Abel Strand pushed the handle in and twisted the knob. There was time enough for breakfast: An unrealized egg, he thought. You've got to take the life out of it first; the quality that makes it animal. That's why I don't eat lobster.
     Theshell was thinner than he thought and crushed into itself instead ofsplitting into two domes like a cartoon egg. The yoke tore on thejagged edges and slid into the bowl among other fragments of brownshell. He pushed his finger through the white jelly and fished out thehard bits before beating the egg into a yellowish soupy non-egg.
     It must happen before the shell forms, he thought, after that it'd be impossible. The chicken came second. The rooster came first. Hepoured the mix into the steaming pan and listened to the dissipatingcrackle as the surface cooled for an instant under the congealing egg. If a rooster lays an egg on thepinnacle of a triangle, which side will the egg fall down? Humpty had agreat fall. You can't take the life out. A non-Humpty. Roosters don'tlay eggs, stupid. The life is in the blood. Humpty came first; therooster came second before the shell.
    
     There was time enough on a Sunday morning despite the fact Abel had overslept. Heplaced his fork prong-down over the lip of the emptied plate. The tidalsunlight bled through the cross hatch of the window pane projecting theelongated image onto the table where he sat. He squinted forcing hiseyes between the shape and the space around it; the light and thenon-light, blinking as he blurred his vision attempting to wipe hismind clear of bias. The shadow comes first, he thought. The shadow comes first because their deeds ave wicked.
    Abel carried his breakfast-ware to the kitchen, running the tap whilehe poured coffee grounds down the disposal. The hour had turned and heheard the boomerang sound of bells through the mechanic gurgle andpulse in his ear. Methodists first:Daylight Savings Services. They don't pull the rope. It's allmechanized now...Quasimodo stands in line at the unemployment office.The bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.
    The bath smelled fresh like plastic and Abel let the shower run for aminute, thinking it might disinfect the basin. The water pressure camestrong with the warm beating of the stream diffuse through his chest ashe breathed the heavy air. He felt the briefest pulse of virility andpotence as if absorbed somehow through quickened water, realizing witha strange indifference the yellowish mix in the drain. But he remainedupright with palms flat against the tile, not counting or blinking tillthe water cooled like a lapsing heartbeat. Only then did he close thevalve and open his eyes.

     It was half-past when Abel finallypulled the front door flush and walked down the street to where his carremained wedged between a hydrant and mini-van. The air felt warm,alive with the vernal hum that could be electric or insect; a dronethat ceases to be wind-borne some time past April. The pavement wasfissured but level; wet where the cracks ran to a sandbar around theculvert.
     He fit the key and opened the door, realizing the passenger had been left unlocked since Friday. I told her to lock it just in case, hethought, reaching across with a quick slap on the button before lookingback to catch Mr. Gibbeld squatting to pick up a fat Sunday paper. He hates me.
    Gibbeldturned with a forced contempt holding his paper like it was adetestable object he had to carry to the house. He stopped only for asecond, wiping an imagined smudge from the chrome trim of his car withthe cuff of his bathrobe sleeve. Until recently Gibbeld had the onlycar alarm on the street. It went off with the unpredictability of anactive volcano. Abel mentioned it to him once with little result orchange in it's sporadic blaring. One day Gibbeld banged on his door.
     "Do you see this," he said shoving a yellow slip so close to Abel'sface that it blocked out everything else. "Fifty dollah citation. AndI'll be damned if I don't gotta take the whole thing out, cuz they tellme next time it go off, it'll be a hundred. Hope yer happy, Strand."
     A few days later Gibbeld's car stereo was jacked and he never showed a kind face to Abel again.

    "I told her to lock it," he said again to the windshield as heturned off Grave Street onto Bridgmont. There was something aboutdriving that bothered Abel at times: the inert motion of it, thesomehow unearned travel as if it took as much energy to sit on thecouch tapping his foot. It used to mean something: One Day's Journey. "I told her."
He jerked the car to a stop, listening to the gravel spit under the tires. The bridge must be up.
    He rolled down the window and watched the mast cut through the roof ofa pick-up four cars ahead. As the ship passed beyond the canal it'shull seemed to flex through the rippling gloss just at the line wherethe keel broke the surface. It's not me. Abelwatched as the sail dropped, pregnant with the wind, movingimperceptibly toward an unseen point. The hull rose in the swell freeof the channel, suffering the ocean's perspective. He watched as itfell into the curve of the earth: the infinitesimal sea.
     Abel sat back as the bridge dropped slowly down. A great fall. Theengine stuttered. He held the wheel at a distance, rigid, almost asthough he were pushing the car away from himself. The vibrations shookthrough the axle, the muscles in his hand, his face in the trembling miror.  The dark of his eyes had shrunk in the milky blue-white. heblinked rhythmically, staring through the blood red lids holding outthe glare off the hood of the car, watching the circles grow andsubside. The shape and the space it takes up. The space I take-I took. The non-me I fill with me. A horn blew and he found the gas with his foot.

