Redhead Saint - Revised

It was Sunday morning, as always.  We spend the morning on the backyard porch. I made breakfast and he sat by the windowsill, outside on the top step of the staircase leading down to the backyard.  Softly lit wooden floors sometimes churned beneath sunlight. The floor seemed to stretch from my perspective, by the kitchen, as I watched the burnished mahogany tease my husband’s ankles with the taunt of contrast, making his pale skin sickly whiter.

I sat and placed the tray with our food down on the table.  He sat across from me, brandishing his smile like a banner waved in testament of our happiness… our blessings as he’d say. He took a bowl of oatmeal and set it before him, then began to stir the contents idly, while still looking at me with a sensitively questioning gaze.


“Please?” He whispered, bringing a spoonful of oatmeal to his lips. Mouth opened, gaped, and lips hugged the spoon… I could almost picture his tongue diving into the pool of oatmeal and making it overflow, then pour past the silver colored rims into his warm mouth. I could picture his tongue from the sudden inflation of his cheeks and the breath escaping him as the spoon was pulled.

I took my own spoon to distract myself. A small ceramic bowl lay on the tray; I always served the cinnamon in said bowl, with enough for us both, without ever being too much. I stabbed my spoon into the bowl’s contents, picked up half a teaspoon of cinnamon and added it to my coffee. I let the spoon sink and the cinnamon propagate along the caramel colored drink mixed with milk and honey. As slow as him, I paid attention to the insignificant and stirred my spoon to distract my eyes from him. My eyes rolled from the cinnamon to the coffee then towards the sugar bowl, but I found my gaze being magnetically attracted to his. I tried to be a tease with a small smile but I never seemed to get it right, I couldn’t fake happiness even as I added some sugar to my coffee… even that didn’t cheer me up. The coffee began tasting bitter, and I hadn’t tried it yet…

“Come with me to church today. If you hurry we won’t be late.”-  He begged, he seemed to plead as if my life depended on a prayer and the blessing of a ‘messenger of god’, I never believed a priest could be holy. -

“I think I’m getting a migraine”- I excused myself, or attempted, and in that moment I managed to get him in the mood to debate my own state of being. -

“A small headache is one of those little things that only happen in Sunday mornings.  It’s the devil I say.” Those words were stones tossed at a sinner; I was blasphemous and he was divine. I needed salvation; he offered me redemption.  He would’ve been happy if I had drowned my indecisiveness in his suggestions and followed them through instead.

Thomas had always loved me. He has loved me for a while now, he says. Pretending our love only flourished through our marriage and that anything before it was puppy-love.  I personally can’t agree, it makes our old friendship seem fake, along with all the events before our actual wedding. He says love grows after the couple reaches intimacy (not necessarily sexual) and that our lives eventually entwine and become one and in His name, Christ’s name, we can love and lead a happy life and marriage.


I could see his unnervingly strong love beneath his caramel glazed eyes cutting through the distance between us, which was as long as the distance I placed between us both. I detached myself from his words and from my emotions; I unplugged my sensitivity and drank indifferent thoughts induced by my rebellious anarchy.

“I’m sorry…”

Oh, I swelled with a decisive sentence. I’m sorry, I had said. And I regretted it.  Thomas would smile and say my name with a light shake of his head… pause, and then speak out redemption and how God forgives me and gives me solace… but he didn’t.

  I was a solitary soul and my peace of mind did not rely on a god. He did not grasp the concept of believing, and not following and then raising my children to be lost in the world. I thought about my child as my eyes drew themselves to his lips, observing the crease of his frown carefully, maybe then with the movement of his lips I could predict his words and brace myself emotionally.  They were always soft, gentle, slow; as soft, gentle and slow as a blade.  

“Don’t go to church for me.  Do it for yourself, Samantha... do it for your child. Only one year old, he’s a sponge to everything his mother does. Impregnate his young mind with knowledge and understanding and fear of God, let him grow, knowing of the truth.”

“I’m not keeping you from going to church, with James.”

