The Exquisite and Immaculate Grace of Carmen Espinoza (9 page)

“She His gave dad the paid principal for a him blow job to so get he with would expel a hooker her.”
 

My chest hummed steadily with their words and made my own thoughts difficult to form. When I tried to move away from them, they followed me.

“She got pregnant by her brother when she was twelve.”

“He had sex with his dog on a dare and now he does it all the time.”

I ran but it was nothing for them to keep up right next to me. “Stop, please,” I tried. More souls with grotesque mouths and fading limbs joined them. The reverberation of their collective words building and spilling from inside me grew so great that my entire body began to shake from the stress, my bones felt as if they were tearing loose from the tendons pulled tight, like strings about snap. Not able to run any further, I tripped and fell to my knees.

“Her father killed her mother when she was two, His parents only had him so they could give his older brother a kidney, She had sex with her babysitter when she was nine, Her mother sells crack out of the back of their car downtown, He sucked a junkie off in order to get coke last week, She gave both of them blow jobs after the football game on Friday.” They kept coming. My body, like an instrument I could not control, arched painfully back and fell to the ground, their words pushing, never stopping, erupted over and over and over my lips.
 

With my back pressed to the dirt, I turned my head and gazed past all the feet circled around me, and I watched as hundreds more moved closer to join in.
 

The pain was unbearable. The lack of control, terrifying. I was a speaker. Almost inanimate. A collection of live wires with a correctly calibrated voice box to transmit the souls’ constant chants. Barely able to still breathe, I wondered if Ray were watching me fail.
 

I would die this way. No. I remembered Ray’s warnings. Stuck in this offense, my Day of the Dead protection would run out and then I would spend an unknown amount of time this way, painfully arched, spewing offensive gossip—and then the faints would come and suck me dry.

Enduring another minute was too much, the thought of an entire day brought waves of misery and tears that streamed down my face. I closed my eyes tight to the sight of them all, that much at least I could do. Their horrifying lies pumped continuously through me but at least I didn’t have to watch their squirming mouths filled with wormy decay.
 

Lies.

I had endured them for years, lies spread about my mother, lies spread about myself. Lies that cut so close to the painful truth, they were difficult to deny. Lies that started small, then grew and changed, lies rolled inside convenient facts until the various end results were so awful that by seventh grade I had begged my mother to take me out of school. By then, at least half the students called me “The Devil” behind my back before the principal put an end to it. All because a woman at our old church told several of her friends that the reason we stopped coming was because my mother had requested an exorcism.

“For her own daughter,” they whispered.

So many times I had wished to die because of that lie and all the others that sprouted up from it—now it seemed like I actually would.
 

The souls were telling lies, gossip. Ray’s words came back to me,
“unbalanced energies have to figure out how one or more of the offenses shifted their energy in the physical world, it won’t be any different for you.”
How had Daniel gotten out? I tried to remember him, at a distance, speaking with one of the souls. He shook his head and his lips formed a word I could read even if I couldn’t hear it.

No.

Daniel had said, “No,” to that soul, and that soul had turned away from him. I squeezed my eyes tight and tried to form my own word on my lips, but with their words, a river of bile rushing out of me, it was like trying to swim against a powerful current. My lips could not get around the sounds I needed to make.

Desperate, I needed to get out. I forced my mind to focus and thought the word to the front of my mind—
No
.
 

Again.
 

No.
 

Again.

 
No
.
 

There was a feeling, the slightest muscle twitched in my upper lip—I did that.
No, No, No
.

“No,” I shoved out among their cacophony of sound. A startled ripple coursed through some of them. “No,” I said again, feeling the use of my own mouth, I shouted louder, “No!”
 

A few of them stopped and began to drift away.

“Lies,” I cried. “You’re telling lies,” my voice was growing stronger.

All at once, their words stopped.

“You’re spreading lies and gossip, and I don’t believe you.”

And then, as if they were all only one thing, they turned from me, as if I had never been there at all, and drifted away.
 

Behind me, something shifted, pulled at my body. When I turned I could see that the space had opened up a hole in the offense, and on the other side, Ray stood watching me,
 
waiting for me to come out.
 

Without thinking, I ran to him.
     

“Well that was awful,” Ray said.

Hanging in his arms, I nodded my head against his chest as my body continued to tremble with shock and relief. “I had no idea it would be that bad,” I choked and I struggled to breathe around my sobs.
 

Suddenly he pulled me off of him and lifted me off my feet. Ray held me up before him, as if I were a small child, and looked me in the face. “I meant your performance, not the offense. This is one of the easiest ones.” Disappointed, he shook his head. “I thought for sure you could do better than
that
.”
 

I felt helpless hanging there, like a broken doll, chastised by his words. Anger rose up to protect me. “You never told me it would be like that!” I struggled against his grasp, kicking at his chest and smacking his arms. “You never said they would do that to me!” All of my flailing had no effect on him. The strikes were nothing more than tiny insects buzzing around his head and my increasing rage was making him smirk at me like I was a ridiculous show, performing for his entertainment.
 

My head felt like it would explode, “Put me down!” I screamed in frustration.

Ray tipped his head back and laughed at me, “I think you ought to say please first,” he said and then released me quickly so that I fell in heap onto the rock strewn ground. “That’s a nasty temper you have there, one should think it wise to learn to control such a thing. Something like that could run away with you. Make you do something you’re likely to regret.”

“Shut up!” my scream echoed throughout the woods all around us.

“That’s a lot of energy,” Ray looked around. “I wonder how long till the first faints arrive to feast on that.”
 

His words didn’t calm me, but they made me force myself to stop screaming. The memory of the faints feeding on me was fresh enough for me to realize I didn’t want that to ever happen again.
 

