Morning Swim
Last night I watched the wind and tide carry my mother’s ashes out to sea. And now this morning it seems to me that her favorite coffee cup holds an ocean. I can’t help but feel God-like cradling its entirety in my hands, even though my mind tells me it’s just a cup filled with freshly ground French roast brewed strong. I add a pinch of powdered creamer like she used to do and watch it sink away from me. When I realize that I cannot see the bottom as I lift the cup to my lips, I have to tell myself that the cup is not bottomless, that death is not endless. I tell myself this over and over again, like a mantra. I dive in, nevertheless. The shock of the hot coffee stops me dead at first, but I don’t let it hold me in place for long. I kick my legs hard and push myself down through billowing clouds of rehydrated creamer without knowing for sure how far away the bottom is, or whether there is another shore for me to climb onto. The cup is not bottomless, death is not endless, I keep repeating until the words weave together into the infinite echo of my mother’s voice convincing me when I was a child that the sound of waves crashing on the sand during a storm was just a song the ocean sang whenever the wind asked for a favor.
~
Dead Man’s Float
I’m not even in water. I’m in a bed. I can see, though, that if you were looking at a picture taken of me from overhead with my surroundings cropped out, you might think I was in water, being that my sheets are aquamarine microfiber. And it might look to you like I am floating face down in a pool after a long night of heavy partying and one-too-many of something. Or like I just decided I had had enough of the current political chaos and chosen a way out that doesn’t require the kind of violence that defines our world today. Or, if you knew anything of my personal life—like that I had just been dumped by my partner of twelve years and they took my dog with them out of spite—you might conclude that I decided to take “The Long Swim” to other side. Or you might think that I’m just looking for something on the floor of the pool—something out of reach yet tantalizing, something that I lost but am not sure I want to retrieve, something worth something but maybe not enough to risk a deep dive all the way down to the bottom. Or maybe you would just assume that I like to test how long I can hold my breath, which might be the best guess of all because I have always been one to take on risky and meaningless challenges for no other reason than to see how close I can get to death without actually being labeled once and for all, “Dead.” The truth might be as simple as this: On hot summer nights I prefer to sleep face down on my king-size bed unencumbered by blankets or clothes or consciousness or dreams. I prefer the sleep of the dead without the guarantee of ever waking up to the life I was living before I fell asleep. Or waking up to the promise of an afterlife in Heaven. Or waking up to the possibility of being reborn as someone new, perhaps the person who is looking at a picture taken of me from overhead with my surroundings cropped out and wondering how the hell I got there. Or waking up as you, the person reading this and wondering whether these words are merely a fiction that allows you to fantasize for a moment about being someone else—anyone else—other than who you are, or whether these words are a kind of titillating truth stolen from the pages of your secret diary that no one other than you was ever meant to read.
~
Healing Hands
Healing and pain go hand in hand. That’s the God’s honest truth. Whenever I lay my hands upon some poor animal’s diseased or broken body, they always let out a momentary cry of pain when they first feel the jolt of my healing powers just before the Holy Spirit swiftly rids them of their suffering. I’ve learned to expect the protestations of the animals’ owners. I can’t say how many times I’ve heard, “You’re hurting her!” when a cherished pet first reacts to the sacred power of my hands forcing out whatever evil venom infects their innards. I’ve also learned that comparing their pets’ reactions to the shock of diving into a pool of cool water on the hottest of summer days helps to mollify even the most anxious pet owners. And before you know it, I’m accepting grateful hugs, kisses, and handshakes from teary converts, not to mention licks, purrs, and nuzzles from all manner of cured beasts.
How did I come to learn about my powers? That’s easy. When I was all of nine years old, my mother took away a wormy kitten I’d found wandering the field behind our barn, placed it in a moth-eaten pillowcase, filled up the tub in the bathroom, and dropped it in.
“This is how we send sick kittens to God,” she told me. “The poor thing is dying and in pain. God will pluck it from the water and take away its pain.”
At the sound of the kitchen timer to let her know the bread was ready to come out of the oven, Momma told me as she left the bathroom, “You watch it for me. Once it stops moving, you will know God has taken it.”
