Soup

*

A church bell rings -- in your head, not outside. When you recognize it, then it's physical sound, a vibration. It was inside first somehow.

It sings: true prayer is conduct! Prayer is conduct! True prayer is behavior.

Never pray for someone you can materially help without also providing that help. The help and the prayer: one seamless thing to God. A pretty garment.

So Elf's bones grew moist in the Christian air.

She could not close off -- moved in the mist of conversion, where being Christian still seemed easy, natural.

Free of the triple demons? (Avarice, gluttony, self-esteem). By no means. But they were placed, limited, parenthesized for now. She fed on God and fed herself with God.

Ordinary (?) people found her hard to be around. Her boss would complain about the times she would pause on the floor, move through a trance on the gym floor, in the middle (so to speak) of her own swinging arms.

I feel elated and I can't explain. Her own body spoke in tongues to her. No time or space to analyze this.

Serving the hot meals, she smiled like an idiot. That's all right. I am an idiot. With incorrectness she gave her loose money away. The "poor" found her a bit eerie, but interesting. You could say otherworldly.

Wrapped in time, not at al ltimeless, but in a different time going a different way. She hovered more than cycled.

When happiness walked the labyrinth in the porch behind the kitchen it would seem to sink into the turns and acquire a spin that difficult to carry back into ordinary, repetitive, humdrum daily life.

*

Depression would recur when she brought her gaze back to the people around her: from those near homelessness to those like Ainsley who were richly housed and miserable. Happiness was not an art to be taught, did not have prescribed steps, could not be passed on like a disease. If you scrutinized it coldly it disappeared -- like faith. It remained but wasn't yours anymore.

Don't just stand there, honey, you have to dish out that soup. Elf would fill the bowls so high that clients had trouble carrying them.

This is absolutely the finest soup in the world, Loopy Billy said one day. Listen, if you put this soup in cans and sold it, you'd turn the church into a billionaire. This soup is magic. This is the best soup ever made. (Pointing to a pot of zucchini soaked in salty tomato.)

Billy talked on and on in his sweet disorderly way, while in the background, behind him in the hall, Elf saw (but was too repressed to pursue) a familiar wraith moving from table to table, eating pieces of bread that others had left behind. It was her love, her true one, her lost one, now reduced below destitution, her beloved Dave. But by the time she managed to track him he was long gone.

*