St. Anthony's Lost and Found - a short story

IF SOMEONE BLINDFOLDED ME and walked me into a church, I would immediately know where I was. There is something unique about the mixture of smells that come from the materials within it, like the wooden pews, the velvet kneelers, the candle wax, the polymers from the audio equipment, the hint of incense you can detect even if it hasn’t been burned in years. Every church I’ve ever been to have all smelled the same, and I have never been to a place that is not a church that has had that same smell. St. Anthony’s Lost and Found is the first.

I can’t understand where the smell is coming from because there is little wood here, no similar types of cloth that I can find (like on a church altar), none of the really tall candles, and any candles they do have are wrapped in plastic, ready for sale.

“Where’s your mind?” Celeste asks me. She stays close, and even leads me around with a firm grip, not that her skinny fingers come close to fitting around my forearm. She scans the store with wide golden eyes without blinking, like she’s never been here before and will never be back again, even though she told me it's her favorite place. I don't have any interest in being here, and I only followed her in because she's kind of pretty.

I just met Celeste, like twenty minutes ago. I was sitting on a bench in the Mall reading a paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged (I'm only halfway through it). She sat down next to me and started talking to me about the book, which is not something that happens to me every day, because people usually don't comment on what I read--then again I've never read a book like this one before.

The first thing she did was say something about my size, because I'm really big, like professional wrestler big. Then she started asking me all these questions about God, because I guess the characters in the book I'm reading don't believe in God, which I didn't get from the text, but then I found it weird that she would care because why would she care if characters who aren't real don't think God is real. So she asked me if I did believe in God, and I said I wasn't sure, and that a friend of mine at work, who definitely doesn't believe in God, told me to read it. She told me to follow her to a special place, and I did because, like I said, she's kinda pretty, and here I am.

Celeste points to the wall on our right where a framed piece of yellow paper with two lines written in a calligraphy script is on prominent display. It’s a poem that I know well.

Dear Saint Anthony, come around
Something is lost and cannot be found

I was taught that prayer by my grandmom. It is a child’s prayer meant to provide hope that if you lose something and pray to St. Anthony, you'll find it. The thing is that it really worked sometimes, like about half the time: half the time I’d find my lost item, half the time I wouldn’t, which isn't too bad.

Below the Prayer to St. Anthony are two other framed scripts:

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”(John 14:27)

And then under it:

“Don't imagine that I came to bring peace to the earth! No, I came to bring a sword.”(Matthew 10:34)

Celeste and I must be quite a sight, since I'm this mountain of a man, and Celeste looks like she hasn't eaten in three months. She also has this strangely braided hair, part of it's red and part of its blonde, and it makes her look like a Raggedy Ann doll.

The store is a series of tables loaded with a wide assortment of stuff, and there is not much space between them, and I can barely fit through. I can't fit through some of them at all, but it is still pretty awesome. I can’t believe how much stuff there is here. The items are laid out like for one of those consignment sales. It makes sense that St. Anthony would be running a consignment shop, because God always seems to be short on dough.

“First time here?” A man of medium build with cropped gray hair and square frame glasses says this. He walks toward me with a pronounced forward head posture (something weight-lifting could fix) and lists to the right due to a large stack of books he has pinned to his ribcage. I smell that church smell more and more as he approaches, and I’m starting to think he’s the one who gives this place it’s smell. He puts the stack of books on top of the pile in front of me, which then topples over onto the other items, not that it seems to matter to him. There no organization of any kind on each table that I can see.

“I don’t remember seeing you in here before,” he says.

I shake my head. He looks over to where Celeste is picking items off a table and examining them, holding them close to her eyes, putting them up to her ear. Lord knows what she’s doing.

“You here with that young woman?” he aks. I shrug my shoulders. “She’s in here a lot. Never buys anything. Just sort of roams around.”

“Yeah,” I say. "Me too." It’s important to set people’s expectations.

“Well, take a look around," he says. "Maybe you’ll find something you lost when you were a boy.”

I shake my head.

“Then maybe something you lost not so long ago.”

