Evan James Sheldon

And All The Ghosts Sang Hallelujah

by Evan James Sheldon

And all the ghosts sang hallelujah

There’s an abandoned church, about a five-minute walk from my apartment, where I used to go to smoke weed. People know about it, but no one goes up there. Only me, and if I take anyone up there it is just to fool around in a creepy place. There’s something exiting, almost exhibitionistic, about going down on someone in baptismal font.

The last time I went I was alone, and today I was walking up the road by myself and I thought I was beginning to recognize a theme.

Work had sucked. My coworkers had sucked. The weathered had sucked and continued sucking, like nature itself agreed that the day was shitty and we might as well feel shitty and be shitty too. I don’t normally drink, but an artsy ex had left a bottle of absinthe in the cupboard, and my soon-to-be-ex was out and about, making sure that our lives were as disconnected as possible to make the coming breakup easier. We’re just different people, into different things. It’ll be better for both of us. I could picture their shapely lips forming the words already.

The shitty thing about this imagined breakup is that my soon-to-be-ex would be right when they said those words, and it made me preemptively irritated at the possibility they might so casually dismiss what we were losing.

So, I took the absinthe and walked to the abandoned church, planning on getting as shitty as I felt. It was snowing, but not the pretty fluffy flakes that float down and remind you that there is gentleness in the world. No. This was the sleet-like, wet, driving type of snow that chills your marrow and burns as it freezes.

The door to the church was shut, but opened easily, welcomingly, after a solid kick from my size-eight Sorel boot. The lights didn’t work, but the moon was up and churches always have lots of windows, with this being no exception. One window along the right wall had a small hole, the size of a dove, and snow had blown in at an odd angle, piling and dusting the end of one blood-red upholstered, wooden pew. In that light, it didn’t even look like snow. Rather it was grainy and sand-like, as if the church had been abandoned in Egypt or somewhere far more exotic than a dying Colorado mining mountain town.

I sat down next to the pulpit and poured myself a shot of absinthe in a plastic communion cup. One silver platter filled with the cups had been left behind, along with a couple of bibles, all the hymnals, two white baptismal robes, and a handful of tiny pencils without erasers. I took the shot and poured another before it hit my blood stream and took that one too. It tasted like Listerine and gasoline had been mixed with some witch’s herbs in a cauldron. It burned all the way down and lingered—deadening, dampening. It hurt a bit. It was perfect.

As I waited for the blanket of alcohol to wrap me up, I looked over my sanctuary. I tried to picture the congregation, hands clasped before them, singing in four-part harmony. It may have been the poor light, but I could almost make out a family holding hands near the back. Though I knew they weren’t really there, I strained to hear a song they may have never sung. Normally, on either side of the entryway hung two metal and glass sconces. But now, the one on my right was missing. A cluster of torn wires was exposed and protruding from an ugly hole. That was all that was left. If the sconce had been still been there, it would have hung over the family and the ghost of their song.

The thought that someone had been here, to my church, and had taken something was irritating. Who knew about this place? My exes for sure. But who else would come out here just to take one sconce? They hadn’t even bothered to take both sconces. Somehow this made the intrusion worse. Not only had someone invaded my space, or a space that I thought of as my own, but they had vandalized it.

I took a slug from the absinthe bottle and made a mental list of exes. Which one could have done this? Which one had the audacity to come out here and take the sconce? I tried to picture each of them, at home with their new lover, casually showing it off. It would be a concrete reminder of my crazy, a reminder of how much better they had it now. But none of my exes fit my mental image; they looked wrong in the photo of my mind. I tried to insert my soon-to-be-ex, but they didn’t fit either.

My cheeks were flushed with alcohol, but I knew my body would be cold, even if I couldn’t quite feel it. I had read somewhere that alcohol pulls the blood toward your stomach, and even though you feel warm, you aren’t. You can freeze that way. The church walls kept most of the wind out, except any that leaked in through the dove-sized hole in the window. I could feel it, the draft coming from that hole, so cold as to be hot. I laughed and thought about desert winds, and in the echoic sanctuary my voice didn’t sound like my own.

I got up and pulled one of the baptismal robes over my head. It was still so clean. Pure even. And it made sense that people would wear this to get dunked. But the added layer was thin, and didn’t warm me.

My hands had shrunk with the cold and I shoved them beneath the baptismal robe. I shouldn’t have come out here. I shouldn’t have come out here alone. And I definitely shouldn’t have drank the absinthe. I took another quick swig for the road, because fuck it, that’s why, and I set the absinthe on the altar. Maybe whoever had taken the sconce would come and find it. Maybe they would drink sips and wonder who had invaded their space. Maybe I could ruin their perfect little escape.
I wobbled my way home. The snow stung my face, and I was glad for it. My soon-to-be-ex was already there. And sober. I tried to shake off the church, the absinthe, and the cold. What are you doing back so soon? I asked. After I saw their smile dim, I wished I could have changed my tone. My soon-to-be-ex turned away and I thought that was going to be it. But they turned back with a small box in their hands and a smile flared so bright it hurt my eyes. It was a small box, with a curved top. It was the kind the held rings.

Do you remember when you took me to that church? Well, I went back, and took something, and I had this made for you.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. They kept speaking, explaining why they had been gone a lot recently, but I couldn’t understand any of the words. I couldn’t respond, my would-be-words turned to sand in my mouth. I could only think about how my hands were so cold and shrunken. How easy it would be to slide on a ring. And how easy it would be for that ring to slide off.

Evan James Sheldon's work has appeared in CHEAP POP, Ghost City Review, Pithead Chapel, Roanoke Review, and Typehouse, among others. He is an Assistant Editor and the Editorial Coordinator for F(r)iction. You can find him online here.