Devotion

By C. Rommial Butler

The end draws nigh, I know.

I can feel it in my very bones, resting as they are in my favorite chair, surrounded by this prison of flesh and muscle.

I grab a matchbox and strike a match, reaching out to light a lone candle on the pedestal before me.

It flickers to life before my eyes, the flame blurring, refracting spectral hues through my sheath of swelling tears.

Some would say it was only a symbol, that my intense ecstasy is only a psychological aberration, but in the dancing flame I recognize the Lord, my God.

He is in all light. He is in my heart, a golden glow that disperses the shadows, and the creatures that lurk therein; a raging fire that destroys the machinations of the wicked.

For the non-believer it burns, for me it gives warmth and clarity.

Yet I have compassion, for I know that though the wage of sin is death, everlasting life can be found in the forgiveness which our Lord Jesus Christ has offered through the greatest sacrifice, and temptation to sin itself must beckon us to the death-in-life which opens our eyes to salvation.

I have experienced this death-in-life.

I spent many years chasing false idols of worldly pleasure. The old pagan festivities of wine, woman, and song. In modern parlay we call it sex, drugs and rock and roll, but it's the same old story.

I was a roadie for a rock band. They headlined arenas all over the world. My primary job was to procure drugs, run for meals, and direct their preferred lovers backstage.

My mother named me Anthony Michael, but the crew used to call me Tony Baloney, because they said I could bullshit my way out of or into any situation.

That was how I got the job in the first place, bullshitting my way backstage, befriending the band and crew. (Pardon my French, dear Lord!)

They were wrong though.

My luck ran out, and I got busted acquiring a kilo of cocaine. It was a surprise because most of my traffic was with crooked DEA and other law enforcement agents. So much so that I seriously doubted there were any that were not corrupt.

I still do.

I figure I was a fall guy, just there to make a show of piety to a naïve public.

The band still tours. They've made a show (a reality TV show, in fact) of going through rehab.

But none of them did time. I did many years in a federal prison.

It was there that Jesus entered my heart, and He has been with me ever since.

After I served my time I became a Franciscan friar, and I have only one regret: that my dear mother, a devout Catholic and an inspiration to all her children, was not there to see me ordained.

She passed on to her eternal reward while I was in prison; but I will see her any minute now when my own service in this life is done.

Here I sit in my final daily meditation, staring into a flame which not only represents the Lord, but which must indeed be Him, for He is in all things.

The tiny candle flame grows into an all-consuming light in my vision, ballooning simultaneously with the pain in my chest.

I've known this day was coming, for the Lord foretold it in a dream.

White incandescence consumes my entire being. I feel His arms lift me, pulling me gently through sphere after sphere.

I think I see other beings in the light and hear them singing out a sweet chorus. Was that a trumpet? Do the angels await me at Heaven's Golden Gate?

Yet it gets colder and colder as I rise. Painfully cold.

It is no matter. I will face any trial to meet and make peace with my maker.

The white light disintegrates to reveal a lone electric bulb flickering beyond a pale pink film.

I am paralyzed, suspended in some sort of tank filled with a viscous slime.

Peeking into my prison from beyond the rim of the tank is a creature with an almond-shaped head and large pupil-less eyes. It has no nose or ears, but a proboscis which hangs from its face, twitching around on the surface of the goo.

Several tentacles creep down into the slime, seize me, lift me.

I emerge into the cold light of a strange afterlife, nothing I ever envisioned.

What is this?

All around me I see other creatures floating in tanks, hooked to various apparatuses the likes of which the alien presently begins pulling from many of my own orifices.

I feel plugs and needles slide free.

Unharnessed from whatever life-support system the alien used to sustain my inert body, my nerves drone a dull roar of pain.

I can see now that my life was only a coma dream, and I have no way of knowing what lies beyond.

I can feel myself breathing rapidly, my vision swimming in a newfound Hell of unutterable shock.

The alien, my true god, selects a tool that looks like a barbed ice pick.

The barbs spin on the shaft as the alien brings it close to my ear.

As it shoves the whirring instrument into my ear canal, my numb body shakes.

I feel consciousness slipping away.

Is this the only mercy I was ever truly fated to know?

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