“He’ll see his mother staying behind – Soon he’ll stray, too.”  He protested.

“I’m not lost, I’m right here.”  

“Smartass” He replied, sighing as he rolled his eyes.

“I thought the Reverend dislike such… vulgar language” I teased and refined my accent, played it over his senses with the same finesse I made him believe everything I said. I felt guilty for manipulating him at times, but maybe he was just too gullible.

My redhead Saint, Thomas, once again sighed and scolded me by correcting. “Priest” He spat and leaned back, deeper into his chair. Thomas grabbed my cup of coffee; he stole a sip, my rejuvenating addiction, my caffeine.  He was annoyed and possibly flustered, frustrated. The light smile that always rested over his mature and masculine features, which I always complimented, seemed to fade beneath the guise of a content man.  He placed the cup down, then left the oatmeal untouched, stood, and left…

I could see his breath billowing past his lips as he walked away. Each heavy footstep palpitated through the ground and each vibration seemed to stir the cup of coffee, lingering over an indirect kiss the moment I drank from it.  It was as close as I could get to him lately. Every week we drifted away. Each Sunday was a step further into forgetting what we once cherished.  It came from laying one over another in bed to assigning sides; I took the bed’s left side, he took the right. I used the bed comforter, he used cotton sheets.




Even when I heard the car’s doors close and screech in protest against its metallic pang I still stared out the balcony and into the backyard. The cup of coffee remained in my hand, all my fingers curled around the handle besides the pinkie which stuck out… it was an interesting habit I assimilated from Thomas, but he never once noticed, or just kept quiet about it.  It was another one of those little details I wanted him to notice, I wanted him to be curious about my inner workings, about how each gear within me shifted and pushed the other.  I wanted him to count the times I’d say I love you before I’d kiss him, I wanted him to notice the beauty ‘spots’ that appeared from one day to another, over my thighs.

We were opposites in more than one way. I read books Pulitzer-prize winning books and he, instead, read daily devotionals with recycled messages.  I see him walking past our garage doors as they recline and hide, I see the car puling out. He drives a mini-van, he said it was safer, and I’m happy with my compact car.   

I drank from my cup and I didn’t take in coffee, I absorbed his scent lingering and brewing around the cup’s brim. It stirred the misty aromatic vapor exhumed from the cup, the burning cinnamon burnt my nose and I frowned… he wasn’t there to peck the tip of my nose and blow away the hurt, just like we used to in those high-school days. Now love came second to God, but wasn’t God love? I was confused, I was hurt; I wanted to be confused, I wanted to be hurt. I wanted him to pick me up from the ground in the same way he once did, when my parents were breaking up, when my first child died 3 months after her birth. I wanted him to hold me the same way he held our baby James, with hope, not with the despondent detachment he kissed me with.




I can still remember Christmas mornings.  The games with used to play with only two souls that drifted in and out of the corridors. Our breaths were beacons to each other and each giggle I send down the silent halls was a guiding light; he followed through the dark and found me. Beneath the bed covers, but I wasn’t there. I was in his chest, beating like a heartbeat when I kissed his collarbone.  Each line stricken across his body was unevenly symmetrical and perfect in its own right. I saw beauty in his scars and I found him beneath his sarcasm and contradicting kindness.

Thomas used to hold my hand and kiss me. He was reserved but curious, never daring to go too far or too rough, or too soft, without asking me first. I never answered, but I led him with remarks that failed to tease his confidence and whispers that controlled his judgment.  I had him and he thought he owned me.  I couldn’t deny him the right of ownership over me when those full lips crashed into my collarbone –in the same spot, same way, same manner, and same ferocity every time- to brand my skin with the superficial burn of his breath and the temporal scar his teeth left behind.  He could sooth, he could entice, but he never could love.  

Maybe as time passes I’ll convert, I’ll transform.  James might grow up to be just like his father, or his mother, or an indecisive hybrid of teachings and beliefs. Whatever happens, or happened, after that day on the backyard porch would be left to fate… or faith, as Thomas would say.