Bible Study
1
The girl says she feels just born when she lies naked under the lights that tan. She says she’s checked for cameras and, as she leaves, the expression of the clerk. They are lying upon a blanket as she speaks, the sunlight so bright he squints. There’s a poet, she tells him, who said tanning was like being fucked by God, and he feels weightless, suspended in the sunlight, vanishing like the lotion he has rubbed slowly into every part of her flesh, how she protects herself like a nurse. Her tan is already so deep it seems, just then, to absorb the light until he can stare, eyes wide, without blinking.
2
When the weather turns terrible while her parents are on vacation, the rain heavy and lasting for three days and showing no sign of letting up, she tells him they are lucky her parents’ house is high in the mountains because this rain may go on for weeks. Flooding stories fill the news until the power goes off, and they are left in darkness to imagine the consequences of extended weather. She asks him which animals he would allow to shelter in the house if the rain lasted for weeks, whether he would unlock the door for desperate strangers. When he doesn’t answer, she says, “Just suppose” and begins to undress him.
3
She tells him there is a Purgatory Museum where proofs of penance are displayed like small, resurrected fossils. In Rome, she whispers, inside the Church of the Sacred Heart, there are signatures left behind by souls who nearly escaped, and she touches his lips to silence as if he might shriek like a spirit. When he lies face-up on her bed’s checkered quilt, she straddles him, his hands lifting to her thighs. “Hell,” he tells her, “sounds like raw milk, purgatory floating on top like cream.”
4
She is twirling her hair on one finger, looking at the floor as if she’s spotted something crawling. As if she is thinking of allowing its legs to find her scuffed shoe and climb. As if she would welcome six, eight, or a hundred legs. He thinks he is going to scream right there inside her room, and he wishes the door wide open as he examines the floor, finds nothing and believes, suddenly, that she is searching for cracks, that she expects a sinkhole is about to open beneath them. He imagines the geology of hell, its tectonic plates pressing against each other like bodies abandoned to passion, a fault groaning as if widens beneath them, her hair still twirling, his hysteria flaring into a brilliance that swoons through his torrid nerves.
Gary Fincke's latest flash collection is The History of the Baker's Dozen (Pelekinesis 2024). His newest book is After Arson: New and Selected Essays (Madville 2025). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.