Pray Me Up, Before You Go-Go

I knelt silently on the floor while muttering a few prayers that I could easily remember at the top of my head while looking up at the cross that I had bought with me. I placed it on a table beside my bed and solemnly clasped my fingers in hopes that my message to God would be heard once again, just like how all of our prayers would. I started falling on my knees, not even minding that I was still wearing the same black cassock I had on since I stepped on the airplane ride from New York to Los Angeles. This is a sign of my complete devotion to my faith—unwavering and unfaltering, not answering to the call of temptations that will somehow urge me to stop my faith.

One might find it bemusing to see that I am kneeling in front of a slightly different-looking cross than one might have otherwise expected. The Orthodox Christian cross looks just like the usual Christian church that one might see out there in the wild but with two varying differences: there's a short straight line at the very top, and another line perked diagonally up the left side. Well... I would like to go in-depth about the many meanings behind such additions to our cross, but just know that it is one where my piety falls unquestioningly.

"Well, well, well, look at Mr. Priest here, devoting more of his time to his little circus freaks." Susan's annoying grating voice scratches from behind me like a giant drill digging a hole on a hunk of hardened concrete. "Getting a bit nervous on your first mission, boy?"

"What do you want, Susan?" I said, still with my eyes crossed while trying to continue my prayer in my mind.

"Nothing." She said, still standing at the doorway of my room. "Look, you've stopped visiting for, what? Three years?" She then

"If you want to annoy me, then you've already succeeded." I sighed lightly under my breath after hearing that she wouldn't let go off me. "If you don't have any other business with me, then please leave me alone."

Instead of just merely leaving me in my lonesome, Susan decided to enter my room and sat on my bed. Unsurprisingly, she kept on talking like that one little nosy neighbor that one simply wouldn't be able to remove, no matter how much one decides to keep them off your life politely. 

"You know, I don't get you, Anatoly," Susan spoke in a quieter volume than usual. However, her high pitched voice still pierced right through my ears like barb wires going through my right ear and leaving on the other. "you've seen the other side and the place where all the souls go, but you're still keen on being pious on your faith. I'm sure I don't have to mention how much life you've prematurely removed from this world." Susan then chuckled mockingly inside of my room that she barged in uninvited. "Isn't that illegal in your holy literature? What's that word again... Uhh... It really says a lot about you, to be honest... errr..." She then snapped her finger as if to explicitly inform me that she had successfully processed her eureka moment. "Ah! Hypocrite, that's the word! You're a hypocrite, Anatoly." Susan uttered her final sentence with a scornful, grating tone.

"I don't want to fight, Susan," I said while reciting the prayer to Saint Michael at the top of my head, which is enough for me to disregard whatever it is that Susan is saying.

"WE'RE NOT FIGHTING, THOUGH, AREN'T WE!?" Susan screamed with a hearty laugh, which managed to make me forget the words to the prayer in my head. "I just want to ask while you're still doing all these charades even if you know that it's useless."

I then gradually opened my eyes as anger slowly rose from within the pit in my stomach. "Because I find joy in offering my life to a being much bigger than any of us, Susan."

"Oh, quit the crap, Anatoly. You're not fooling any of us with that shitty half baked answer." Susan spoke less loudly but still with the same high pitched and cursed tone. It truly makes me wonder if this is what the sound of a demoniac choir from the very depths of hell sounds like, or perhaps this is the sound souls make when they fall from grace. "Come on. I'm bored, and you're here doing nothing! Look, we haven't seen each other for a long time, so humor me for a bit!"

"You know, I can say the same thing about you and your son, right?" I whispered, not even wanting to pray anymore, for I wouldn't wish to taint my message to the Lord with my negative emotions. "You know that taking care of your little vermin mistake brings you no joy, no value, no monetary gain, and no sense of self-gratification. The only reason why you're still wasting your time on him is because you already endured so much pain when you conceived him, and now you think that it would be more of a waste to get rid of him after all that trouble."

"You better stop now, Anatoly," Susan said as he stomped her feet on the wooden floor, making it creak so damn loud that I almost thought it would break. Because of Susan's untoward reaction, the ceiling shook lightly, causing all the dust on it to fall onto the ground. "we're talking about the two of us here; there's no reason to involve my child in—"

"Oh, but there is a reason, Susan. We most definitely have to involve your son here, absolutely!" I interrupted with a loud voice. "I could also say the same thing to you for defiling the name of the one true God that I very much value in my life! You have no reason to involve MY connection to MY religion in this unneeded conversation you forced me to comply with, but please, go off and continue calling me a hypocrite if that's what would keep you awake at night."  

