In the Devil's Territory by Kyle Minor

Author:Kyle Minor [Kyle Minor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Detective and mystery stories, Mystery & Detective, Short Stories (Single Author), FICTION, Anthologies, Short stories; American, General, short stories, Detective and mystery stories; American
ISBN: 9781480426405
Google: GybhMScvEkAC
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-06-01T21:06:04+00:00

I had come to St. Simons Island to rest, and I intended to rest, and I lay down in the hotel bed that evening to rest, but I could not achieve anything like rest. There was still light through the window from the direction of the hotel pool. I got up and walked to it and saw fathers splashing in the pool with their children, and young men roughhousing in the hot tub, and, on the beach beyond, a man and woman walking very close together, hands clasped, and beyond that the darkness of the ocean, and the pinpricks of light from whatever fishing boats or pleasure craft were drifting out there.

My thoughts ran in the direction of Steven Whitley and all the things he had told me at dinner, and also toward Marianne, whose love had seen me away from her and toward this hotel room. I thought, too, of the church, and the work we had done in our years there, and of what it said about their regard for me, that they would send me here at their expense, and offer me—require of me—a five month paid vacation, for the sole purpose of my own health.

I knew and know how strange it might seem to hold all of these things in tension, to think of them with gratitude while at the same time entertaining the darker things this quiet was bringing up alongside them. I wanted, yes, to knock on Steven Whitley’s door and confess to him that the feelings he had were a whole lot like the feelings I have always had, and to confess to him that I wondered why God would create a man with an empty place in the center of his being, and make it clear inside that man’s self that the only thing standing between him and happiness was the love of another man—erotic love, yes, but also a spiritual communion akin to what the union of man and wife had not brought into my life.

But there was the matter of my own capacity for self-deception. The one doctrine of the church that seems to me to be forever verifiable is the doctrine of original sin, the idea that we are born with selfishnesses beyond measure, and that we can do any number of increasingly complicated contortions in our own minds to justify whatever cruelty, whatever pettiness, whatever selfishness appeals to what Christian tradition calls the flesh, that part of us that is carnal and separate from spiritual transcendence.

The selfishness at hand was twofold. If I did what I wanted I would hurt Marianne, and if I did what I wanted I would hurt the church.

The church, it seemed to me, would bounce back. I had not created a cult of personality around myself. I had, all these years, trained the people to create for themselves a community of faith, mutually supporting and loving and uplifting, and I had always told them that every person they would ever meet was capable of failing them and would, in fact, fail them, me included.

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