He gives me a wink and then smiles in a way that reminds me of my grandpop. My grandpop had a stroke before he died.

“My name’s Jonathan.” He holds out his hand. “And you are?”

I shake his hand.

"Don't be shy, my boy," he says.

“Jeremiah,” I say.

His eyes widen. “Now that’s a good, strong biblical name. You don’t hear of many people naming their kids Jeremiah anymore, and that’s too bad. The Prophet Jeremiah had the weight of the world on his shoulders. You can see it in the face of the portrait of him on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is the face of a man who tries to save a nation of doomed people who can’t see how doomed they are. Good to have you in the store, Jeremiah. Take a look around.” Jonathan walks back to the front of the store. Celeste and I are the only ones in here.

The amount of stuff is overwhelming, especially for such a small space. Everything on these first few tables look like things a child would lose. There are missing legos and heads of clown dolls, pieces out of picture puzzles, and rings that look too small for any finger. There are tiny guns that belong to action figures, cowboy hats and toy lizard tails. Countless batteries, plastic cutlasses, fake nails from fake carpenter sets, and enough Lite Brite bulbs to make the Manhattan skyline glow.

Next to them are tables with original Kenner action figures from the first Star Wars movie, the one I saw with my grandfather when I was five. There is Walrus Man, and Hammerhead, Snaggletooth, Jawas, original Storm Troopers, the original Han Solo with the stylish brushed back hair before they made him look like Moe from the Three Stooges. There is the original Leia with faded hair buns, Greedo with one broken antenna, various styles of Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan, faithful R2 and C3PO, and of course dozens of capeless and lightsaber-less Vaders. There are tiny blasters and rifles, and red and blue light sabers with missing skinny tips. There is Luke’s landspeeder, well-used, like some kid took it outside and buried it in a rock pile. There are Obi-Wan and Vader figures with red and blue toothpicks inserted for the lost light saber. There are blasters held together with electrical tape, chewed up dismembered action figure legs, action figures with burn and melt marks on them where a kid unraveled a paper clip and held it to a gas flame just before reenacting a torture scene from some twisted seven year-old fantasy.

Nobody talks about that. That’s what gets buried, the stuff that gets lost on purpose without ever a prayer to St. Anthony to find it. No one wants to find it. I don't want to remember, but it's not up to me. It’s looking up at a crucifix when you’re seven and seeing the blood pouring out of Christ’s wounds, the way his back is twisted as he writhes in agony, his head lashed back against the cross. He is blinded by his own blood, but looks to the sky anyway for help that never comes. He is abandoned, and you can relate to that feeling, and then you look down, in the shadow of the cross, in what is cast by the greatest suffering of humanity, and realize you have an erection. It was your first, and it was the result of looking at torture. Hold an old toy in your hand, and every feeling comes back fresh and new, the things you’d never admit to anyone.

I look for Celeste because I want to leave. Something strange is going on here. I recognize every one of the items in this store. I has to be a trick. A trick of lighting. It's like my earliest memories of images have been melted into the stained glass windows, and the sun streaming through them has colored me with red and green and blue light. These three colors shone down on me from God in church, in a place like this, but they follow me everywhere, and still shine on me from my TV screen. Every color on the internet is a blend of these three colors. They are the real trinity. Red, which is the blood of Christ; green, which is the foliage of the tree they nailed him to; blue, the color of skin that has been beaten over fractured bones.

And then I see it. My favorite toy of all time: the Boba Fett with the detachable rocket, the one they never sold in stores. You had to send away for them with something like a million proofs of purchases.

What are the chances? What are the odds I’d happen upon this toy that looks so much like the I used to own, back before some idiot kid went and swallowed the rocket and died right in front of his mother. No more detachable rocket for me, my mother made sure of that. I don’t even know if that’s the reason she threw it out, but whatever the reason, it wasn’t fucking fair!

This looks so much like the one I had, even the scars and places where the paint has worn away. I colored the bottoms of the feet black with a permanent marker just because I was a kid. Maybe…

If there was any paint on the bottom it has worn away. But the bottoms of the feet could’ve been black. They could have been.

