Awakenings

My family escaped our Pentecostal church in New Hampshire and moved to the seacoast. No more mountains and cold, clear lakes. No more mill rivers foaming at the mouth or riotous fall leaves. No more stoned fathers sending their kids to buy them cigarettes because they couldn’t bear daylight. No more lawns hieroglyphed in decapitated car parts. No more poverty hung from everything like gray weather. No more hunger. And no more Sundays ripe with wailing as the possessed collapsed between pews, our pastor exalting the Lord in his blue suit, hands thrust before him as if holding back some great, electric wave.

We were different now. We were saved.

But we weren’t. Because our father said the new house was unclean, that demons conspired in every corner, moved between the shadows, and would climb into our dreams like bats. Our father walked from room to room, his voice raised, and called upon God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost to wash our new home of its past evils and fill our hearts with hope; with the right fear only devotion could provide.

We ate spaghetti that night after saying grace, holding hands around the table and thanking Him for providing for us, for watching over His children. Before a dessert of cherry Jell-o, my father announced he was moving out and that he and my mother were getting divorced.

Later, my brother and I said our prayers before getting ready for bed. We asked God for forgiveness and that he watch over us as we slept, and we rebuked all evil in the name of the Lord. Afterward, the silence of our room held the dark. Neither of us asked what the other wanted to know; which one was responsible for Dad’s leaving.

I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be now. Tomorrow meant a new school, new friends, new people to lie to about what happiness meant. I turned on my side as the rest of my family slept. Beneath me, I heard small sounds awake in the basement, almost like voices. Almost as if something was about to be born.