ignite and the purple smoke loosen and rise. When her mother first found out she had cancer, she read books about aroma therapy and crystal intervention; she ate brown rice and steamed vegetables and listened to tapes about positive thinking and curing yourself through creative imagination. Her face was always flushed then and her lifereduced to anxious waits between doctors’ appointments. To her father's horror, she went to the healing ceremony at the local Pentecostal church, had snake oil rubbed on her forehead. When the preacher's hands rested on her head, she said she felt a definite sense of purity and release.
    Pentecostals believed that the end time was near and Ginger believed it too. She heard the universe was expanding and this was why time went forward, but she'd heard too that at some point the universe would begin to contract and then time would start backward. The point of change would be some kind of apocalypse, and then all of history would rewind itself like a video. Jesus had the power to make time go backward, like when he raised Lazarus from the dead. This was what was meant by risen from the dead. The dead would get their flesh back and be born again out of their coffins and lie in the hospital and then they'd open their eyes and their hearts would start and they'd get better and go home and live all the way down until they were children and then little babies and then they'd go back inside their mothers and melt to nothing and this would go on and on until all of history played itself backward, until people lived in caves again, until they evolved back into apes and then to fish and then tiny amoebae, until everything was in that electrified mud puddle and the lightning would take back its kiss of life and the earth would explode and time would be no more.
    Her father was talking in his sleep again, the words muzzy. His mattress heaved sideways like an imbalanced boat and she heard his feet land solidly on the floor and the springs uncoil as he stood. She snubbed the cigarette out against the bed frame, waved her hand to dissipate the smoke, then slid down into the sleeping bag, pressed her head against the pillow and pretended to sleep. She didn't wantto talk about God. It was always so humiliating. His footsteps were frantic and reckless in the hall; then the basement door pulled open and his surplice billowed down the stairs. Had he slept in his church robes? But once her eyes adjusted, she saw it was just a pile of dirty sheets draped down the steps and a cold draft caught in the stairwell, shifting and rattling the door on its hinges. He was still in bed, restlessly rolling sideways, yelling out, “Her spilled blood will pass for moonlight.”
    Amen, Ginger thought, crucify the flesh. She reached out from under the flannel and grabbed the lighter, pushed her thumb against the flint; a tiny sunset appeared, blue-green core, the arch of transparent orange and creamy wavering light on top. She brought that flame so close to her eye she felt its moisture heat up and evaporate. Jesus come down, she prayed, and save us from our miserable selves.
    Ginger's T-shirt twisted around her sweaty stomach and blood swelled against her temple. She opened her eyes. In the dream she'd approached the deer in the woods, slowly, with her hand outstretched, like when she was little and wanted to get close to rabbits or birds. The deer reached out