for some reason in my (cursed? blessed?) sims game i am able to invite the grim reaper to parties, and now he regularly shows up even if i don’t invite him. he often brings ceviche. normal quality. he’s a decent party guest except for the fact that the only interaction you can have with him is to slow dance. naturally i made one of my sims slow dance with him, which gave him the notification ‘we have a lot in common! id love to get to know you better’. so anyway, a couple of days and parties later, it’s 6 am and my sim gets a phone call. it’s death. he wants to know if i want to go on a date.
naturally my sim accepts. death takes him to the school stadium in the rain and stands outside, unable to be interacted with, while a thought bubble containing my sim’s face pops up over his head for a simlish hour, over and over again, carrying a rainbow umbrella while my sim sits on the ground and considers the hollowness of life.
remembering that all i can do is slow dance with him, i drive him to moonlight point, where there’s a couch and a record player, and i slow dance with him for about 5 hours. every 2 seconds he steps on my sims’ foot, to the point where it was hard to get decent pictures of them actually slow dancing.
after a while my sim got hungry so i let him go drink some juice, and death went and started reading a book on a couch. i went and sat next to him, wondering if there would be any new interactions since you get different ones when you sit on a couch or bench, and lo and behold i discovered, not only can you slow dance with death, you can also cuddle with him. naturally i did so because the quality of dates is determined by the number of positive social interactions you have with someone, and slow dancing unfortunately doesn’t give you any of those, but cuddling does. anyway, once you start the cuddling animation, you get fancy new options like kiss and make out, so my sim spent the next six hours making out with death on a shitty couch at the beach in a thunderstorm while listening to sim!bastille.
after a couple dozen make out sessions, a single option appeared under the Romantic… heading: ‘take a romantic photo together’. this only shows up once you’re a romantic interest of someone. i have now successfully wooed death. knowing that selecting this option would make death stand up from the couch and i likely wouldn’t be able to get him to sit again, i decided to end the date at the tender hour of 3 am (i guess death doesn’t sleep) with a kiss. it takes a while- death can’t seem to figure out where to stand or how to walk around a foosball table- but eventually i get my picture.
but apparently death doesnt like having his picture taken.
i try to slow dance again with him, but the option has disappeared. i have committed an irreparable social faux pas. i sit on the couch again in the hopes that death will resume reading his book and i can cuddle with him again, but instead he stands in front of the bookshelf for an hour. i take a break, leaving my sim to his own devices for a while while i check in on my other sims, since one of them just went into labour. i deal with that. when i return, i find my sim drinking juice in silence with death still standing in front of the bookshelf, but he’s changed into this sick new outfit in the interim.
beekeeper chic. finally, at 6 am, death decides he’s had enough. he will never forgive me for my social blunder of taking a selfie while lipping at his shadowy veil. he opens up his rainbow umbrella and leaves.
the date doesn’t end until i get home. i receive no date notification. death doesn’t even deign to let me know how badly i fucked up. all i have to remember my 24 hour gay liaison with one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse is a single selfie. i hang it over my sims bed, a constant reminder to him that he has achieved ultimate goth status, and a warning to the others he dates: i have kissed death, and he never called me back.
In Osmosis Jones (2001) a statue of a sperm cell can be seen that is labeled Our Founder.
In Pulp Fiction Vincent Vega is constantly on the toilet. One of the side effects of heroin abuse is constipation.
For Interstellar, Christopher Nolan planted 500 acres of corn just for the film because he did not want to CGI the farm in. After filming, he turned it around and sold the corn and made back profit for the budget.
In The Movie ”Unthinkable” You See A Guy Try To Defuse A Nuclear Bomb With Excel.
In The
Lost World: Jurassic Park, the ship that brings the T-Rex to San Diego
is called the S.S Venture, which is a reference to King Kong, in which a
ship called the S.S Venture brought King Kong to New York.
If you watch the film with headphones or properly placed surround sound speakers, every time we see Baby in Baby Driver (2017) wearing only one of his headphones, you’ll hear the song he is listening to through that ear only.
In Team America: World Police, the Paris ‘set’ has a floor made of Croissants.
They couldn’t hide the camera in the doorknob’s reflection of this scene of The Matrix, so they put a coat over it and a half tie to match with Morpheus’.
This Wolverine Easter egg in the opening credits border of The Greatest Showman.
