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