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“WHAT are you doing?”

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit. The tips of my right tarsi cling to the votive candle halfway down the front of my pants. Smoke curls around the shaft of my penis and lifts itself out of my Dolce & Gabbana underwear and over my shoulder.

I drop the candle into my briefs and pull my hand out of my waistband. Spin on the balls of my feet to confront the priest. His bulbous eyes bug from their sockets, while mine fracture him into a thousand tab-necked faces. The votive smoke traces a line into his nostrils. This man is a father. A fellow inseminator. Stud. All the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men.

I know he knows I have a prayer down my pants. The smoky evidence has coiled itself around my dick and pressed itself into his nasal cavity. There are a few people down on the kneelers sending love to their dead, pressing rosaries to their lips and whispering, “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” And then they cross themselves.

I move to block the empty space on the display of white wax candles. Drying wax burning the underside of my penis. Bulge in my pants. Thin crease between the priest’s eyebrows. I say, “Hi, Father Woodington.”

“Tonyyyyyyyyy,” he says, shaking his head. No one in the pews is praying anymore. Eyes locked on me and our priest, the man who speaks to God on our behalf. A family of six walks in through the glass doors from the foyer. The youngest boy wears a toque with bear ears. Father Woodington says, “Someone in this room lit that candle. Lit a prayer for a loved one. And you dropped that prayer in your pants. In the House of God, Tony. The House of God.”

I have been discovered. Dissected. Anatomised. He documents me in his field notes. I swallow and wipe my palm against my leg. Swallow again and again. I open my mouth to speak. The bear-boy points at my crotch. His mother swats his hand. Their family sidles its way along the wall to get around me and the priest. The mother knocks her head against the steel box holding the emergency fire axe. I swallow.

“Why don’t you go to the washroom and throw that candle in the garbage? Wash your hands then come have a seat at the front of the congregation, please. Go on.”

I skitter off into God’s washroom behind God’s crying room and kneel at the feet of His white throne with two droplets of piss on the seat. Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy aim. I spew my steaming oblations. Some of them splash across the seat, so I wad up some toilet paper and wipe them. “Sorry,” I mutter. “God, sorry.”

Wings rustle behind me.

“Kind of shitty, stealing a votive candle,” says Lionel.

“Fuck off. You steal Rolexes, engagement rings.”

“Yes,” he says, leaning against the stall’s open doorframe, “but I’ve never stolen someone’s fucking prayer. That’s pretty wicked, boss.”

Once upon a time, I carved only jesus saves into the paint of this stall. In black marker underneath, someone’s added hundreds on car insurance by switching to geico! Tears well up. I blink them back.

I wish I could flush Lionel Réaumur down the pipes. Watch his white feathers circle the bowl and wash away. His fancy golf clubs, his cigarette boxes, the trinkets that glitter in his Porsche’s glove compartment. But Lionel is unflushable. My floater.

I push past him and wash my hands with pink soap from a plastic dispenser. Splash my face. Rinse the vomit out my mouth. Lionel preens himself in the mirror over my shoulder. He is my reward for the bile tithing I pay.

“The candle’s still in your underwear,” he says.

“Right.” I dry my tarsi and throw the candle in the wastebasket by the door. It flattens heaps of paper towels, sinks to the bottom. Tiny water droplets dampen the front of my pants and sweater. Spray from the faulty faucet.

I reach for the door handle and Lionel says, “Gonna wash your hands again or what?”

“Fuck that noise.”

Father Woodington waits for me outside the washrooms. Clasps his hands. He smiles as congregation members enter the building. No smile for me. God accepted my bilious repentance and repaid me with Lionel. But Father Woodington, he will not forgive me and scatter bounties at my feet. He will, however, happily scatter thorns.

“Come,” he says. Beckons with one flick of two fingers. Wipes his nose with his knuckle.

He leads me to the front of the church, past rows of pious faces kneeling and reading and chatting quietly because it’s polite to be quiet in church. Past my neighbour who owns the limousine company and her banker CEO husband who wants to suck my skin. Past Angela, who rubs her bloating belly. Past the redhead mother of the liquor store wasp. Past the family of six with the youngest boy wearing that bear toque. All whispering. Mutters spread through the colony. They now know what the priest knows. A wave of twitching legs pans out from these six. A blue light for the dead.