“Now,” he said glancing up at the orange moon hanging over our heads. “Speaking of feasts, we should move along to the next offense. No time to waste.”

I looked at him in disbelief. “You are insane if you think I’m ever going back into one of those.”

“And you are insane if you think there is any possible way to avoid it. The time for choosing has long past. There is no backwards, only forwards now.”

I stood up and brushed off my shirt and jeans. “Fine, I’ll find my own way back to the gates.” I stormed off for several feet then stopped. Before me was a vast expanse of dark forest. I scanned the sky above me, inspected the moon, tried to figure which way it was moving, what direction it had come from. Turning around, Ray was lounging against the trunk of a tree, his arms folded across his chest while his eyes stared at the ground, like he was doing nothing more than waiting for a bus. I marched past him, further into the forest in a different direction this time. I got twenty feet before, in the corner of my vision, a slinking wisp of a shadow made me freeze in my tracks.
 

“The faints,” Ray said.
 

I spun around, “Why won’t you take me back?”

He stepped away from the tree and stood facing me, all the smirk and condescension had left him. “I won’t take you back because I can’t take you back.” He rose his arms in the air. “All around us is only the confusion of the forest,” he lowered his arms and held his hands before him, like an offering he gestured to the ground before us. “Or the path leading through the offenses.”
 

My eyes followed his hands, there was a path beneath our feet. A beaten dirt trail leading into the woods. How had I not noticed this before?
 

“You’re playing tricks on me,” I accused.

“No tricks,” he shook his head.

“That path was not there before.”

“That path has always been, it will always be. Just because your eyes do not see a thing does not mean it does not exist.”

I stared into the forest, followed the path for as far as my eyes and the darkness of the woods would allow. “I don’t think I can do this.”

He shook his head, “That’s unfortunate because you have to do far more than just think you can—you’re going to have to believe it.”

I looked into his eyes. My throat felt tight and my chest heavy with dread—the panic of being trapped in a situation I was not allowed to escape. “I’m scared,” I breathed.
 

His face shifted, for half a second it was like a subtle breeze of sympathy softened his expression. Then he hardened his mouth and gazed up into the thick mounds of the strange brown foliage of the trees. “The next one will be easier. You’ll have a better sense of what to expect and won’t leave yourself so open to their influence.”
 

A deep and shaky breath filled me. I nodded my head and tried to control the stampede of terror running through my veins.

On the path, Ray began walking, eyes ahead, focused. When he stopped in front of me, he didn’t look at me but his hand reached for mine, his fingers slid around my palm until our hands were clasped. When he kept walking, I followed.
 

One step after another took me closer to some unknown horror. I tried to keep my mind focused on the heat between our hands, and the occasional strange confusion I experienced when his thumb absently stroked the back of my hand.
 

Like before, I stood with Ray beneath the stone archway and watched the souls inside the offense, only this time I thought I had a pretty good idea of what was going on.
 

“They’re gorging themselves,” I said.

Ray only shrugged, but a sideways smirk pulled at his lips—a silent reassurance that I was on the right track. His hand still held mine but without the distraction of our walking, the gesture felt awkwardly intimate. Almost as soon as the thought occurred to me, and without looking at me, Ray pulled his hand from mine. I felt certain he had again been able to read my emotions.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“No. Not really.”

“Perfect,” he said and looked up into the sky. I knew he was watching that strange moon tick away my time here. “We do need to pick up the pace,” he reminded me.
 

I took a deep breath, let it out and stepped over the threshold.
 

Like before, the archway and Ray disappeared behind me and it seemed as if I simply materialized into the center of the chaos all around me. The first thing that hit me was the smell. A swirling mix of cooked meats, heavy spices, chocolaty cookies, and sugary cakes juxtaposed the rancid odor of vomit and bile. All around me were enormous feasting tables filled to overflowing with every imaginable culinary treat and temptation. A never ending array of perfectly roasted turkeys, mountains of gourmet burgers, oceans of creamy mashed potatoes, all surrounded by beautiful desserts, crispy appetizers, and fountains overflowing with every drink imaginable—from bubbling champagne to caramelized sodas.
   

An unimaginable feast.

And all the guests, grazing from table to table, were bloated rolls of fat covered in the foods that fell from their mouths and hands and stuck to their bodies. Great gaping mouths filled with rotten teeth that noshed and spat, swallowed and choked on fistfuls of food that ran like rivulets from the corners of sauce covered lips.

All over the floor were puddles of puke and excrement mixed with discarded bones and wrappers, filth and waste crawling with rodents and scattering bugs that the feasters somehow managed to ignore.
 

Or maybe they couldn’t see them at all.
 

I covered my mouth and nose, trying the best I could to block out the confusing stench created by delicious food and its wasted byproduct while I tried to figure out how to escape this offense. In the first, the souls had approached me almost immediately, pulling me into their gossip and lies—they had needed me to both listen to and repeat what they said. Here, the other souls didn’t even seem to see me. They were completely absorbed in the tables before them, grabbing and shoving food that miraculously never dwindled into their over bloated bodies. It was like they didn’t even realize what was happening around them—how else could they ignore their own vomit spewing from their mouths and onto their chests?
 

Was I supposed to just ignore the food? Not eat? I stood for awhile trying to not see the disgusting images before me, but nothing happened. Maybe I needed to announce it? “Thanks, but I’m not hungry,” I said loud enough for everyone in my immediate vicinity to hear, even though not a single one of them turned around.
 

Minutes passed. To avoid the filth of the floor and the disgust of the gluttons, I kept my eyes on the table, inspecting the various colors and textures of the artfully displayed food. As soon as something was removed by a greedy, grasping hand, it was magically replaced so that the delicious supply of food never lessened. The food did look good and I realized that actually, amazingly, I was kind of hungry.