hen he was eight years old he overheard a preacher man tell his Grandma, in the leaking sanctuary of a dying Baptist church, that the scriptures instructed each of us to tithe ten percent. Well, fuck that ten percent. His Master demanded everything. He sacrificed paychecks; he worked all week out on the dock behind the dairy, the reek of spoiled milk soaked in his gloves. He loaded crates into freezer trucks, his shadow his only companion in the cold, blue-dawn of the third shift.

When his money was gone, he sacrificed all his worldly possessions. He ripped the computer out of the wall; he lugged the television out of the family room. He dumped his music collection into the trunk, discs spilled from their cases like frozen oil slicks. He waited until his wife was fast asleep, before he slipped out of the house with her video camera and laptop hidden under his coat. When those things were gone, he sold his coat. He lied to his daughter and told her he was going to donate her Game Boy to an orphanage.

He was “Becoming,” everyday, more and more in The Master’s image. He shed weight and muscle, believing the only strength he needed would be provided. His once heavy and sure hands were nervous and always searching for something.

His wife didn’t understand. She put herself between him and The Master. She threw herself at him, clung to him, begged him, and fought him not to go. But vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord, and he bashed her face under an angry storm of his knuckles. He beat her off and then stomped the blasphemous protests out of her. His daughter cried and screamed from the dark staircase above. He burst out of the house and into the possibility of midnight.                

He hurried off the porch and into the neighborhood, never closing the door, never looking back. He kept walking, head down. The street blocks fell behind him. His shadow got loose and soared on ahead of him, far on enough to catch a glimpse of his future, to know how it would all turn out in the end, but as he passed under the street lamp, his shadow spooked at what it saw and scurried behind him, trailing at his heels like a beaten hound.

He cut through a jagged alley, puddles black as blood splashed beneath his feet, and he came out on a side street. Ahead, the pawnshop’s neon sign hung like a yellow cat’s eye. Dark angels moved as street steam from the manhole covers, and ushered him past the condemned storefronts, past the steel carcasses of abandoned cars and into the sacred shop on the corner. 

The one eyed-owner grinned and greeted him by his first name. He pulled the sacrifice from his pocket and laid it on the counter. The owner’s dead cornea floated in the warm milk of his eye socket like a weightless marble, while his sharp eye—bloodshot

and bugged—inspected the GameBoy. He stood there in the filth of his own sweat and fat, chewing on his tongue. “Ten bucks.”

“Come on, man. It’s brand new, out of the box yesterday.”

“You bring the box?”

“Nah. I got this though.” He pulled out the twisted wire of the battery charger and three small video games from his pocket and put them on the counter.

“Twenty bucks.”

“I can get thirty uptown.”

“Take your ass uptown, then. Makes me no difference.”

Need exploded in his belly like a gas fire. “Fuck, man, just hurry up.”

The owner plugged the greasy keys on the register. The cash drawer popped out like a broken jawbone. He took his money and fled the shop.

The night materialized from a purple fog. Curious eyes followed him from the alleyways. Barking dogs echoed like gunfire in the distance. He hurried over the twisted landscape of an abandoned lot, stumbling over rusted pipes, curls of barbed wire, and chunks of cinder block. 

He spotted a holy man on the corner; he wore a dark hood pulled up over his head, keeping his face secret.  When the holy man spoke, a scatter of gold teeth filled his mouth like a cob of Indian corn. “Whatcha need, man?”

He had promised himself he’d save five bucks to catch the train out of the city, but now, in the presence of the holy man, he felt guilty and realized to withhold anything from The Master was a sign of weakness. To prove his faith, he gave the holy man all his money.

“Go round,” the holy man said, and turned his back on him. “J-man back there.”

He squeezed into the narrow alley. His shoulders whispered along the old brick. The darkness embraced him, he shed his ruined life. His wife’s black eye and hitching

sobs dissolved from his memory, the cries of his daughter—the ones that could find him buried deep in the black abyss of his nightmares—could not reach him here.

Above, on the third floor, an orange square opened like The Master’s watchful eye on the broken brick. An ugly cat slipped from a doorway, ran like spilled ink down the wall, tail jigging in a question mark. He followed the cat out.

There was J-man, tall and hollow, smoking a cigarette. Scars twisted like gray worms over his face. J-man waited for him to approach. No words were spoken. J-man shook his hand, pressed salvation into his palm, and then was gone.

His heart pounded in his chest. He clung to the darkness, scurrying with the rats. He could see the silhouette of the church ahead, a burnt out husk of a house, with boarded windows sewn up like corpse eyes. He gained entrance in the back, crawling on his hands and knees in the dirt, through a hole of caved mesh and rotting foundation. Inside, he shrunk into a grimy corner, beneath a window facing the street.

The moon bled yellow light into this corner and hung the shadow of the window frame on the far wall like a dead man. He stared at this image; the shadow of the window frame reminded him of three crosses, and he thought back to when he was eight years old, back to that leaking sanctuary in that dying Baptist church, back to the smell of his Grandma’s perfume and her fine Sunday hat. He recalled the preacher man’s words, sweat glistening on his face as he bellowed from behind the pulpit, “And Jeeeeeeesus turned to this criminal, this pitiful and sinful man on his right, hanging on his cross, dying alone, dying in shame, and Jeeeeeeeesus promised him, “Tonight, my son, you will join me in Paradise.”

Tears fell from his eyes as he emptied shreds of tobacco from a Newport onto a small section of cigarette paper. He bit the packet the holy man had sold him. The taste of crack on his tongue split his belly open like a hot knife. He pinched the baggie, spilling the crack on the tobacco. Then he wet his fingertips, pressed the paper, and rolled it.

The flame from his lighter kissed the cig to life. And then he filled his entire soul with the smoke. Redemption seeped through his lungs and found his veins, traveling the interstate highway of his insides, washing him in newness and hope, in his toes, his fingers, his guts, his heart, and finally his brain and he forgot everything he ever knew and for that moment—he was free.                   

He woke--his mind scattered like shards of busted glass—and sat wasted in the corner, eyes wet and bleeding tears. Later, he wandered out of the sacred temple and up the rubble of the block, with his head down, his eyes desperate and searching the sidewalk for the shine of a loose dime or nickel. Any dropped change, so he could catch a bus back home to weep, to beg forgiveness, to pledge empty promises.

To try again. 

Jill Faith Neal lives in Lansdale, PA, with her husband and three children. She is currently working on her creative thesis at Rosemont College. Redemption originally appeared in Audience, an online & print-on-demand journal.