In a summer, when the wind held its breath and the day lay like a sheet of wet-wool he would drive past the small little church and wonder what sort of words were written on the scraps of paper in the Prayer Box.
The Prayer Box was about the size of a good-sized cooler, bigger than a mail box, stuck at the end of the drive-way where passers-by could take a piece of paper, scribble with the pencil attached by a string to the side and offer up missives...offer up wishes, cures, miracles. He never saw anybody stop by, so he often wondered if it was even used.
One day in the heat of an early summer-start in June, he saw the pastor walking down the dirt driveway...he pulled over slightly, watching as the gray haired minister opened up the top of the box and pulled out handfuls of folded slips. There must have been 25 or more...each pulled like a lucky lottery number, stuffed into his shirt pocket. It bulged after a minute or so.
Sitting in the car, he felt amazingly small. He had written all of them.
And so far, despite it being a single request, multiplied over many instances, it remained unanswered.
He watched the pastor walk up the hill, unfolding the small pieces, reading them and then putting them back into his pocket. At one point he thought the man paused halfway up the hill, glanced in his direction, and then resumed his pace. In his car, he stared back at him through his sunglasses, never wavering. But he wondered if the old man read his lips as he mouthed "come on, give me something."
The written words were pretty much chicken-scratched from memory; fueled by bourbon and the color brown and all its permutations...he wrote of the salt of sweaty skin, he wrote of the warmth of a mouth...he scribbled at the point where her hair arced around her ear and how he drove his tongue deep into the fold...he wrote of her breath hitching...her mouth mentioning his name...he wrote in tiny sequences that unfolded. They were not prayers...not exactly....rather, they were scenes that now, in the full heat of summer, he perhaps had hoped they'd be replayed.
It was a false hope. And the fullest part of a prayer is in its truth. Therefore, these had no chance.
He watched the pastor shaking his head slightly as he read a tiny script of paper.
He pulled the car out on the road and drove away.
Yet the words continued. The spill, like a faucet turned on after a long time alone, sputtered, and splashed...until a gentle rhythm spooled out. Halting at first, he intertwined his thoughts with his wants...he started using full pages of paper, the words piling on and darkening the white. The paper had to be folded into quarters to fit the Prayer Box slot...and the 25 became 45. And the pastor started bringing a paper sack to the end of the driveway.
After some time, he realized the pastor knew he was just an outlet. That the prayer wasn't even real...it wasn't an ask. It was a hope. And even then it was more of gesture. A politeness.
The way a flower will still bloom despite lack of water.
He knew that his words would end up in the pastor's can in the corner of his office. There was no prayer in them...no holy request. It was carnal, visceral...thoughts of encounters that he felt might be answered.
She had been a part of that summer...that succulent and fertile place where she bloomed in his mind, his touch...full blooms that created colors and pastels that she alone possessed.
And he held that craggy flower...long after the rains stopped...long after the sun beat the stalk into a brittle black stem. He wrote a few words now and again...but the earth would now consume itself and erase the colored parts that were there before. The pinks and yellows now reverting back to the earth-tones.
The dark tones. The sepia moving into a coffee colored mixture that was rain-less...
The dirt colored colors that were just like the color of her eyes.
He picked up the piece of paper and started writing again...black letters like the color of scorched stems that dotted the white of the paper that was filled with pieces of her.
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