The Triple-Headed God

By

Robert Kilborn

                                                                  I

A molten warmth engorged her veins. She saw six men bury her up to her waist in sand. She saw her lover’s face crumple and her husband’s fists bloody her head. She saw the opaline sea air, the sea pulsed like a great heart, Allahu Akbar. Her grandmother walked behind her grandfather on the sand, their faces like dried barberries, zereshk. Little mice, the children circled and squeaked silly rapid rhyming songs. She saw her wedding, her parents smiling, proud. The men peacocked in splendid striped grey and dark blue suits, jeweled tieclips and white pocket squares. The women preened in crimson and violet silk dresses and headscarves, fingers, necks, and wrists trimmed with gold ram’s heads. She saw the grinning one-eyed shopkeeper with the blue mustache. He handed her egg-coloured calligraphic paper and fine-nibbed wooden pens for her first day at school. She saw her brothers drop lemon drops in shiny yellow foils into her cupped hands. She saw the widowed neighbour lady drag her grocery cart up the stairs, bump, bump, bump. She saw the dusky street that snaked to the marketplace where, at three-years-old, she had bought apples, pears, and white beans with her mother for the first time. All this she saw as the last stone struck.

                                                                 II

In Brooklyn, in exchange for our bloc vote, we get to maintain our own court system, emergency medical corps, and security patrol. But our cantor had encouraged the boy to get into the car, where he had performed oral sex on him. He then repeatedly molested him in the mikvah ritual bath. A child had been touched. Many children. You couldn’t talk about it or report it to the authorities. They had killed us in the past, the authorities, so we must keep to ourselves.

                                                                 III

“So what you’re saying is, that you believe that the end of the world is coming soon, and that the billions who don’t believe in him are condemned to eternal hellfire.”

“Yes.”

“And you find this an acceptable belief.”

“Yes.”

“How does this belief work with the charity, love, compassion, and forgiveness of your faith?”

Silence. A weak smile.

“So you agree with the fathers of your church, that one of the pleasures of the righteous in heaven will be to look down on the billions of people burning in hell and screaming in agony, their flesh melting and then reforming, so that their torment, misery, and suffering goes on forever?”

Silence.

Robert Kilborn

Robert Kilborn writes friction, nonfriction, thrillosophical essays, articles, reviews, and jeux d’esprit. He started out as a rock singer. At the University of British Columbia he read Literature, Philosophy, and Art History. He’s been an English teacher, a Don Draper, and general manager of one of Canada’s leading modern dance companies, Anna Wyman Dance Theatre. He lives in Montreal. You may contact him at [email protected].