Every Day Is Sunday

by Korie Khanyers

I was chewing on Fruit Stripe and feeling bad about that last exorcism. I’m told we’re on a crusade but I’d stopped giving a shit a hundred miles ago. God’s own scorched pan behind us and the badlands ahead. Father Pierce muttered in his sleep next to me. The exorcism had taken a lot out of him. He muttered half sermons in his sleep—somewhere between infomercials and Rush lyrics. I was just the driver for the time being anyway, so I tickled the peddle and fiddled with the cigarette lighter. I sang “Tuesday’s Gone” to myself because the radios were all sermons too and I kept work at work.

The Father sounded like a beach bum and dressed like a Irish Catholic parody, with the exception of a singed cardinal’s galero. Behind my El Camino, I drug his Airstream Camper, it’s windows pasted over with Chick tracts and Hare Krishna pamphlets. Pierce used to be Catholic and said he worked freelance now (whatever that meant). He was smug and vague about everything, but his money still spent, so I guessed I was freelance now too. I started as a holy-roller huckster but the only thing I liked to roll was hundreds and dope. The Father and I ended up double-booked on the same baptism and he hired me on the spot.

Thus far, the most I needed to do was drive while Pierce sat in his trailer and prayed. I mostly sat in the car and pounded Red Stripe while he did his thing. Bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras, weddings. I didn’t care too much until the exorcism at the trailer park, but I listened to the screams and Latin that had echoed through the thin tin of the single-wide. When we pulled away from waving poor folk, it felt more like we’d left something there instead of taking it away.

Pierce slid me a twenty and a Fabergé egg afterwards. I was a ways away from selling olive oil to octogenarians for joint pain.

He woke up bellowing “WE’RE HERE!” with an abruptness that made my brakes screech as loud as I did. A gust of humidity backhanded me, somehow I’d driven past a burning church. The steeple stood but it was already looking like smeared ink and charcoal. Nothing to be done.

I almost pissed myself. Then I saw it. Then I pissed myself.

I’d done some drugs and this wasn’t drugs. Something one-part spider and two-parts Sunday school drawing clutched the church, a segmented wrist disappearing into parted clouds.

“That’s faith. That’s real faith. That’s what this has always been about. It’s feeding.” The Father kicked open the side of the door and produced a shotgun I’d never seen from his deep robes. Gold and ornate, a relic of a Vatican firing range. I suddenly missed hawking packets of holy oil.

I spat out and reloaded my gum, knowing I couldn’t peel out. I’d just enjoy the fleeting seconds of flavor in the same way I’d enjoyed my own quick, bright chemical life.

In the event of a conflict of interest, I thought it might be in poor taste to pray. I took my time loading my revolver and slammed the El Camino door with my boot. I marched after my comrade toward what was now a purple blaze. The church was barely a shape—just the flickering lines of a square, a roof and a cross. A living blueprint smoldering with hot, cosmic snot. Pierce was emptying rounds into the many-fingered, stigmata-afflicted hand, whose palm dripped iridescent blood that engulfed the scene. I emptied the revolver into what might have been the God I’d always said I shilled for. The bullets melted before they got to it. I kept pulling the trigger hoping something would happen.

It did. A rifle shot cracked out of the end of my barrel and lanced the hand across it’s divine knuckles. Rainbow smoke seeped out of the hole and the god-hand twitched and squealed and scurried back to the heavens. I still had the gun pointed at the sky when Pierce clapped a long-nailed hand on my back. I flinched and looked at him. He was smiling for the first time since I met him in Waco. He had a bucket of the purple stuff, it sloshed and sounded like a chorus.

“Looks like someone just had their first miracle. I’m proud, really, but grab another pail from the camper. I got to get this stuff to my guy at the crossroads by three a.m. He’s a bastard but his commission is hella righteous.”

I swallow my gum and my collar has never felt tighter.

Korie Khanyers is a weird horror writer living in Lexington, KY. He has a partner, a cat, and a chip on his shoulder. (He’s really trying to work on that last part.)