I wondered who exactly had been with Lyle. I couldn’t help but picture Taffy with him. I was sick again in the dirt.
“Maybe we’re coming down with a possession,” I said. I sat against the building. I felt emptied out.
Denay scoffed. “As if demons would dare approach us. Do you know how important we are to this church?”
Maybe he’d been with her, I considered. I wondered if he got to choose. I wondered how any of this had happened.
“Shut up, Denay,” Sharon said.
“You’re all weak in faith,” Denay said. “The time is now. This is the trial, when it really counts to God.” She wiped her mouth on her bare arm. Her brown waves fell over her face and she looked pretty, the sun filtering through her hair from behind, but there was something energetically off about her, something that could not be explained, but felt. “Anyone can be a believer when times are easy, and God knows that.” I wanted to know where her confidence came from. She walked back into the church, leaving us all there like cows at trough.
AT CHERRY’S AFTER church, the nausea kept on as I lay on the kitchen floor and cleaned the fly larvae.
“This doesn’t make any difference,” I snapped, scraping the black patches of eggs that had reappeared overnight. I flicked a squirming flesh-colored maggot off my hand.
Cherry stomped around with the bull penis cane, swatting the flies out of the air. I could hear their bodies hit the floor, fat and slow. That morning I’d woken up to a layer of them on my face, my neck, rubbing their little stick arms together like they were trying to start a fire.
“You ever make my mom do this when she was young?” I asked. “Or was she too valuable to you? Too pretty to break a nail?”
“She was supposed to win Miss California,” Cherry said. “We even sent her pictures to Playboy magazine. That was before we were believers of the highest order, of course, Vern forgive me, but they wrote her back. They said almost. We’d like to see more emphasis on the breasts. Oh, we did her hair up in a beehive and had her half naked at the stove cooking. She chanted, Eggs eggs eggs. Bacon bacon bacon. It gave it a realness.”
I remembered the pictures perfectly, how before our conversion my mother had tacked them up in our bedroom with pushpins, a collage of her face and body, along with Polaroids she had taken of herself pouting and shellacked with body glitter. In one she was bent over in a thong, hands on her breasts and a whistle between her teeth. In another she was kissing a woman for show, both their eyes looking at the camera, tongues out and searching. My mother had come home with this woman after meeting her at the DMV. They had become very best friends in the waiting area. The woman drank Welch’s grape juice all day from a big plastic bag with a spigot she carried around in her purse and the whites of her eyes were tinged purple from it. She had a slew of children that seemed to be naked and breastfeeding all day, pulling her tit out at their whimsy and drinking from it like a hose—standing up and bending over, all kinds of gymnastics. I was entranced with them feeding from her in this way and stared openly until finally she asked if I wanted some. I was six years old and proud to be a big first grader. “That’s for babies,” I said, as her son who was my same age gulped from her nipple. “Oh yeah?” she said. She pulled the breast out of his mouth and squirted me in the face. The milk landed on my lips, some reached my tongue, and I froze. It was warm. I think I had expected that grape juice would come out of her, but no, it was dairy, sugar sweet. She cawed with laughter and slapped her knee. “Your face!” she kept squealing. “What, you never drank your mama’s titty before?” She stuffed her breasts back into her bikini top. I looked at her kids and felt sorry for them. They probably felt sorry for me.
“What are you daydreaming about, you little weirdo?” Cherry asked. Her demeanor had shifted. She was suspicious of me now. She lit a raspberry Sweet Dream and blew smoke into my hair. “Wondering where that mama of yours is? I know