     The route to New Congregational church had become instinctual forAbel, in a way that if he ever intended to go beyond the church, awayward lapse in thought inevitably brought his car into the horseshoedrive that arched at the front entrance. The unfinished exterior of thebuilding possessed a hasty but durable quality as if the planks werenailed up in preparation for a hurricane that never came. The weatheredauburn walls gave the impression that the lumber had been painted tolook like wood. But it was a lasting landmark on the waterfront; amodern ark for a people not given to steeples and bells.
     Abel turned the engine off and looked across the stonedust lot for a car he hoped was missing. Good, she's not here yet. The door opened with a rusted pop and Abel rose deliberately eying his pant cuff on the dirty lip of the frame. He walked quickly lifting his feet in a vain attempt to isolate the gray mud to the very bottom of his shoes. The steps were red granite and he reached the top uncertain as to whether his last stride had been the sixth or seventh. These things are not accidental. As he reached the door a voice broke his stride.
     "Abel, would you mind." Mrs Smick stood at the base of the stairs with her bamboo fingers wrapped around the railing. The opaque skin. The ankles swollen around her charcoal shoes as if her legs were plants that had grown too large for their potting. Her buckled legs were sheathed in slouching tights colored (like the church itself) to give her skin the illusion of skin. Abel moved quickly to brace her ascent.
     "My, thank-you, Abel," she said. "Aren't we feeling chipper today." Abel wasn't sure it was a question and had only the vaguest idea that chipper was a quality of being attributed to anyone under sixty with a steady pulse.
     "Yes, it's the weather I think."
     She squeezed his arm reflexively with each step, pausing to check and see if she had already reached the top.
     "Don't be so sure it isn't something else, I think," she said squaring her shoulders to look directly at his face. "In due time, Abel. First ways first."
     Abel moved ahead pulling at the palm-smoothed handle of the door.
    "I thank you. All-ways."
     He waited a moment for her to finish her peculiar interrogation, but when he entered the foyer she had already plotted to her pew and was busying herself with a tissue tucked into the sleeve of her sweater.
     The church experience was familiar to Abel in a way that a grocery store is familiar. There were those who started in the produce and those who began in grains. And to reverse the order would be as unnatural as driving on the left side of the road. It was not a question of dogmatism, though if you asked, many might say something to the effect, "My parents started in grains." It is the comfort of habit that forms an unspoken doctrine; an insignificant religious mantra. Abel knew he would sooner be confronted for the peccadillious sin of sitting in Mrs. Smick's pew, than for not occupying a pew at all.
     Abel followed a fray in the carpet to where the angles met and turned with a haste not quick enough to be called deliberate, yet not lax enough to invite a pause for conversation. There were a hand's worth that he knew beyond name; the rest were statues, quickened only for the entrance and exodus between the call and benediction. They filled the vacuum with blank life and stilled the hollow reverberations. He demanded no more of them.
     The pew felt strangely warm as Abel eased his body into it. Four back. Three over. Bride's side. The organ began to enter almost as though coming from behind. The long sustaining horns seemed to swell to the shape of the room, and from beneath -as if ascending mercury steps that suddenly lost viscosity and form- a scale of notes fell like they were driven by the hand of Sisyphus. The I that disappears. Roosters don't lay eggs. I was Able. Before the shell. Abel.
     "Abel--" Mrs. Smick had turned around to face him. The words were coming now and her face shook them out while she tapped her hollow knuckles on the back of the pew. "Don't think I have to tell you these wooden bones have a history. I say bones because the flesh life's sure out of them now. Solid, though, and I could tell you that's worth for something. Ought to be for all the leagues they've spanned past only Lord knows what and all that's found within them.
     She paused and fussed again with the tissue in her sleeve as if she were pushing the stuffing back into the arm of a doll. "The pews, Abel. Cut from the ribs of the Alabaster that ran more than the old oil on the whale-roads. Made Adam look like a bit selfish I guess. She retired, you know, for the fact of a leaky shell. All that marine life clamped on like they was calling the timbers home--it begins to ware on an old ship. Of course it's a past time even before my father came up, but I knew it as a child. So, they said rather than sink it into the harbor they ran it to earth and gave it up for something still in use. Don't here we sit today?"
     She waited with something not quite smiling across her face; a half-felt satisfaction that only ran for an instant to the corners of her mouth before she chased it back.
     "But doesn't the Lord baptize in fire too?" Her eyes grew larger as if she willed the pupil's dilation, lapsing into her attic memory as if the very picture hung from a nail on her black lenses. Then with a exhalent groan, she dropped the lids like she was snuffing out a dancing flame still warm in the recess of her mind. When she opened her eyes it was as though she had been refocussing the image in a tub and waiting for the edges to take form before allowing light to enter again.
     "It was for the sake of the Christ-child, you know. My sister Martha only held up seven. And Jimmy, her Joseph the son of Clive Armstead that owned a piece of farm on down Dogwood Road, not older. Don't you see it was a proper manger for us that knew how our Lord suffered the world of men. Suffered, that came not of man, but out of a woman.
     They said it was the star that caught up while we was occupied with the face of Martha (or Mary) holding the bundle of our Lord. And the shepherds not really minding it with the lowing going on now. It wasn't till the Silent Night that we saw the whole mess fall from the rafters to the wrapped up head of a wise-man. Of course it was Joseph (or Jimmy really) that stomped it out. 'The most I've ever seen a Joseph do,' said Bill Marler to my father. My sister just cried a bit for the sake of the Christ-child not having a star to light the sky above Beth-le-ham anymore. I told her the wise-man came first before the star fell, so it wouldn't matter. But she kept saying he needed the star to come home.
     We walked back down and it was an awful winter wind to be in. It was near to half-past the Eve at twelve or so when I heard the bells and saw it up on the hill. Those awful red horns like a breathing shape pointing out of the windows. I heard my father's feet falling down the hall and saw the lights moving as from one house to the next that woke to it. And you know my sister Martha's crying louder than the bells, it seemed, for the sake of the Christ-child having no place to sleep for Christmas.
     It was bright for the morning and a snow came when no one was paying attention. I ran up in my boots to see if my father would still come for Christmas morning. If I told you I didn't see my father and Mr. Armstead shouldering this very pew like they were putting one to earth inside a charcoal coffin."
     Her eyes looked him over where he sat watching her palms circle over the smoothe grain on the arm of the pew before she rapped her hollow knuckles hard against the wood.
     "Now tell me if you don't smell the ash through all the sweat of sinner's prayers." She waited almost until Abel  felt he should actually drop his nose to the back of her seat. "But I'm one that can tell you I remember the smell of sea life in it. The deep blood and brine." She touched his shoulder and snapped back around facing the altar. "And what an awful stench he burnt out of it."

