Dance Yrself Clean · Story 4 of 5 · About 75 minutes
God came back, and the snow hasn’t stopped since.
A writer who covers religions, not cults, follows an informant down into a Solstice ritual: a hot red chamber where the faithful kneel in harnesses and bits and strain at a pole as tall as a tree. Afterward the snow never leaves the city. Helicopters drop boxes of food. Some people are followed everywhere by red birds. People become horses; people become dogs. The believers say God is come, and He hungers.
The story arrives in pieces, each in a different grammatical person, with a call and response between them that keeps coming back: Is it your desire to pull? One piece is a job interview with God.
Where · An unnamed cobbled city, before and after the snow.
How it’s told · In sections, in first, third and second person, with a liturgy between them.
The only evil in this world is shame. Anything you consign to darkness is dark. Anything you admit lies in the light.
— When It Was Automatic
The opening
Read an excerpt
“Is it your desire to pull?”
“It is my disease, to pull.”
“Do you pull so hard that it pushes you out?”
“I pull until I am pushed into new life.”
He says we are the playthings for a larger thing with a scary sense of humor and a way of doing things we can’t be expected to understand. He says we are driven by demons and sometimes they are light and sometimes they are darkness. He sounds crazy. Until I see the horses, he sounds insane.
I am supposed to meet with him on a street somewhere in a neighborhood we really shouldn’t go. It is a cold day but not very rainy. The clouds are heavy enough that you can’t tell the time of day. It feels like a dream; without the chill air on my skin it would be a dream, but the cold unmoving air is slicing.
I pretend to be interested but not too interested; I give my objectivity a yearning air, the possibility of conversion bringing its head above icy, chopping water at least once in every conversation. He can’t think of me as a tourist or he’ll clam up; I’ve seen him pull back into himself like a turtle when he thinks he’s being ridiculed, or managed, treated like anything but a prophet. I leave myself lexical backdoors, he hedges his explanations with lexical trapdoors.
I write fiction as well as nonfiction, so he doesn’t think of me as a journalist. I know he’s searched me high and low, to find out my subjects of interest. I write about religions, not cults. I write about body modification, not self-mutilation. I write about fashion, not clothes; sexuality, not sex. I write about faith and the desire to believe, but never my own beliefs. It’s a Mad-Lib blank in which he can write anything; this is how men are managed, ridiculed, treated like prophets.
The rest of When It Was Automatic is in Dance Yrself Clean.
More from Jacob Clifton: Oldie, a novel in progress, published one chapter at a time.