St. Rosea Court
Flash Fiction by Nicole Crucial
I drive by the church on my way to the grocery store, or pilates, but mostly when I just need to get out of my own head. I wind down the road, past the run-down apartment complexes and the Food Lion. It’s perched on a street corner, haunted by a stoplight, but it always looks fuller and warmer than it did when I drove to it instead of past it. The grass is not greener, but it’s dewier. Daffodil light floods the windows, the kind of yellow you see but never feel.
I think of the first time I set foot there: the raucous laughter I did not think was meant for churches. The inescapable sense of connection. Places like these, you get pulled in, wound about like vines. Sometimes you bloom. Little prepares you for the pruning.
This last year, I did little but prune. Two different lovers and one god have all chased me into the driver’s seat, wheeling me in circles around the seven stoplights of this town. One I asked for love, one I asked for a future, one I asked for signs. I hoped one of these would resonate. I begged all three of them for a certain level of intimacy, never got it, ran away.
To try to cultivate something less in the leftover space is, at best, inadequate. That doesn’t stop me from casting furtive glances backward, missing the temporary shelter—whether a roof or an embrace, both would do.
I confess this to Evie, and she laughs. My sister calls herself a witch, and she says she carries her power wherever she goes. It’s not tied to a sanctuary, or a bedroom, which is effectively the same thing. The constant presence, she says, soothes her. She doesn’t need to tell it what to be. She doesn’t need to ask to make a home in it.
She gifted me a rose quartz pendant, but I lost the little tag that tells me what it means. I don’t feel home in the cool stone pressed to my sternum, between my breasts, but I was not expecting it there. This, at least, is a little comforting—absence when one expects absence.
Most often these days, I drive by the church on my way back from a different church (which is bigger, and full of rituals near the same, and not as dark—but also, somehow, not as light). The stars stain the porch light blue, drip shadows into the parking lot. This time, I skirt under the traffic light as it beams yellow, begging me to slow down. I never got to see the lovers in the dark.
Nicole is a graduate of UNC Wilmington's BFA program in creative writing. Much like a houseplant, she loves sunlight, the indoors, astrology poems, and when the cat sits next to her on the window sill. Her work appears/comes forth soon in Luna Station Quarterly, Diabolical Plots, mutiny!, etc., and at nicolecrucial.com.