[thisislife]

Sorry for not posting in a while; life has been quite hectic as of late. To toss out a paltry attempt at making up for my absence, here’s a piece of short fiction that I’ve written.

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It was during my internship, between bouts of minesweeper and pursuing Wikipedia, that I decided to be a saint. I was already halfway there; I myself am Jewish and becoming a Catholic saint would be one of my many miracles. And so, at the expense of my less-than-enthused superiors – not to worry; I quit before they could fire me – I delved my liberated self into a labyrinth of text scraped out of the local library.

Dismal stuff. Doctor Faustus was depressing; Inferno was more so. Paradise Lost gave me no more insight into saintlyhoodness than a snail might have into quandendiferies. In a fit of rage I summarily burned those texts, and picked up The Life of Antony by a good chum of my great-great-grandfather give or take a few generations. Ah, that guy had something going for him! I found the whole ascetic thing to be very avant-garde, very chichi. Deliciously monastic, as I put it to myself that night amidst a few bottles of Manischewitz and some slabs of gefilte. Definitely something I could go for.

So the next morning dawned with a wondrous head-start into the world of deprivation, the bells of repentance already jangling incessantly upside my skull. Truthfully, I wanted nothing more than to cease this silliness and return to a regular, sane life (in which I would have jam in the mornings and a banana before bed, as I always have), but I reluctantly concluded that to slink off to such a milquetoast nature would be both unfortunate and decidedly like myself. And since I was no longer myself – I had been renamed overnight by an ancient form of divination, using two large stones and a pot of peppered mustard – the newly-minted Gregorious Happenstance was forced to grumble his way through not-breakfast, the first meal of the ascetic day. “Deliciously monastic.” The words guffawed at my good nature as some sirocco, rubbing wantonly at my shins.

I progressed through not-lunch while trembling; I had thought it to be a series of spiritual revelations, but I realize now that it was a near-truckling to the devil’s pit of sustenance — no, not for me! A saint, I had decided, needed no such thing. And so set in the splenetic washes of my afternoon. Tennyson came to mind: I was battered from the left of me, battered from the right of me, stormed at with shot and shell and a plangent craving for cranberry sauce which I could only put down to true desperation: I had never once had such a sauce in my life. No matter; I was lickerish beyond satiation. My vicious want did not subside.

How canorous the taste of fruit! How delectable the meat of sweet! How toothsome the paphian blood of the berry! It was as brilliant as a thousand suns, as sodden as my whilom way yet so wondrous as though a hundred bushels of nitid jewels were baring themselves for the blade. I had lost all comprehension of subsistence on anything else; I was transfixed on these rakish things as though they were the adornation of the world itself. I fervently questioned how I had ever lasted through Yom Kippur. How I had passed up so many gentile thanksgivings. This — this was my revelation! A concept so pure that only the ravishing taste of a redness could encompass it. It blossomed in my eyes. I could taste it on my tongue — a sanguinary swirling olio of an offering shattering like a wine bottle in a sermon. I chewed it down red and raw.

Then it dawned on me.

“Oh dear,” I said, quite startled, “I seem to have bit through my cheek.”

When I awoke I had lost quite a bit of blood. It tanged of iron. The cranberries had vanished somewhere past the tip of my tongue. How unfortunate, I thought, while clumsily sipping away the last of my kosher wine. Perhaps this saintly life is not for one so brilliant as myself. Ah well, back to the typing pool for me. But the most puzzling matter of my theological bout was that after everything, despite my most ingenious of revelations, I could not resume as an intern. And as I lolloped into the future, those unenlightened souls bound shut their eyes and burrowed on in the dark.