Wayne locks Bob in embrace over last night’s hockey games. Angela burrows into a green hymnal resting on her swelling belly. Bob doesn’t know what Angela and I know. A thousand larvae a day. Webbed up against the walls and ceilings tunnels and alcoves and tool sheds. Lionel flies over us and perches on the arm of Christ. Now Lionel, he knows. Knows I know the priest knows I packaged a prayer with my junk.

The priest points to the bench in the front row with a knobbly white finger, the colour of lamb’s wool. I feel dozens and dozens of compound eyes breaking me into thousands and thousands of joints and guts and veins and pelvic shards. Shattering me. Antennae frisking the morsels, tasting the orange-peel and pistachio sins that line my exoskeleton. Scavenging for anything more to take back to their sandy hills, to talk about over fences and hedges, to chitter into the phone, to snap inside a beaded catechism.

Alter boys dressed in white enter the pulpit and light candles. These not for prayers, not for the dead. Well, maybe for the dead. Everything’s for the dead in these caverns. We worship the statue of our dead saviour and bury his life among nutshells and fruit rinds. Forget he ever lived. Twice. Father Woodington takes his place among the holy. He remembers every confession scraped onto his booth’s grate.

Silence. Father Woodington takes two deep breaths then dots his forehead, chest, shoulders. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

“Amen,” moans the colony.

“The Lord be with you.”

“And also with you.”

“My brothers and sisters,” he begins, one hand resting under his neck tab, “to prepare ourselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries, let us call to mind our sins.”

We raise our voices to clouds and suns. We would lift these bodies on our backs and parse them out to waiting mouths. If we had enough of us, enough mandibles to bite into the rock and vapour, we’d drag the heavens down to our tunnels and feast on them all winter. “I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do; and I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord, our God.”

I cough. The priest’s nostrils flare.

Blessed Mary, ever virgin. Poor Mary, when she had to tell Joseph she was pregnant, that he wasn’t the father. Some comedian did a skit about it. Or several. I giggle. There’s only one other person in my row: a withering woman in a flower-print dress, wearing glasses with thick lenses painted with depictions of the crucifixion. I want to lick the inside of those lenses and taste the sugar deposited on them. The woman has been nodding her head. I don’t think she’s heard what’s come out of His Reverence’s mouth. Her cane lies across her lap and she pets it like it’s a cat. But when I giggle, the woman’s claws tighten. Someone behind me clears her throat. Fuck.

“May Almighty God have mercy on us,” says Father Woodington, “forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life.” He scratches an itch on his leg. Chloe Valentine, Our Queen rest her soul, collected stones and stamps and hockey cards. Lionel: cigarette packets and anything shiny. Tinfoil wrapping and earrings and bells from pet collars. Me: robin eggs and beer bottle caps and hymnals and newspaper clippings and termite skulls. Father Woodington: confessions and amens and pewter civil war figurines.

“Amen,” we moan.

“Lord have mercy,” he sings.

“Lord have mercy,” we repeat.

“Christ have mercy.”

“Christ have mercy.”

“Our Queen have mercy.”

“Our Queen have mercy.”

Somewhere in the congregation, Angela rubs her abdomen to soothe twelve hundred expanding eggs. She will dispel them and deflate and tomorrow, she will lay twelve hundred more. Then the day after that and the day after that. We will pour ourselves down the throat of another anthill to thieve its rations, its harvest, its store of seeds and coconut shavings. We’ll spoon the spoils into infant mouths. Raisins and blueberry muffin crumbs. And we’ll raise those children to chant these same litanies. Follow these same sugar trails. Angela whispers, “Let us pray.”

We crawl over one another in silent prayer. Spasmodic legs entangle my own, brush my belly, knee me in the mouth. I taste cinnamon, coconut cookies, watermelon seeds, maggot, parmesan, gravy, soya beans, cream corn, cabernet sauvignon, strawberry-rhubarb pie, potato skin, scrambled egg with pepper, peanut butter, bacon bits, semen, southwest chipotle sauce, orange rinds, grape bubble gum, spearmint mouthwash, oregano, and the smallest drip of pistachio mint ice cream.

“Today,” proclaims His Reverence, halting our prayers, “I shall talk about covetousness.”

Of course you shall.