"At least, I can see my son, unlike this garbage little connection to your imaginary friend!" Susan said with a condescending chuckle while looking down at me as I knelt on the floor below my cross. "At least my son is real!"

"Oh, and are the many great emotions I feel for my God fake then?" I said with a fit of apparent anger echoing out of my pointed tone. "My devotion to the Lord is not what keeps me moral, for a moral person is far from who I am! My love for my God is not rooted in my desire to go to heaven, for you have said yourself that I know it doesn't exist. I simply implore my piety upon this imaginary friend you speak of because it is one of the very few things that's still keeping me from abandoning this world once and for all! IT brings me joy, and once it stops doing so, I will cut it off my life the same way I stopped treating you like a sister because you have given me nothing BUT DISAPPOINTMENT!DISAPPOINTMENT, I SAY! YOU DISGUST ME, SUSAN! WORDS CANNOT DESCRIBE HOW MUCH HATRED I FEEL FOR YOU JUST FOR THE VERY FACT THAT YOU'RE STILL ALIVE AND YOU GET TO STAY BEING ALIVE IN THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE! The very anger you feel for your son could not even compare to the absolute desire I have every single day to cut off your head and place it beside me on the bed like a rotting little teddy bear!"

"I... wow..." Susan said with a weak voice.

"Hmph," I grunted with a lighthearted smile as I gently stood up from the floor and turned my head towards Susan. "well, engaging though all this familial talk may be, perhaps we should move on now." I then slightly narrowed my eyes as my smile slowly faded away. "Or maybe I should say, I SHOULD get a move on, unless, of course, you wish to take your previous place in this mission, which I will wholeheartedly return to you."

I then looked at Susan straight in her eyes as her visible anger flashes through her piercing gaze as her eyes gradually drown in her tears. She then swiftly stepped out of my room but turned around quickly once she reached my doorway.

"One thing, Anatoly..." She growled with a shaking voice. "You said one thing wrong." She then sniffed as she slowly turned her head away from me. "Keeping my son alive does give me happiness."

She then loudly stormed into her room next door and started waking her son Kyle up before doing God knows what ungodly punishments she has stored in their room. It boggles me so that she's still sleeping with her son in the same place. Maybe she really does love her son; however, such thought perishes in my mind when I started hearing Susan's pterodactyl-sounding screeches.

"HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT YOU SHOULD CHANGE YOUR CLOTHES FIRST BEFORE GOING TO BED!?"

No, her love is not directed to her son—it's a love for something else. I chuckled with that thought in mind. I then fell on my knees again as the harmonious sound of Susan's sadistic punishments calmed my raging thoughts and placed me in a solemn state of mind once again, making it easier for me to send my love towards my Lord.

"Hey, Cousin Toly! Aunt Ila says we have to go now!" George's voice echoed in my room.

"Whatcha doin', Toly bro?" Jeffrey's voice intertwined with Kyle's crying from the next room.

"Praying," I answered with an uninterested voice.

"Is it fun?" George replied with confusion.

"Very," I replied with a chuckle as I proceeded to pray in my head.

"Oh. Good for you, then, Toly bro." Jeffrey cheered with a chuckle.

"I will be down there in a few minutes," I whispered in response.

"' Kay!" They spoke in unison.

"Oh, and, boys,"

"Yes, Cousin Toly?" George replied with confusion.

"Yes, Toly bro?" Jeffrey replied with a happy-sounding question.

"Do we still have some concrete around?"

"I think so?" George pondered quietly.

"Dunno," Jeffrey answered honestly.

"I see," I said, still engrossed in my prayer. "If we have one, I want you to take an entire bag with us in the van and three gallons of water with it... and maybe a pail, too, just in case."

"' Kay!" They replied in unison once again.

Finally, in my dimly lit room filled with nothing but a bed, a table, and my cross, I was once again left alone amid my concentrated prayers as the melodious sound of Susan's voice and Kyle's tortured cries intertwined in the air like a perfectly synchronized operetta.