In Saving Private Ryan, a medic gets hit in the canteen. Water first starts to pour out then blood.
In
The Truman Show, the travel agent kept Truman waiting because she has
never needed to show up for work before. Also she is still wearing her
makeup bib since it was a rush job.
In
Die Hard (1988), Alan Rickman’s Petrified Expression While Falling Was
Completely Genuine. The Stunt Team Instructed Him That They Would Drop
Him On The Count Of 3 But Instead Dropped Him At 1.
In
‘The Avengers’, there is a small screen showing the heat signature in
the room where Loki is being held which shows that he has a cold body
temperature because he is a frost giant.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The White Witch’s crown melts as her power dwindles.
Farquaad kills Mama bear to use as a rug in Shrek.
In The Avengers, Hawkeyes states that “They can’t bank worth a damn, find a right corner.” Jarvis proceeds to plot a route around a corner for Tony.
In the Last Jedi, the door for Luke’s shack is made out of a panel from his X-wing.
In
The Shawshank Redemption (1994), the DA who arrests the sadistic
Captain Hadley can be seen reading the Miranda rights off of a card. The
scene is set in 1966, the same year that Miranda v. Arizona court case
made the act mandatory when arresting a suspect.
The skeletons from the pool scene in Poltergeist were real, as they were cheaper than rubber skeletons at the time.
In Back to the Future, when Marty travels to the past and runs over one of the trees, the name of the mall changes.
In “The Fifth Element,”
Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge appear to
tower above the landscape because the sea levels have dropped
significantly, with the city expanding onto the new land.
In the
Matrix, Morpheus asks Cypher for his phone, Cypher hesitates pulling his
hand out of his pocket because earlier he dumped his phone so they
could be tracked. Fortunately, Trinity immediately gives her phone to
Morpheus.
In Django Unchained, A Man Asks Django What Is His Name Is And How It
Is Spelled. “The D Is Silent”, The Man Responds “I Know”. This Man Is
Franco Nero, The Original Django From The Original 1966 Film.
In Monster’s Inc (2001) Mike has 3 sticky note reminders to file his paperwork in his locker, which he later forgets to do, driving the plot of the movie.
In lord of the rings you can see that gandalf carries his pipe in his staff.
who do i look like to you. some kind of man who just makes things bold. some kind of man who got his left side blown off. some kind of man who is feelin just alright. who,
im sorry. i take it back, fuck you
fuck you
fuck you as well
thanmks
does this help
fuck you as well
this is too aggressive. someone bold that for me
that
how dare you. how dare you, fuc,king cheat me like tha
Freelancing in technical theater means you’re on a lot of different email lists. People need a crew, they send out an email, you respond with your availability. Now, most people start these with things like “hey folks” or “hi everyone”. Neal is not most people.
His openers started off innocent enough.
Then, he started to push boundaries.
And as you can see, it has spiraled out of control since then.
Tag yourselves. I’m the anteater in a suit who thinks he can pass.
Hairdresser: We’re going to have to use a color remover to take out the blue pigment, then apply more pigment to allow for the proteins in the hair to adhere to it. Then possibly mix three different types of toners to reach the goal of your natural hair color.
Hairdresser: pretty simple
Me: this is chemistry
Hairdresser: yeah, but people don’t like when we talk that way
Hairdresser: so you’re a mortician?
Me: apprentice
Hairdresser: do you know why formaldehyde is used in clothing?
Me: I didn’t know that was a thing
Hairdresser: I think it’s due to the preserving qualities? But I don’t think that’s right.
Me: It’s not just a preservative, it’s also a disinfectant ‘cause it destroys bacteria as well as their food supply. It’s also a dehydrator.
Hairdresser: why not just use alcohol?
Me: good question. Formaldehyde is super cheap, so probably to cut costs
Hairdresser: is it really a carcinogen?
Me: yeah, I’m going to have so much cancer
Hairdresser: so you’re going natural to work at a funeral home?
Me: yeah
Hairdresser: while still in school?
Me: well we work in the funeral homes so we have uuuuh … experience with cases
Hairdresser: you can just say bodies it’s fine
Me: oh thank god
Five Minutes Later
Me: yeah so we don’t do autopsies it’s one of my pet peeves
Hairdresser: what if someone wakes up while you’re embalming them?
