I remember the preacher said: “Let them be joined together forever in the Holy Spirit,” and I kind of wrinkled my brow because God is easy and Jesus is easy but the Holy Spirit thing was always way beyond me, and I wasn’t really sure that what I had in mind was a ménage à trois with some supposedly benevolent essence, and in my poor agnostic head I imagined the two of us suspended in the spiritual plasma of the Holy Ghost for eternity, like watermelon pickles.
But when we headed out of the old adobe church that day, so far as I could tell it was still just the two of us, just you and me, lightheaded as teenagers in the summer in the evening in the park, our vows an exotic narcotic wrapped in plastic and shoved down deep in our socks.
And I remember we didn’t even make love that night, but consummated our marriage in the deep sweet of sleep. In the morning there were tiny roses of blood on the bed and I knew that my dreams had ferried across the occult water of sleep and with a broad flat sword had broken through the soft dense flesh of your maidenhead to dance with you to the beat of feral drums.
And when the morning had come, sure enough, there was the Holy Spirit, less like a poltergeist and more like a cat, perched on a comforter on the old steamer trunk at the end of the bed.
“Go ahead,” the Holy Spirit dared me. “Touch her.” And I touched you and the walls shuddered like an old miner’s shack teetering atop the San Andreas Fault.
“Holy shit,” I said, thinking this could be dangerous, and then I realized that I had blasphemed and I was afraid and embarrassed.
“It’s OK,” the Holy Spirit told me. “You go right ahead. Don’t worry. Nothing can harm you.”
So I kissed your ear, and Aretha Franklin began to sing.
And I pulled off your T-shirt and the bed danced a samba across the floor.
And you said, “That’s cool,” and I said, “You try it,” and you kissed me on the lips and instantaneously the bedroom walls shattered, covering us in gypsum dust and little puffs of pink insulation and bright shards of glass.
I cupped your breast in my hand and bit at your nipple and the trees moaned with pleasure and all the neighborhood children gathered around us in the rubble and danced in a ring, their little hands holding each other gingerly, like hamsters.
I touched your belly and Gideon appeared, his trumpet blasting a hallelujah into the quivering sky.
Then you pulled hard at my back and fire roared down from the sky like napalm, sucking the air from my lungs and smoldering in jellied splotches on the soles of my feet.
I stroked your side and buck-naked laughing seraphim appeared fluttering all around me, randomly shooting morphine-dipped arrows into my butt.
Light stuck to your naked body like a fresh-cut haystack after a rain. You looked just like a desert sunrise and you tasted just like filé gumbo and you smelled just like the spray from the breakers at Patrick’s Point.
Puppies played under your skin and some unseen hand snaked a length of hairy twine up from my tailbone and out through the center of my skull, harmlessly pulling out bits of unused brain tissue that stuck to my hair like marshmallows.
And when I pulled your thighs apart the sky opened and God Himself came thundering down wearing a porkpie hat with a press pass stuck in it, taking a seat at the announcer’s desk of some celestial sky box, surrounded on every side by bleachers full of rowdy drunken angels.
“Don’t mind Me,” He said into the microphone.
And then He filled us so full of the Holy Spirit that It oozed out of us, and we slipped and slid across each other, the Holy Spirit sticky in our mouths, the Holy Spirit leaking liquid blue light from our fingertips, the Holy Spirit trickling down our foreheads and stinging into our eyes, the Holy Spirit pouring from our armpits and off our legs and our shoulders and from between your legs and making a Holy mess on the bed.
We were speaking in tongues. We were holy rolling in the sheets, our tongues were driven mad with Pentecostal ecstasy, our tongues were epileptic, our tongues were frothing, our tongues were crying, our tongues were screaming, our tongues were babbling holy nonsense, our tongues were repentant of every sin, our tongues praised God, our tongues were baptized, our tongues were washed with the Blood of the Lamb and our tongues were born again. And again.
And as our tongues gave witness to the power of the Holy Spirit, I heard the strange words rise up into heaven and rattle the very cage of the universe, building, like an argument, shattered, like the Tower of Babel, resurrected, like Jesus, emerging from the dark cave of our souls.
And then it was night again, and the Holy Spirit settled down on us like a feather comforter, a soft weight that pulled us close in the night, down toward the dark beat of drums around a fire in the forest along a turgid river of sleep.
And as I drifted slowly down from the headwaters of consciousness, I remembered what the preacher had said: “Let them be joined together forever in the Holy Spirit,” and I pulled you closer, and I murmured from my tired, tired tongue, “Oh, baby, amen.”
This story originally appeared in Yellow Silk.
— Ed.
For additional Yellow Silk articles, click here.
