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if you ask steve about god, he won’t know what to say. he’ll think back to days of wearing stuffy suits that sit heavily on his little body, the way his feet don’t hit the ground as he swings his legs in a pew. the way the pastor would drone on and on as steve played with his mother’s fingers just to give him something to focus on. he’d think about the red light that would stream in through stained glass windows as if it was the blood of christ itself and the way it would wash over his face when he’d kneel down for communion.
god was church, god was sunday morning, god was hunger pains and scratchy polyester and burning words wrapped in silk that brand their way into steve’s memory. god meant showing face to his parents’ friends who would talk about salvation over their weekly donation to rid themselves of their guilt and self-loathing. tithings of bloody dollars that would go towards building houses in countries steve had never heard of all so they could feel better about their own miserable lives.
it wasn’t until he was older that the words the pastor spun made any sense to him, words that were too big for a sunday school vocabulary becoming common place and growing around his heart like vines on a once loved home. things of damnation and abomination that he’d find inside himself, desires and sin that he’d push down into the darkness that even stained glass sunshine couldn’t get to. he could pinpoint hypocrisy but went along with it because his father expected him to and wasn’t that just the kicker? pitting father against father in a holy war of who to obey.
but if there was one thing about steve, it was that he could grow. he was malleable and observant and ever curious, the proverbial hand outstretched to grab the forbidden fruit. he had questions that would never be answered, he had ideas that would never have evidence, he had a longing to make right what he had wronged and wasn’t that what god would have wanted? he let his own son perish on a cross to allow steve that chance and by god he was going to take it.
if you ask eddie about god, he will have too much to say. he didn’t grow up in two piece suits on a historical pew on sundays, he had crooked crosses in yards and bibles in motel rooms with dollars between the pages and saying grace before supper. he had a father who swore at the same god he prayed to and a mother who used his name like a curse. he had brimstone and anger and sweat rolling down the round red face of a preacher as he held his hands to the sky. he had fingers wagging in his face damning him to an eternity of hades flames if he wasn’t careful.
his father buzzed his head after eddie’s eyes wandered just once to that bright shiny apple that he knew he shouldn’t have even thought about tasting. the lord works in mysterious ways and gave him a sin with big green eyes and a toothy grin, short cropped hair instead of long curls. he had been told that he’d go to hell if he didn’t cut that damn hair ever since he decided to grow it out and it was almost funny how true it felt when the clippers came too close to his scalp.
he grew disdain for the idea of a god early on because goddamnit, he was was as angry as that preacher man was. eddie was a ball of rage, a flash of burning holy wings falling from the sky, misunderstood and tossed aside. he learned to curse the way his parents did and pray to the same ghost in the sky in the same breath wondering why. if he was real, why was he was stuck in the life he had? the hardest battles for the strongest soldiers, that’s what his granny would say as she turned a blind eye to his own black ones.
hawkins, he had thought, would be eden in a trailer park. a fresh start with new people and cold air freezing his newly shorn head like a lamb. but there he met the same believers, the same rhetoric, only this time it was subtle. it was eyes sliding over him and downturned lips and furrowed eyebrows that told him he was unwelcome. if there was a god, he was cruel and he was vindictive and he was no better than the devil that people swore by.
but steve and eddie, they learned about monsters and creatures that were under their feet all along. they fought like angels with big mighty wings and swords and spears against relentless demons. they fought for themselves, for each other, for the sins that felt heavy in their chests and left them with matching scars. when it was all over, and eddie lay praying to a god who had been silent to at least make it quick, steve was muttering prayers of his own to not let them fail, to not take his family from him.
it felt like a wicked full circle when he looked down to see eddie’s body, bites torn out of him shining red with fresh spilt blood, and thought that it was like a crucifixion of their own. steve was back in a pew in a too scratchy suit, playing with his mother’s fingers, prepared to take communion with the body and blood of someone he wanted to know but never really would.