Me: there’s a huge difference between a living body and a dead one
second hairdresser: I think we should add more toner, but yeah I think rigor mortis would make it pretty obvious
Me: that and being in a fridge for a few days you will be dead by the time you get to us
Hairdresser: I think pumping them full of a carcinogen would help with that
an incomplete list of unsettling short stories I read in textbooks
the scarlet ibis
marigolds
the diamond necklace
the monkey’s paw
the open boat
the lady and the tiger
the minister’s black veil
an occurrence at owl creek bridge
a rose for emily
(I found that one by googling “short story corpse in the house,” first result)
the cask of amontillado
the yellow wallpaper
the most dangerous game
a good man is hard to find
some are well-known, some obscure, some I enjoy as an adult, all made me uncomfortable between the ages of 11-15
add your own weird shit, I wanna be literary and disturbed
The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gift of the Magi, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County, Thank You Ma’am
the box social by james reaney. i remember we all had to silently read it in class, and you would hear the moment everyone reached the Part because some people would audibly go “what”
wHat did I just put my eyes on
“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury
Not quite a short story, but read in class: “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” from The Twilight Zone
Harrison Bergeron, Cat and the Coffee Drinkers
“Where are you going and where have you been” by Joyce carol oates
“The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury
the lottery by shirley jackson
i can’t believe Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady” wasn’t already mentioned
and also it’s not so much unsettling as more absurdist but “The Leader” by Eugene Ionesco definitely made me go wtf
Ett halvt ark papper. I cried so much.
Ночь у мазара, А. Шалимов
A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury
I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, by Donald Barthelme
We read lots of good disturbing shit in hs or in the writing groups I joined in hs but somehow the top of the heap for shit that haunted me’s still indisputably Ethan Canin’s “The Palace Thief”. It’s not horror as such but it freaked me the fuck out.
There was another O. Henry short story we read that was also really alarming but I had to google a major spoiler (which is also a warning) to recall the name – “The Furnished Room”.
there will come soft rains by bradbury was very unsettling for middle school me
I had no idea so many were all written by Ray Bradbury, why did he do this to us
“Emergency” by Dennis Johnson – not entirely disturbing but really weird and there’s one Bad Part
“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver – again not all that bad but sad and kind of creepy
Bradbury wrote a lot of weird shit. But, “The Book of Sand” and"The Library of Babel" by Luis Borges.
“It’s a Good Life” – Jerome Bixby
“The Little Black Bag” – Cyril M. Cornbluth
“The Cold Equations” – Tom Godwin
“The Nine Billion Names of God” – Arthur C. Clarke
“Mars is Heaven!” – Ray Bradbury
“Born of Man and Woman” – Richard Matheson
“That Only A Mother” – Judith Maril
“The Country of the Kind” – Damon Knight
“Mimsy Were The Borogroves” – Lewis Padgett
“Lamb to the Slaughter” – Roald Dahl
“We Can Get Them For You Wholesale” – Neil Gaiman
“BLIT” and “Different Kinds of Darkness” – David Langford (set in the same universe) (there are a couple of other “basilisk” stories and they’re worth checking out)
“The Secret Number” – Igor Teper
– urgently marched into A&E and said ‘we’re having knee pain!!’ to the confused receptionist. i had to explain that it was only my knee and that he was just worried
– when asked to tag me in a meme of ‘what water are you?’, said ‘you are the ocean: home to all friends’
– loved ‘filthy gorgeous’ and, rather than learning the words, learned ‘all three parts in the song where they ring a triangle’
– after we had an argument about him not ‘getting’ my ADHD, i caught him halfway through a three hour playlist of lectures on ADHD, with a pen in hand, taking notes
– he suffered a TBI last summer and he did not like the orienting questions they ask (’what year is it? what day is it?’ etc). when asked ‘do you know where you are?’, he cracked one eye open and angrily said ‘in bed!’
