Synaesthesia Magazine Eat | Page 21

of pain shooting up from her knees and into her spine. She worries that praying makes her more aware of her body and it distracts from her ability to think of higher, less earthly things. She should not be thinking of bodily things, she should be thinking of spiritual things, but she thinks of her body’s pain, then her body’s pleasure, and then Pat, his hands cupping her breasts gently with his warm hands, his mouth tasting like the Northern Lights, shifting, shifting across the sky and her shoulder, then her collarbone, the side of her neck— There is probably some rule against it, Coby thinks, but I wonder if you tasted the sacramental bread before it was blessed, if it would taste different than when after it’s been prayed over? She wonders about the person who baked the bread—did they know they were making bread to be used in a church service? Did it imbue their baking process with a kind of reverence? She is curious to know what blessed bread will taste like. Coby watches the priest lift up the bread into the air and break the loaf in half. Behind him, the window with the angel she likes is glittering a little. The green of the angel’s wings reminds of her of the specific shade of glossy green that the Northern Lights have. Coby reads the Lord’s Prayer off of the church’s service program: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. The priest sets the clean white cloth over the cup of wine. Pew by pew, the worshippers are called up the altar to accept bread and wine and miracles. Six years ago they were not ready for a child and Pat had been angry with her. Coby had told him not to worry about the pills she’d missed; he was kissing her and she almost felt like she was back in that first moment, the phenomenological moment in which he kissed her for the first time and all the parts of her became alive as if a flower, as if synesthesia, as if everything was unified, them and sound and colour and touch. She was pink everywhere, suddenly a rose or a tulip or a chrysanthemum, many-petaled and still and he was a stem or a vine and they were together in their small apartment with the floral comforter he doesn’t like and the lamp from IKEA bumping gently against the badly painted bedroom wall. She was due to get her period soon anyhow and she just needed him inside her, immediately, needed to get back into that moment. She shouldn’t have gotten pregnant but something about that moment shifted and she was no longer reliving the first time they’d made love or remembering it, she was experiencing something new, something brand new. Coby supposes, now, that God must know all about the phenomenological moment, he is the original phenomenological moment, or created it, and she doesn’t know how much she can believe but she does believe in that magic—what do you call magic in Christian theology? Coby wonders. Are there only miracles? Or is there something else to describe that feeling that happened for >> Miranda Foxx is an image maker from London, inspired by an endless list of dark and distorted novels, an avid collector, and admirer of the cosmos. She works predominantly in found materials and paper. www.cargocollective. com/mirandafoxx @mirandafoxx