“Brothers and sisters,” says Father Woodington, “Exodus twenty-fifteen tells us the Word of God: Thou shalt not steal. We take this as our seventh Commandment. Our ninth and tenth come just two verses later: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.”

Does that include thy neighbour’s daughter’s ass?

“And when the people of Moses heard these words they also heard thunder and lightning and trumpets, and smelled the smoke of the mountain.” Father Woodington smelled the smoke of the mountain when it rose from my pants and stuffed itself into his flaring nostrils. He thumbs his nose. Adjusts his tabbed collar. “They knew that to do these things, to act against these or any other of the Lord’s Commandments, was to sin. And to sin could bring waves crashing down on them from all sides. They would drown in the tunnels.”

Behind me: the swelling whispers of my candlelit transgression against the dead. Passed from mouth to mouth like a bean or blueberry muffin crumb.

The whispers might as well be thunder and lightning and trumpets. Lionel caws from his sanctuary. I chew the ends of my tarsal claws. Zone out to skitter through the first part of the Liturgy of the Word, through standing and singing in one, monotone voice: “Stealing From the World Away.”

Father Woodington flails his arms in his closest imitation of a living prophet. “Why do we sin, brothers and sisters? Because we’re scared? Greedy? Because we’re evil? What is stealing one tiny item, in the grand scheme of things? According to the gospel of James, ‘For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.’ So when we break the Seventh Commandment, we break the other Nine. Stealing even the smallest of things—a bottlecap, a robin’s egg, a candle—brings us under the righteous wrath and judgment of God.”

I worship all the gods. I take the Lord’s name in vain. I defile the Sabbath. I have dishonoured my missing mother, presumed dead. I have eaten the life from breathing bodies, committed adultery, stolen bottlecaps and eggs and candles and prayers and faces and fucks, borne false witness, coveted and coveted and coveted and coveted.

“And as a congregation, one transgressor damns us all.”

Compound eyes are magnifying glasses under the sun, shining on the back of my thorax. I crisped ants on the patio after Chloe’s death. Wisps of curling smoke rose around their stiff corpses. Votive candles that no longer skittered. Catch these six-legged prayers before you send them up to the sky, smoking.

“A heart that trusts God will not steal. God will provide.” He holds his hand over his heart and sips vodka from a red water bottle. “One gentleman I presided over sought the counsel of the Lord when he planned on robbing a liquor store with his friends. The Lord bade him stay his light fingers, and he did. One month later, he won a hundred thousand off a scratch ticket.”

Someone’s doodled a birthday cupcake in this hymnal on “We Gather Together.” Right beside the first verse. We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing; He chastens and hastens His will blah blah. Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own. Birthday cupcake. One candle.

One candle has bought everlasting winter for all of us. No summertime to forage. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit. We’re all going to smell like brimstone and burnt popcorn.

“Amen,” we chant.

“Thanks be to God,” we chant.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done in the tunnels as it is in heaven.”

Crawl across pages of readings and the gospel according to Father Woodington. Lord, hear our prayer.

We rise row by row to take communion. We all go marching two by two, the little one stops to sit in the pews and we all go marching down to the ground to get out of the rain. Chewing the Lord’s body, swallowing pieces of rib and thigh and rump that Lionel pecks out and flings down to us from his perch. But according to the Word, thou canst only eat the body of thy sister if thou hast been dunked in the sink. So the boy in the bear toque and I both hold our arms over our chests and Father Woodington draws crosses on our foreheads with his finger and says, “May God bless you.” Except when he says it to me, he injects venom from his mandibles. Shoots it into my veins. My legs twitch and my mandibles froth. I limp back to my pew and curl up in a ball on the polished wood. Hold all my legs against my underbelly. My antennae wilt and hang limp along my back. Pistachio shells tumble out of my pockets and bounce along the carpet, under benches and kneelers. More oblations on top of bread and wine and puke, this time for the colony. Meals they can scrape from inside the ovary walls. They swarm under me, over me, through me.

Salvation through pistachio skin.