– he played knack 2 and hated it. when i asked why he was still playing it, he said ‘so i never have to play it again’. he got every achievement and as soon as he got the last one he stood up, ejected the disc and returned it to the store
– lately he’s given up on making lunch so he just drinks huel which is a meal replacement shake, except huel is kind of boring so he sometimes puts nesquick strawberry powder in there
– my favourite drink is pepsi max. when asked about his dreams for the future, they often involve ‘being rich enough to find a way to pump pepsi max directly into our house’
– one time in our first year of dating i hadn’t seen him in weeks, whereas we normally saw each other all day every day, so i was gonna go stay with him for a couple days. he had a temporary job (i’m talking 2 weeks total) at the time and i was bummed that i was gonna be alone at his for a bit, but w/e. he was texting me like ‘work is going okay, in the line for the canteen right now’ while i got on the bus. i found the key where he said it was, i found a note on the table like ‘hi love! the wifi code is [password], I’ll be back at 5!’, and then I went into the lounge and he was there. he was lying on a fold-out bed with Marvin Gaye playing. the TV was on a powerpoint slide that said ‘Welcome, Jess. I quit my job.’ he was entirely naked except for a cushion with the letter ‘D’ over his crotch. im 95% sure there were candles
– we play the game Rimworld, where you micromanage a colony of people on an alien planet. he uses it entirely to simulate a peaceful colony, mostly of women, who have a large number of animals they care for and train. one time he got this random event where all the women in the colony got a psychic mood boost and he was like ‘honestly that’s my life goal’
– when he was in hospital and his cognitive functions were slowly coming back, he looked up from twitter with horror and said ‘jess… is the american president a racist?’
– we were playing Articulate, which is a game where you have to describe a word without saying the word itself. His partner said ‘when you’re beginning sex, you are…’. he, without a second of hesitation, yelled ‘FOREPLAY’. the answer was actually ‘initiating’, but my ego grew like fourteen times
– one time he asked me what guacamole was, and i told him, and he said ‘if it’s made up of things that already have names why does it have a different name?’ i have not let him live this down yet
– i used to have an eating disorder, and whilst i’m good 99.9% of the time now i occasionally do have wobbles. one time i’d eaten some mini-donuts and i told him ‘i kind of want to check the calories on those…’, so he immediately pulled the label off and ate it
– i lost him for like twenty minutes at a uni event, and when i found him he presented me with a pepsi max badge and said ‘i rode this mechanical bull to try and win you a year’s supply but i fell off pretty quickly. sorry.’
– we won the ‘best couple’ award in our year at uni, but neither of us were there to collect it because i was ill and he left halfway through to come home and take care of me
– one time he wasn’t paying attention while making lunch and he cracked an egg directly into the bin. the look of confusion on his face was priceless.
– on the rare occasions when i wake up before him, when i kiss him/ touch him he makes these little like… activation sounds? you know like when you touch a cat? it’s like those
This is the cutest thing I have read with my own eyes
Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention. Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.
As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities. This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.
When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.
Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace. Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on. In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.
For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you. It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass. All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.
*
“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”
“We’re getting to that.” He waved.
*
The First Incident in January when, due to a serious cock-up by the church, all the hosts Father Pat received were moldering and spoiled and probably would have killed someone if he’d actually fed anyone them. But it was the first mass of the year, when a peak number of people came in after vowing to got to church more for new year’s. He couldn’t NOT have communion.
“I’ll bake.” offered Maria, the parish secretary and probably the best baker in the county. “So we have hosts. Jesus will understand.”
Father Patrick, not one to pass up the chance at Maria’s cooking, immediately agreed.
A Host is supposed to be composed solely of unleavened wheat flour and water, which is why they taste terrible. It’s a theological point of some importance relating to Exodus or something but Maria had an important theological counterpoint: Jesus both divine and loves all his children, ergo, Jesus would neither be a nasty bland cracker nor want his children to suffer as such and so instead, she made Mexican wedding cookies.
They were a SPECTACULAR hit. Many praises were heaped upon father patrick for the Much Better Wafers and that they’d be sure to show up next week as long as Maria kept making them. Father Patrick figuring that hey, anything that gets people in the doors is good and really, if it was turning into Jesus once inside the parishioner, did it really matter what the wafers were made of? So he continued to let Maria bake the Hosts, and encouraged her to try out new flavors, like nutmeg and cinnamon.
This went on swimmingly for a few weeks until The Bishop showed up for a surprise visit the same week Maria decided to experiment with rainbow sprinkles.
Dad remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring “THE HOLY BODY OF CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!”
The matter went clean up to The Archbishop, who decided that while Pat was probably right to not feed spoiled hosts to his parish, he should attend some remedial classes to remember what Communion was all about, so that if it happened again, he’s come up with a more suitable substitute.
Father Patrick returned in late March, full of spite and some fascinating new ideas.
*
“Is this where the Cannibalism happens?” Six-year-old me asked, eager to get to the good parts.
