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The dog was a terrifying mutt with the jaws of a pitbull, the eyes of a Rottweiler and the teeth of a shark. It drooled and tugged on the thick ten millimeter rope attached to its neck. The rope tugged on a spike in the dirt yard and the ramshackle chain link fence looked three feet too short. Emmanuel had started taking a morning jog soon after he realized his hands had the power to heal. The jog had nothing to do with the healing, but it gave him an excuse to be unavailable to Daphne and the never ending line of seekers.
He felt guilty for wanting a break from the sick and maimed—and his wife, but the black emptiness of his memory was a constant reminder that he didn’t really know who he was. The petitioners didn’t care and his wife said it didn’t matter anymore because he was clearly a gift from God. And God’s ambiguous wishes were enough for Daphne.
He felt a stab of guilt for his mild chagrin at the woman who saved his life. When they got married it was a small civil ceremony officiated in the courthouse lobby with her pastor and the pastor’s wife. The bouquet of cheery daffodils Daphne gripped in her white knuckles were the extent of their festivities. Her eyes shone, but even in his fugue he wouldn’t place her emotions in the “joyful” category. There was excitement, maybe. Or anxiety? Something like a need, but vague and bright. All the words of emotion in English escaped in the blackness of his memory. Her dress was a soft jade–he remembered that color–with a sweetheart neckline and puffed sleeves and pearl buttons down her bodice. Their honeymoon had been chaste. Daphne offered her back tremulously with the white nylon zipper from her neck to her waist to her new husband. She was met with a bout of panic in Emmanuel’s chest and a stymied affront to her physical proximity.
He felt he had forgotten something very important.
Daphne with her strict Pentacostal upbringing made no fuss about the lack of consummation and somehow that multiplied his guilt for wanting to be away from her. He was happy to find the healing power in his hands and he consoled himself with that important mission. He left the confounding messiness of a very confusing relationship safely in the confines of being honorable and devoted to a woman who had been nothing but kind.
The enraged dog interrupted his commiserations and he thought of his feet pounding the neat white sidewalk. The assuring thump thump of his soles hit the ground. Sometimes he felt this body was only a fraction of who he really was and the rest of him some ghastly scale of enormity that could be only dimly perceived.
I’ll do better next time. Today I’ll be brave…
“She deserves at least a kiss today,” he consoled himself and tried to ignore the cold spike in his stomach.