WINNER, SUMMER 2022
THE SCREW TURN FLASH FICTION COMPETITION
BY JOSEPH BATHANTI
Jimmy Vallone hunches in the last desk. He magic-markers 69 across his books. Never removes his sharkskin trench coat. Flunked so many times, he’s old enough to drive hot-wired cars to school. Bucked, nicotine teeth, one Kool after another, sideburns, a pimp’s apologetic mustache. A widow’s peak plows his pimply forehead. Skin-tight stove-pipes. Pointy, cleated shoes. The seething pathology of the misunderstood: Judas of the Gnostic Gospels, stench of alleys, Romilar, Ripple.
One day he snares me, his long filthy fingernails at my collar, flicks open his switchblade, bares his fangs, dips toward my windpipe. “Say you hate Jesus,” he whispers coquettishly, swears he’ll cut my throat.
Two months ago, in Chicago, Richard Speck killed those nurses. One hid, undetected, and listened to every bit of it—the one I can’t stop thinking about. At this very moment, possessed, unloved American prodigies like Jimmy muster from the slaughter at Con Thien, in southeast Asia. The number one song is “The Ballad of the Green Berets.”
“Say it, Motherfucker.” His blade stutters against my neck, his breath Tokay-sweet.
“I hate Jesus,” I say.
Consummated, he smiles—blue-lips, orange teeth—and moves to his next convert.
He’s been inside girls.
We pray his genius is mere stupidity, but that’s not possible.
Sister steals to Jimmy, slams both fists upon his desk. For a moment, he’s catatonic, eyes river green. Jimmy fixes Sister—wizened, 4 feet, 6 inches, 85 pounds, 85 years old, the bonnet of Charity strapped to her widowed face—in his green gaze and warns: “I’ll put you in the fucking hospital.” Fucking drips off the walls. That’s what got us into this war: fucking. Too much. Not enough.
Sister laughs—like she was raised street-fighting—then pops Jimmy in the face. He tumbles out of his little desk—he’s three sizes too big for it—a jackal driven mad. Sister rolls up her billowing black sleeves. Her wedding ring catches the sun.
We abhor nuns. They flail us with wood, with metal. But Jimmy is a satanic jagoff, our executioner. We want Sister to kick his ass. Suddenly, she’s our champion: our juvie, rubber hose, bread and water. Jimmy barely makes it to a knee before she punches him again in the face.
Sister hopscotches around him, splitting his lips, purpling his eyes. He goes down again and again. Each time he gropes his desk for purchase, to hoist himself from the floor, she whips down on his hand the ten-pound rosary girdling her waist; then another jab to the face, until Jimmy lies in a curdled heap of bloody iridescence.
In antique desks, inkwells and slots for gnawed pencils, we remain perfectly still. Across my desk top, desperate, tiny cursive graffiti swirls in a palimpsest of suicidal terror and ennui. On the blackboard, in Sister’s immaculate hand, looms a quote from her patron, Saint Catherine Laboure—a Sister of Charity herself—a virgin, it goes without saying—purportedly prone toward getting unquenchably pissed: One must see God in everyone.
Chalk dust floats. On the blackboard ledge, erasers perch with nubs of spent chalk. The chrome Boston pencil sharpener, belly gorged on graphite and shavings, distends from the wall. Jesus, whom I’ve lately renounced, refuses to look at me. From his cross, above the blackboard, He stares out the window at the holographic sun.
Jimmy pants, a nearly imperceptible growl—the vagitus uterinus of the already sorrowing fetus.
“Get up,” Sister commands.
He rises: 6’3”, lording like a kite vulture over a crow, nose a crimson sponge nailed with gall above his crimson mouth, blood sliding the cliffs of his trench coat to the floor.
Rabid angels, they peer into each other’s eyes. Sister roundhouses him—torque enough to fell a werewolf.
Jimmy shakes his head, advances, smiling. Sister yanks up her hem, hefts a black, hearse-like brogan and kicks him in the balls; he doesn’t flinch. She retreats a step, spins her rosary like a lariat, then lashes it, crucifix first, toward his face. He casts up a hand and snares it midair. Decade by decade, bead by bead, Sorrowful Mysteries through the Glorious Mysteries, he paces to her, fretting through his fingers the rosary as if reciting it as commanded by The Blessed Virgin Herself, accruing each indulgence, each token of grace.
Once he’s upon her, she swings again. He takes it, smiling all the more—blood, like praise, spraying off his crown into the sun-filled room. Takes it because he’s cock-strong—invincible. She strikes him once more before he rips away her bonnet—out of which cascades interminably the gorgeous white tresses of queens and sortilege. Until she and Jimmy are standing in it. Until it feathers beneath our desks, and we lift our feet from the ancient floor.
She is inexplicably younger, exquisite, as if she’s hurtled back through time. Then he knocks her over. Doesn’t even touch her. Simply lifts his hand, tangled in her mammoth rosary, a prophet wielding wrath, and she’s on her back.
In an instant, he’s atop her. She doesn’t struggle, but looks past him at the ceiling, as if there is no ceiling, just vaults of sky she’ll soon be absorbed by. Her mouth moves in silent alms—surely, to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
His switchblade snicks open; he teases it beneath her chin. Sweetly, seductively, as if injecting her, he whispers, “Tell me that you hate Jesus.”
Her lips move, but we hear nothing.
Jimmy’s bloody ear is to her mouth. “Say it again,” he taunts.
Not a sound issues from Sister, yet her steady prayer, rising like smoke, hovers over us.
I look deeply into Sister and there is Jesus. I look deeply into Jimmy and there is Jesus.
Joseph Bathanti, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, is author of nineteen books, most recently, a volume of poems, Light at the Seam, from LSU Press in 2022. Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. The Act of Contrition & Other Stories, winner of the EastOver Prize for Fiction, is forthcoming from EastOver Press in fall of 2022. Author photo: David Silver.