*
At his remedial classes, the teacher had stressed the importance of transubstantiation, aka “That bit where the wafer and wine, Actually, Literally, become the flesh of Jesus Christ and we expect you to swallow.” Also on the syllabus was understanding the importance of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice.
“So, I was thinking about Easter Service.” Said father Patrick one afternoon while dad was doing his computer science homework at the church because his dorm was a barely-standing fire hazard and the library was where you went to have sex.
“Well, we do re-enactments for christmas. Why not on easter? Why not re-enact the crucifixion of Christ right here? Make it real for everyone. Trauma’s great for bonding a community together.”
“Who’s playing Jesus?” asked Maria, always one for a good laugh.
“That’s the thing- A Host, it doesn’t look much like flesh, right? Doesn’t look like much of anything, really. Not great for reinforcing one’s belief.
What if, instead, we- and I mean you, Maria, I can’t cook to save my life- make a man-sized loaf of bread, maybe in the shape of a T, and we have some of the boys dress up as romans and whip the bread and we pour the wine on so it’s bleeding and them- then we make a big wooden cross and actually nail the bread to it with, I don’t know, railroad spikes, more wine all over. And we raise the cross, all while telling the story of the crucifixion.”
He paused to take a drink, Maria slowly crumpling onto the floor in horrified laughter and Dad now thoroughly distracted from his homework.
“Then we lower the cross, and invite everyone who wants to take communion up to tear a hunk of Jesus off. Just descend into his corpse like vultures. I think that’d really be a good bonding experience for the church.” he nodded thoughtfully. “The hard, part, I suppose, will be finding enough romans.”
“I WANNA BE LONGINUS.” bellowed my father, barreling into the room.
And so, the plan was hatched. Dad hit up every other guy in the Church and eventually rounded up four more romans, three of them from the Education Department of Cal Poly, and one guy from Chemistry, who just liked to watch things burn.
This, being a play, naturally meant that there was a rehearsal, and test Bread jesus. Maria had decided that if they were going to start being extra-literal, she needed to make the most lifelike Bread jesus possible, and made a distressingly buff and human-proportioned Jesus by Advanced bread-braiding, complete with plaited hair, quail’s-egg-and-raisin eyes, bready muscle groups, and an eight-pack because why not make the lord completely shredded?* She also made the important theological decision that since Jesus loves everyone and was happy to die in spite of all his suffering, he should be smiling, and had a toothy corn-kernel smile. He was Wonderful and Terrifying all at once.
“Maria,” asked Father Patrick after a few minutes of delighted and horrified cooing over Jesus’ toothy grin and abdominals. “Why is he wearing a tea-towel?
“Well, he’s the Son of God. A Man. With all that entails.” She said, pointedly staring at Father Patrick while everyone stared at the suspiciously lumpy tea-towel. “And he might have… burnt, slightly.”
Everyone nodded and agreed that the tea-towel was the best course of action. The rehearsal goes splendidly and everyone agrees that this is the most delicious Jesus they’ve ever had.
*
Easter Sunday arrives and the Church is PACKED, from the more lapsed Catholics showing up for a high holiday, parents visiting for spring break and a whole horde of newcomers who had gotten wind that something was up and they ought to come.
Dad is a lanky as hell 21-year old composed mostly of technical jargon and acne but he is STOKED to be playing Longinus, the roman that speared Jesus on the cross, because he gets to do the BEST technical effect in the whole parade. Since he came in at the end me missed a good portion of the sermon, but did hear the “oooh” from the crowd as the massive cross was dragged in by the other Romans, followed by horrified gasps and high screams and a discernible “What the FUCK” as they brought in Bread Jesus 2.0, whipping him enthusiastically, and hammering him into the cross, the sound of wine splashing onto the floor loud in the terrified silence of that Parishioners.
Finally Father Patrick gets to the part about Longinus, and Dad comes sprinting down the aisle as hard as he can, because in order for Bread Jesus to be seen by everyone, his middle had to be about 10 feet off the ground, so Dad had to run, shrieking latin curses, down the length of the church, with a big honking spear and take a flying leap at Jesus in order to spear him in the gut.
