god of the open spaces
"His son would be his redemption." | Witch Craft Magazine
Fiction by Victoria Christ
They’d been on the road for nearly eight hours. Up through the garish strip of Pigeon Forge and the sprawl of Sevierville, where the lip of Virginia hugged the national forest, and now through the west of Baltimore, which looked like it had been blitzed.
Row houses boarded up, corner stores barricaded. He spotted a burned out car - the embers were still smoldering. He thought he felt the heat from it as they drove by.
He knew they were protesting a boy who got his neck snapped in the back of the police car. Rough ride, they called it. As in ‘give him a rough ride’ that’s supposedly what one cop said to the other as they put him in the back of the police car.
Still, he didn’t see what that had to do with the broken glass, with the liquor store with its window busted in, uselessly now outlined in packing tape. People wanted to loot, to steal, they would take the first chance they got. This is what that’s about. We are always one step away from falling. It was a miserable part of town, sure, made more miserable with how little respect its inhabitants gave the surroundings. How quick they’d been to torch it, break its bones, climb up their own broken street lamps, flip their own cars. But it wasn’t any more miserable than the place he’d grown up, he thought.
Only a few blocks out, the carnage cleared until it was lush and green, brick row houses, the charming urban sprawl he was used to. John Hopkins University. No, Johns Hopkins he was pretty sure. Brick and trees and little parks everywhere.
But even that cleared and they were surrounded by woodlands again. The kind of dense, spiny trees that reminded him of that movie he’d taken Marcie to see before she split again and before he was saved. What was it called? The Blair Witch Project, that’s right. It was filmed on some shitty camcorder and half the people in the theatre thought it was real, that someone had killed the projectionist and replaced the movie with their own shitty snuff film. But he knew better. Witches didn’t hide in the woods, they lived next door. And they didn’t leave little trinkets made of twigs outside your tent. No, they invited the Devil right to your door. Let temptation right into your heart. Some people didn’t think evil and Satan existed cause they weren’t smart enough to understand metaphor, like he was. No, there’s no red man with horns coming to kill you and drag you to hell, but there’s people who glut on evil, who can’t submit themselves to the Lord cause they can’t think of anything higher than themselves, and they wheedle into your heart, they corrupt you, make you a cheat and a drunk and a lost man. That’s what there is to be afraid of, not witches in the woods or zombies or whatever.
Wasn’t The Blair Witch Project set in Maryland? He thought it was. It had the same spindly forests you could get lost in, that looked the same and the same and the same for miles.
Marcie watched the whole film through her fingers. He tried to tell her there wasn’t anything scary on the screen, it was just a shaky home video, it never focused on anything, not even at the end. He’d fought back a pang of endearment seeing her vulnerable like that. She fled to Knoxville again a week later, for the millionth time, leaving no vulnerability behind. No, she left him to trick and shoot coke, probably crack, that’s what she got paid in half the time. He didn’t even know you could shoot coke before he met Marcie. He didn’t know shit before her - he was a straight-laced country boy. His old man had straightened him out with the belt until he was leathery all over. He never would have touched anything like that if it weren’t for her.
She had a cloud of blonde hair that refused to be tamed and listened to Fleetwood Mac. She wore bootcut jeans and a turtleneck most of the time. Her step dad beat her worse than his dad beat him, and not always in places she could cover. He’d trace the bruises on her wrists and collarbones when he’d undress her, wanting to vow to protect her but not wanting to impinge on another man’s work. Deep down he felt like if the man had got her this bad, there was probably a reason why. Now, after all she’d put him through, he knew.
She got pregnant towards the end of their senior year of high school. She would not stop smoking, or using anything. He found cigarette butts everywhere. In the ice cream container. In the bathroom drawers. Between the pages of a book. He confronted her every time but she was indifferent. Why did she try to hide it at all?
She was miserable. Gone were the visions of the glowing, radiant woman, like women were supposed to be when pregnant. She vomited all the time, until little blood vessels burst in her eyes. She told him marijuana was the only thing that would make it stop. Made him buy it for her. Then he caught her doing the coke again, and drinking. He was furious, wanted to throttle her right then and there.
They knew she was having a boy at that point. She was over twenty weeks along. This was supposed to be the most glorious, most meaningful experience of her life. This was supposed to transform her, why was she falling? Why was she going back to her own ways, and worse?
But he couldn’t leave her. They weren’t together anymore, but he made it clear he still intended to provide for her and the child. Then she got arrested for prostitution up in Knox. Guess guys up there have a thing for pregnant ladies.
He thought of his son sharing a womb with another man’s cock. It made his insides fold in on themselves. He took the baby when it was born, wanted to name him Charles Jr. but settled on giving the baby the same initials as him—CLP. Not that it meant anything.
His son would be his redemption. He would raise him to be a strong man. He regretted that he let Marcie in and out throughout the first ten years of the boy’s life. He felt he could see his confusion on his son’s face as he reckoned with this strange woman who was and wasn’t his mother. Her face grew sunken over the years after all the drugs. She couldn’t have loved him even if she’d wanted to.
He doted on the boy, maybe too much, but this was his chance for redemption. A strong son. But as the boy grew and developed his own personality, he noticed something strange. He was a mirror of himself, which is what he had wanted all along, but he was harder on the boy when he saw his own vices mirrored back at him. The laziness, the wantonness, and eventually the drinking. He could always find compassion for himself, even an excuse for his behavior, but in his son it was reprehensible. It filled him with a twisting rage when he saw his son resting, cheating work, eyeing women that looked a lot like Marcie. He punished him hard and often, withholding love until he could be molded into the godliest version of himself, of both of them.
They were passing into Pennsylvania now, with its eerie abandoned farmland and outcroppings of trees. He looked over at his son, sleeping in the passenger seat, early orange light of the dawn cresting his severe features. Even the act of resting struck him as selfish, unaligned with the selfless and self-flagellating man he’d hoped to raise and he considered waking him up. But no, let him sleep, he’d driven them through most of Virginia, he thought.
His son was older now, a beer belly forming. He had not raised the godly man he had hoped for, but there was still a chance. Now that they were gone from Tennessee, a place where nobody could be saved, they could find somewhere new where the people wanted to be saved. He could surround his son with people of the Lord, a congregation of his making. He could be the savior he’d always wanted.
He did not know where they would stop. Wherever it was, he would simply have a knowing that it would be their new home, of that he was sure.
Back in school, a history teacher had told them the story about Mexico’s flag, not that he’d given a rat’s ass at the time. It was an eagle clutching a snake in its maw. The chief or whatever they used to call it had had a vision of the bird with the snake, and proclaimed that wherever they saw the emblem would be where they built their capital city. After weeks, they came across a lake and on the lake was a rock and on the rock was an eagle gripping a snake in its beak. So that’s where they built Mexico City, on top of a lake. Fucking stupid if you asked him, because it meant their biggest city was bound to sink, but what did they know.
He held a similar conviction, though. Wherever he saw a woman dancing with the devil, he would stop and set down his church.
Metaphorically speaking, at least, and he knew how to read between the lines, unlike most people.
about the author
Victoria Christ (she/her) is a writer and book reviewer. She was raised in eastern Pennsylvania and now lives in Ireland.
this is great