     There were shapes. They came out like faces that suddenly gape with open mouths, rise out of the pattern in the rug or surface in the knots on shadowed walls--Wincing vacuous mouths that seem to swallow all the air in the room. It was the shape first: a breathing landscape and the space that flexed around it--parts and whole, a sphere titled on its axis. And the sphere had a gaping mouth, but it made no noise. It was the moment just prior when the static has grown to it's crescendo, energy collapses inward, and only out of the lapse of pseudo-silence can the slightest sonic ring reach perception in the caverns of the ear. Awareness comes with pressure on the drum beating the ancient rhythm, and in that moment--slowly as it grew in pulses, swelling with the blood--the shapes dimmed or blended and were arms, one back and legs. It was not---.  The sound seemed to float and awareness alone bobbed it above the surface. It could be heard clearly then, and it counted slowly like a soldier marching in tidal sand. One, Two. A soldier marching iambs in the sand. But the sound began to swell till the marching feet were swallowed in the gaping mouth. It changed into a feeling: the motion that suddenly rushes upward as out of a dream--the terror that is also a revelation--with that fearful warm sensation like a fluid channel along the vertebrae. But soon it was the swell again; the bow of a ship down and over the wave's crest: the liquid breathing seascape rolling in it's rhythm. One, Two. Rise, Fall. The ship and the sea rolled and dimmed (or blended together). But the swell had died in the vastness of the sea and the seascape of the ocean was a great parting from which the sound of a swirling O expanded to some unfathomed depth till the bow was swallowed finally--as all before it--in the shadow of the gaping mouth.