Please take moment to imagine you are some normal god-fearing catholic who has decided to visit little bobby or maybe patricia at college and you’re all going to church together like a nice family and this Fucking madman has decided to go all Silence of the Lambs on mass and now there’s some sort of underfed translucently pale man in ill-fitting Roman armor and cape flying at a horrifying glutinous effigy of your lord and savior, with an actual fucking spear, screaming like a madman. Don’t you feel yourself drawing closer to God already? Defensively, perhaps, like an octopus trying to ooze itself into a crevice against the horrors of the ocean.
However, two things happen that were not planned on
1. Dad misses. In his defense, Bread Jesus is close to but not quite the size of a man- more like the size of a doughy teenager, and his middle is a small target 10 feet up in the air and dad is has a computer science minor, not an athletics scholarship. He misses by about 8 inches and instead very solidly stabs Bread Jesus right through the groin, leaving a big hole in Maria’s tea-towel and the spear jutting out at a decidedly… attentive angle, as Bread Jesus’s Bread Dick drops to the floor with a splat. Nobody notices this, however because
2. In rehearsal, Dad had managed to get the spear right in jesus’s navel but neither Father Patrick nor the other romans could get the wine up there to make his middle appropriately bloodied.
Maria come up with the Genius solution that since wine is made of grapes and Jam is made of grapes, she could make a jelly-filled Jesus for Dad to stab. There was a normal-sized test loaf and when dad stabbed it on the table, it had a nicely gooey dribbling effect.
However, this time the loaf was torso-sized, still hot from the oven and upright, so when dad speared the very end of the loaf, all the steam-pressured jam had collected at the bottom and a spray of lukewarm smuckers exploded out from bread jesus, turning the first three pews into a splash zone of symbolic entrails.
There was a hot, sticky minute of complete silence in the church after that.
Then, Father Patrick indicated it was time for the cross to be lowered, and continued on with the normal preparations of the Host, he himself covered in hot smuckers, as though nothing particularly ordinary was occuring, quietly kicking the bread-dick under the altar. At the end of it all, Father Patrick and invited everyone up with the Last Oration:
“Thou, O God, has kindly allowed us to have a part in this Holy Sacrifice; for this we give Thee thanks. Accept it now to Thy glory and be ever mindful of our weakness. Amen.”
…And everybody came up, shuffling like terrified zombies, pinching off tiny bits at first but then the madness took them and they began tearing apart bread jesus by the handful, weeping as they partook, scattered prayers and begging for forgiveness. The whole congregation was kneeling about the altar, tearful and united in their guilt and their need for God.
*
“IS CHURCH ALWAYS LIKE THAT?” six-year-old me asked, absolutely stoked. I’d convert on the spot if I got a show like that.
“No, it’s normally bland wafers and lots of chanting in latin.”
“Well that’s boring as hell.” I remember muttering and Dad snorting the coffee he was drinking out of his nose.
*
As people filed silently out of the Church to a gloriously sunny California afternoon, faces wan and smeared with wine and jam, Father patrick turned to Maria and asked “You don’t think that was too much, do you?”
“No.” Said Maria with a sarcastic deadpan so intense it was hard to tell from sincerity.
It was the exact same tone she used when the Archbishop and Six other high clergy showed up, clutching a letter someone had written, Livid and almost foaming at the mouth, demanding to know if such blasphemy had transpired.
“No. That’s crazy.” She said, staring down the archbishop like he was an idiot.
“Such imaginations some people have!” Said Father Patrick, much less convincingly.
“And you- you didn’t… Spear an effigy of our lord and savior?” the archbishop demanded of my father.
“Do I look like I can jump that high?” Dad asked, having in the interim been drafted for 51 days then nearly died of pneumonia from it, and therefore no longer afraid of the Church, the Law or God.
Somewhat relieved that he’d only received the extremely detailed ramblings of a doddering parishioner, the Archbishop sat down and complemented Maria on her most excellent Mexican Wedding Cookies, may he please have another plate for his nerves? Perhaps the ones with sprinkles?
Dad went on to help build the internet, Father Patrick converted to Buddhism and Maria became a Nun.
*For those of you wondering, Jesus was made of Challah.
If you got a laugh out of this, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or Paypal, as telling stories on the internet is my only source of income right now. Thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed it!
Reblogging so it’s near the top of my blog for people trying to find it on easter, also so that people will know that I’m making a Baby Bread Jesus for Easter/April Fools 2018 and Updates may be found Here.
Thank you everyone that’s donated so far, I’m extremely grateful to you all.
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