I think I’ll buy this. There are no prices anywhere, but how much could it cost? Celeste is in front of me at the far end of the store, farthest from the cash register. She looks really shady as she picks up objects, looks at them closely, listens to them, and puts them back. I don’t know what she’s listening for.

Between us are a set of tables covered with pictures. Huge piles of pictures. Most seem to be of couples, a man and a woman. Some seem to be wedding pictures, others taken around the holidays. They look really happy. I turn them over and see “I'm sorry” scribbled on the backs. Some have “Please forgive me”, and others have “Come home.” Other pictures are of children, or the elderly, or both. Some of the pictures have mud on them, or a boot mark. They are ripped and crumpled and faded. These are not pictures of me or anyone I know, but they are worse because I do recognize them, maybe from things I've seen in a dream.

Celeste stands in front of the table with jewelry--there is only one of these. There are golden earrings and bracelets, and scores and scores of rings. Most are wedding rings. This is the saddest table by far, even sadder than the pictures. But then I see something even sadder, so sad it makes my stomach turn. I see Celeste palm a handful of rings and stuff them into her pocket.

On my darker days you might hear me say that a person lives just long enough to see every bit of faith they have in people, or things created by people, utterly destroyed. Well, you wouldn't hear me speak that, because I'm a quiet man, but I would think that.

I didn't mean to lose my faith. It wasn't my fault. I just wanted things to make sense, and to make sense in the same way all the time. This book that I have now explains it. It explains it all, at least that's what my friend at work said. I don't see it in the text so far, but he said he would explain it to me over lunch.

I walk to the front of the store with my Boba Fett action figure with the detachable rocket, and Celeste follows. She walks right out the door.

“Nope, never buys anything, that one,” Jonathan says. Something tells me he knows.

“Will that be all?” he says to me. I nod. He tells me the price; it's much higher than I expected and I barely have enough cash. I hand him the money, and he looks at me and squints his eyes. His eyes are silver like his hair.

“Are you sure you don’t want anything else?” he says. He continues to look at me and I feel uncomfortable. I can’t look him in the eyes. I look to the exit, I look for Celeste.

“You want your faith back, don’t you?” he says.

I’m just about to tell him about John Galt and Francisco d'Anconia and Ragnar whatever-his-name-is, but the word “Yes” somehow slips from my mouth.

Jonathan shakes his head. “You won't find that here,” he says. “This place returns things people lost, not things they've discarded.”

I grab my Boba Fett action figure with the detachable rocket and walk out into the mall. I see Celeste sitting by the large fountain.

I sit down next to her. There's so much I want to say. I want to tell her how morally wrong it is to steal from a religious store. I want to ask her to defend herself and her actions, but all that comes out is, "Why...You...Steal?"

She smiles and looks up at me with her golden eyes, but they seem hard now, and sit heavily in her face. She reaches up and strokes my left cheek with her right hand.

"You're so sweet," she says. "You want to know why?" She crosses her skinny legs. "You were my forest, my dark night. You were my lost sheep that gets all of the attention." She smiles at me again, but the smile looks a little different this time. "Now fuck off."

She rises to get up, but I grab her by the arm. Her eyes widen like she's just realized something really important, something she had not counted on, something bad. She struggles to free her arm from my grip, but it is impossible. I could easily snap her arm in half with one hand, but I won't. I have to help her. I have to help her get clean.

I grab her other arm and lift her over my head in one movement. She can't weigh more than ninety pounds, and I can curl that weight with one arm. She screams, but the sound is swallowed by the rushing water from the fountain and the meaningless noises from people talking on their phones.

I dunk her into the pool and hold her down. Her arms flail violently, her legs kick, but it does no good. I can see her golden eyes glitter beneath the water. Her head is haloed by the sparkling gold and silver of pennies, nickels and dimes. Her skinny hands claw at me. I hear bodies rush toward me, feel them jump on me, but they can't stop me, and they are wrong and I am right. I am doing something important, and it is a sin to interrupt a baptism.