I watched that pillowcase sink to the bottom of the tub, then watched it writhe for a good few minutes, little bubbles drifting up and popping when they hit the surface. But when that last bubble popped, I yanked that pillowcase out of the water, untied the knot, and lifted the lifeless kitten out. I wrapped my tiny hands around its dripping body and squeezed it for all I was worth. I prayed the way Preacher had taught me to pray in Sunday School. I squeezed and prayed until I felt like I wasn’t in the world anymore and instead was floating in a place filled with golden light and nothing to hold me up but my prayers and the distant voices of singing angels. It was then that I heard the tiniest screech I ever remember hearing a cat make. It was more like the sound a nervous cricket makes after you’ve caught it in a jar. And wouldn’t you know, when I opened my eyes, I saw that kitten licking my fingers before it jumped from my hands and shot out the bathroom window.
When I heard Momma walking down the hall, I shoved a rag in the pillowcase to make it look full, and then pushed it back down to the bottom of the tub.
“God has the kitten now, Momma,” I said when she came through the door.
“That’s good. You go on now and bury what’s left in field behind the barn,” she told me as she handed me the dripping pillowcase. “God doesn’t need the body, only the soul.”
In the field behind the barn where waves of purple and white phlox bloomed every spring before Daddy plowed it under for the crops, I dug a hole just big enough to hold the pillowcase. And wouldn’t you know, the whole time I dug, that little kitten watched from on an old stump on the other side of the fence. When Momma came out to check on how I was doing and saw that kitten alive and licking itself dry, she looked at me, then looked back at the kitten, and then back at me before gasping, “Just like your Grandpappy,” and fainting.
From that day on, I was the healer of animals. Momma and Daddy let the neighbors know that for anything between $25 and $500—depending on the size of the animal and the seriousness of the illness—I would cure any sick critter that needed curing. I healed cats and dogs, goldfish and frogs, donkeys and ponies, not to mention pigs and cows and chickens and ducks and goats and sheep and on and on. Momma and Daddy must’ve made a small fortune over the years, but I never saw any of it directly. That’s not to say I didn’t have a good and comfortable life, because I did. In fact, both my little sister and I got whatever we wanted every birthday and Christmas. Even though she was five years younger than me, my sister never once got hand-me-down toys. It was new toys every year for the both of us. Life was good.
Over the span of twelve years—from the time I was nine until I became a man and moved out on my own when I turned 21—I must have healed close to 5,000 of God’s creatures, both great and small. What I remember most about that time, though, was that not one single person ever asked me to heal them or anybody else they knew and loved. I don’t know whether people were afraid of what might happen if they were ever touched by a healer of animals, or whether they were afraid that that kind of healing might be asking too much of me—and God.
In fact, it wasn’t until a few months after I moved out on my own that I actually tried healing a person. Truth be told, it was my own sister. She was nearly sixteen when Momma brought her to me one night and said, “Your sister’s complaining about a bellyache. I want you to lay your hands on her belly and heal her of her sin.”
“What sin is that, Momma?” I asked. I’ll never forget the expression on my sister’s face as she looked at Momma. It was a look I had seen thousands of times before in the eyes of animals that didn’t understand exactly what was happening.
“Never you mind about that. You just get on with the healing.”
I looked at my sister and raised my eyebrows instead of speaking. She just closed her eyes and lowered her head. When I laid my hands on her belly, I felt a bulge beneath the fabric of her blouse, just like the way that pillowcase had bulged with the kitten when I was nine. I pressed down as hard as I could and prayed just as hard. But I didn’t find myself floating in the golden light and I didn’t hear any angels singing. In fact, I never left the dark silence of my closed eyes. But I kept on praying for a good few minutes before I lifted my hands away.
“Is she healed?” Momma asked.
I just nodded without so much as a word. And my sister nodded, too. But I knew the truth. From the first moment I laid my healing hands upon her, my sister never once made a sound.
~
Kip Knott is a writer, poet, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His writing has appeared in Beloit Fiction Journal, Best Microfiction, Ghost Parachute, HAD, Milk Candy Review, New World Writing, Vestal Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.