     Pastor Meryl Hande placed his glasses on the corner of the pulpit--the spartan wooden stand whose very roots were hidden fast below the altar; the pulpit that scarcely concealed the trim figure of the upright man behind it; the very fixture once cut from the mast of the Alabaster (if you believe the story)--and moved his fingers (that never quite unbent themselves) across the pillars on the page; over the words that seemed always to be in danger of falling into the shadow of the binding; over the words that he must breathe in and expel, respirate.
     His fingers curved as through he were gripping a shovel or a sword and remained stuck in that position due to age, perhaps (though there were those who said it was from the fact he had kept detailed memoirs or logs of his life since the time he took the call to ministry-'A hand that holds a pen always, even when no pen exists').
     It was true that he kept these memoirs locked inside a glass front cabinet in the library of the parsonage. No dates adorn the spine of these journals lined up like identical black buildings in varying stages of decrepitude. He writes one page each day and by that standard can deduce the date of any entry, although he rarely (if ever) peruses his collection and has certainly never yet publicized a single jot of his nearly forty-five year journal.
     The empty pen-gripping hand hand left a moist impression on the page, dimpling the thin sheet and almost bringing the grain of the pulp up to the surface. He spoke now to the known faces whose features receded into a place in which his eyes took no collection. He heard the words before he spoke them; felt the vibrations in his chest.
     The vibration was like a trembling inside his body; a shiver throughout his face (A face sunken a little, whose eyes contained a liquid gleam of never-quite-joy. A face with want of sun.) Meryl Hande heard his voice before he spoke. He saw the letters cascading into the shadow. He watched the known faces he couldn't see become the one-face: the face not unlike his own (a once-pluck expression of youth which bore the countenance of pride without ever having yet known humiliation) that matured with a softer jawbone. The face without his jaw, but rather with the smile of his wife: a smile that he could never form. He felt the words shiver in his chest and his face shivered. He saw the face that smiled behind the breath of alcohol, smiled it's lies, the face that smiled the punishment, the fury, the outrage of a father. It was the expressioned face that could no more un-smile than his (Meryl's) hand could unbend. The face whose parting took with it the jawline of the wife, the crease around the cheeks, the flush of blood. (A wife who was a mother. A fair woman who took no labor till the day she saw the earth fall on the casket. It was to her as if the dirt fell on her womb. She felt the soil fill the space inside her body where no life could grow again. Hers became the battle against the curse with which she could contend, and the toils of that labor, a fruit she would not share.)
     Meryl focussed back on the curve of his fingers above the words that were falling into the dark line. The page stuck to the moisture on the foot of his palm and lifted with his body as he took in breath.
     "I called to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of the deep-Sheol I cried, and thou didst hear my voice."
    

     There wasn’t nearly enough time to get ready. The steady light from the eastern window passed the points of her feet; the broken shadows in the topography of her bed sheets. She watched the mountains rise and fall, rise and fall with the breath in her lungs forceful and deliberate. I’ll never make it.

            She had jumped as the window shade snapped back into the pane with the pull of retreating wind. The clock on the corner of her desk across the room flashed once more before the jumbled nine-five-nine broke into a neat set of respectable zeros. It was the break of the shade that set that deep fearful waking into motion. It was a sound or a smell from memory; the tautness of canvas ripped smooth in a salty ocean breeze. It could not have been a dream. More likely it had been a single impression that woke her so abruptly from a coma-like sleep.

            A body without arms, unable to lift itself out of the sea of bed sheets…suffocating, almost from the pressure within that came from beneath through the ribcage.

            It was the warmth of recognition, rushing blood back into the limbs, the fear of life within life bringing pain to the tips of her fingers still unable to flex from their atrophy; it was all these sensations rising just above her awareness that finally roused her from sleep.

The shape and the space around it; the with-me within me.

     Across the room the clock had boxed-in the zeros like red eyes surveying the landscape above and before her. From the window a faint after-air from the night’s rainfall leaked carelessly into the room. An awakening scent lifted up from it reminding her of the familiarity of morning-cooled plant life, but also some vaporous memory that she was not sure came from experience or some childhood fiction. It was a film that replayed on her eyelids forcing her to ask again, “Can it have happened?”
 

Maybe it's better that I don't tell
the words to old-town march--
the letters penned for eyes in window
sill warground, those watching the metal roll.
The limbs on the pages will fall from memory--
those feet that don't drop with the snare;
the pendulum crutch-swing of Johnny-come-home
left mute in the beat of a battle worn drum.
But better only for the demused--those not shrouded
in blood-striped lines. An unlyrical national hum is
the causality of a people untouched by brutality or
deaf-eared for those few who are.