The cherry wood chest under my bed containing robin eggs, Angela’s panties, one newspaper clipping of a dead girl, beer bottle caps, two hockey cards, bubble gum from under the shelf in a church cupboard, my mother’s porcelain pepper shaker shaped like a lamb, the smell of rotting robin eggs and orange peels, a wasp’s engagement ring, luggage tags, a toothpaste tube, my big brother’s anger at his lost Yzerman rookie card, a piece of pinewood from my mother’s coffin, sixteen pocket squares, and a teaspoon from a café in Paris. A box full of crumbs that will eternally damn the entire colony to a life further underground than our tunnels. Hell will be an anthill that carves its own earth and roots into new tangles. We will be constantly searching in vain for the larval cavern, the midden, the cellar full of food. Unable to navigate tunnels that slither into new paths, new connections, new tributaries that lead to lava, swirling at the centre of the earth. A core from which we cannot extract seeds.

I puke up more offerings. My brothers and sisters collect the nuts and bile. Coat their slices of Christ’s flesh with my stomach’s slime and carry it back to the tunnels, the church’s crypt, the confessional, the cubbies that hold the hymnals and gospel readings. Father Woodington’s blessing’s formic acid swirls through my veins and decomposes the lining of my stomach, dissolves the brick and mud and pistachio and yogurt and skin inside. I vomit again. Blood. The residue of Father Woodington’s finger burns into my forehead. Was there something in the Bible about corroding cross-shaped scars? Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck shit.

Angela’s arm snakes around my shoulders and holds my shuddering, sweating body. Twelve hundred hearts beat from inside her swelling abdomen. Her belly drags behind her on the church floor. A new wave of workers every day.

“Jesus, Tony,” she says. “You look whiter than that crow.”

“One candle. Just one. Does that really mean I’m guilty? That everyone here is, because of me?”

“You put it down your pants before mass,” she says. “That’s fucking awesome.”

There’s a layer of wax stuck underneath my fingernails and covering the small burn on the bottom of my penis. “I’m not sure Father Woodington agrees.”

“I’m not sure anyone in this room does, Tony. But you’re you. You’re going to do what you do. The lingerie you took. You dropped some shells, by the way.”

I clutch my rumbling intestines. Need to keep them from ejaculating again. “Wait, you know I stole your lingerie?”

The entire room silences. The buzzing colony that sends missives up from my living room vents listens for our confession. Any hint about how to evade containers of baking soda and icing sugar to conquer the Queen and take her for their own. They crave my insemination duties. Which are way better than digging trenches or organizing June bug hunts. So they sit in the pews, quiet. Even Lionel can hear us, perched on Christ’s arm. Father Woodington clutches the gold jar of communion wafers to his thorax and darts back behind the podium. Gobbles a few pieces of Lionel’s perch for himself.

Angela squeezes my thigh. “How could I miss those banana yellow panties? Or, you know, miss that they’re missing. You not only took them, you also took that ring you gave me. And kept sneaking back into my house every time I tried to sneak it back into yours. And my dad’s pink rosary. I’ve seen you light-finger a button pin from the movie store but you never wear it. That’s what you do. What makes you unlike the rest of this swarm. You think these people don’t have their own banana panties? Their own pistachio shells? Bottlecaps? You were the one who told me about Wayne’s fetish for that cleaning supply smell. And Mrs. Cooper’s affair with Mr. Brockman. The way Loraine organizes samples of her baby’s shit between microscope slides. And Emery steals moulds of peoples’ teeth from the dentist. That we all have things we hide under our beds in little cherry wood boxes. Even God does.”

“The Lord be with you,” recites Father Woodington.

“And also with you,” says the congregation. Angela and I stop talking. Her father is so absorbed in conversation with Wayne that he hasn’t noticed Angela’s no longer sitting with him. I read a few words off his lips: Zetterberg, dangle, peanut butter.

His Reverence holds one hand out, suspending it over the mass of still antennae. “May Almighty God bless you, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

“Amen,” they moan.

“Go in peace to love and serve the Queen.”

“Thanks be to God,” I croak.

We rise as one and swarm through the aisles. Angela and I cut into the crowd. When we pass the holy water, she dips a couple fingers in and draws a winking face on my forearm. Sucks the blessing from her fingertips. Twines her tarsal claw in mine. The air outside tastes of pistachios and orange juice. She peels the wax from under my fingernails and lets it fall to the grass for our brothers and sisters to forage.






ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Braydon Beaulieu's work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Windsor Review, Broken Pencil, OffSIDE, and A Few Lines. He will soon begin pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Calgary. He did not put a votive candle down his pants as research for Swarm Theory.


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LF #016 © Braydon Beaulieu. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, May 2012.

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