Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor

Author:Kyle Minor
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Christian, Family Life, Short Stories (Single Author), fiction, Literary, Collections & Anthologies
ISBN: 9781936747634
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2014-01-13T08:00:00+00:00

4.

Another death, and another and another. A college mate from Indiana, a girl, gets on the back of a motorcycle at a party. The driver is a seminarian. When they left the party together, they were laughing. At some residential intersection, a newly licensed sixteen-year-old runs a stop sign and hits them broadside. She flies through the air. He impales his lower body on the bike handle. Her heart stops as she hits the ground forty feet away. His legs are broken and his scrotum ripped open. She dies. He walks with a cane.

Another. In Florida, a meter reader, my friend when I was a preacher. He marries a woman, develops leukemia, she leaves him, he dies. In Indiana, a vagrant crawls into the dumpster where I used to throw my trash as an undergraduate. The garbage truck picks up the dumpster in the morning with its mechanical arms and empties its contents into the back of the truck. The sanitation worker pulls the compactor lever, and the man is crushed to death. The lone African-American professor at the seminary holds a memorial service for the vagrant, and hundreds gather to validate the significance of his life.

In Florida, my uncle Jerry visits my parents’ house with his new girlfriend. They make noises like they might get married. She doesn’t seem to mind that he is twenty years brain-damaged from his own accident with a city garbage truck. She doesn’t seem to mind that he still complains every few hours about losing the love of his ex-wife and his children. She seems to love him. She flashes a ring. He’s bought a house. She has a jewelry business. They’ve bought a commercial building. Everyone hugs goodbye. My uncle and his girlfriend drive home, four hours north. My father says everything’s going to be all right now. They’re going to be all right.

The next evening my uncle locks himself in his bedroom. He puts his head on his pillow. He puts a pistol in his mouth and pulls the trigger. She knocks on the front door the next morning. She knocks but no one answers. She knocks and bangs and yells. She kicks at the door. She breaks down the door. She finds him weirdly white, a hole in his head, a pool of blood beneath the bed, whatever wasn’t soaked up by the mattress as it drained from the hole in his head. My parents drive up. Some people from my uncle’s rural church arrive to help clean the bedroom. They carry the blood-soaked mattress outside. My father goes into the bedroom to clean the blood and brains from the wall and the floor, but he cannot. Other men go inside to do the job, but they cannot. In the end a tiny middle-aged woman from the church takes a mop and some rags and a bucket full of water and bleach, and in the end, she scrubs most of it by hand.

I’m there with my parents and the woman who

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