If shame is a fire, let the world burn— By Liam Chimba
Bible Thumper by Joseph Verrastro
I.
Burning sensation, first in my cheeks, then down through my body. My forearms are the site of hellfire. My wrists are atoms splitting apart, Eve covering herself with a comically oversized fig leaf. Mushroom clouds balloon from the space beneath her pubis. I speak seriously, it comes out like a joke and you laugh. Sometimes, you point too. As if to tell me that what I was saying is a joke, funny, some guys took a picture of you, hilarious, maybe you should be a model. Your boxy shirt flaps to her laughter. I think no. I will cast fire upon this world and leave it unguarded like the apocryphal Jesus. Like a nuclear bomb. I want the end of the world so that the happiness-dosed masses of branchy, gnarled teeth might finally roll into their long-awaited tombs. I want the Eumenides with shackles to their feet, anchored deep to the bottom of the last ocean. Anything to stop the laughter. I want you turned to a pillar of salt. (Note: must Google if a H-homb destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah). I want each word that comes out of me to be the colour black, a dull, funereal arrangement of moans that forces a grim dignity.
II.
I practise my breathing sometimes. Meditation. Forgiveness for trespasses that you don’t understand. I'm crying now, mind. I'm a child again, reaching out my hands to an oak cabinet, holes to fill, drawers to plunder, attempts to plug the katechon hunger. You are shouting at me there too. God watching in the panettone. He’s always been a trans loaf. Trans fat. Transubstantiated. I transgress Him with my stomach. I shout back and it's wrong, it's profanity, it's so disgusting that the lavender-scented hand sanitiser will act as my mouthwash. The burning gets worse. It's in my gums. I can't tell where I am these days. The sun has been blotted out by thick, viscous clouds of pyroclastic smoke. It's just a picture. Just a picture of me. Why does it matter? Why am I crying?
III.
When I am older, freer, I will wear a pink sweater. It’ll be something like a gateway drug, the first inference that someone has, as you put it, buggered up my head. Forced these perversions into me. It’ll be a slippery slope of clothing draped over me, sparkling ice-cream icons and fake, plastic rhinestones. You will call me lost. You will laugh. You will call me sensitive, oh so sensitive, and so weak that I can’t even stand people taking pictures of me. The wool will itch against my forearms. Once it’s finally over, you will drop me off and I will watch your car screech away. The chrome panels will reflect my body for one last time. And when I start to unzip my luggage–probably not much, you never let me leave with much–I will exhale with a strength to blow away the clouds. Until that point, I roam the desert that you made for me. You’ve said it’s safe, and you are right. But the sight of sand dunes and the concrete-coloured sky aren’t enough for me.
Liam Chimba (He/Him) is a graduate of Creative Writing and Philosophy from the University of Chichester. He lives on the East coast of England and is obsessed with anything post-apocalyptic.