The Sadist's Bible (8 page)

to be with a woman was okay. At least,
more
okay.

Maybe she didn’t have to kill herself. Maybe she would go east on I-64, but instead

of stopping at the Hillbriar she would continue on to the coast. To some big city out

there. That’s exactly what she’d do. She had five days worth of professional clothes. She would start over. True, she wasn’t a kid anymore. She wouldn’t have any local

references, either. But she wasn’t too old to start over. She had her laptop with her. She would start looking for jobs on the coast. Someplace with lots of other lesbians.

Someplace where being a lesbian wasn’t at all frowned on. She’d research which city on

the coast was the most tolerant toward that kind of thing. Surely, on the coast there would be employment for a lesbian with experience selling barges.

But at some point she’d have to tell Jesse. And he would be shocked, at first. Then

he’d get mad. Maybe she wouldn’t have to tell him the gay part – at least not right away.

She could just say that she needed to get away. That it wasn’t him, it was her. That she wasn’t really the marrying kind, despite their nineteen years of marriage. He would make assumptions that there was another man. He would probably run after her. He’d be

relentless. Find her.

He’d find her and get the Bible out and start to tell her why she was committing a

terrible sin. He’d tell her that the entire church was praying for their marriage. That since God had joined them, no one except God could sever their tie.

And, he’d be right. Or would he?

Was there such a thing as God?

It was a crazy question to ask. God was the foundation of everything – had been the

foundation of everything since she was a little girl. It was like asking if there was such a thing as America. Such a thing as Indiana. Such a thing as parents.

And that train of thought triggered another, unwanted, question. What would
her

parents say about all this? She stubbed the cigarette butt out in the ashtray. Let out a chuckle and couldn’t help but be surprised by the weakness and raspiness of the sound

that escaped her throat. She was okay with being a shitty wife, because – if she was really honest with herself – she’d never aspired to be a good one. But now she realized that she was a shitty daughter, too, and that epiphany stung.

But there was no way to deny it. After all, this was the first time she’d given any

thought to how her plans impacted her mother and father. She’d contemplated suicide

long and hard for many months and only found herself considering the impact on them at

this late stage. If
that
didn’t provide evidence of her carelessness, her disregard for them, then what would? She was a bad daughter, and now it was too late for her to transform

into a good one. She’d made too many decisions that ran counter to the way she was

raised to be a good daughter. Besides, her parents had grown too senile to participate in any sort of game-changing heart-to-heart.

She hadn’t been close to them since middle school. Conversations between her and

her parents were superficially pleasant, when she visited twice a year and phoned twice a month. They were old now and had moved to Florida, so they could be closer to Destin.

They’d been much older-than-usual when they’d had her. They’d struggled a long time

with infertility, and called Ellie their “blessing”. She was their only child.

They were closer, in age, to grandparents than parents. This made them more

conservative than most parents. They’d wanted her to marry a godly man, bear godly

children, dote on godly grandchildren, then fall into a godly grave.

And why not? Maybe they weren’t being closed-minded or repressive. Maybe they

were simply relying on a way of life that had proven its worth over the course of

centuries. Maybe traditions weren’t such bad things. Maybe self-denial wasn’t such a bad thing. For example, if she’d practiced self-denial and not looked for online sex chat

sessions with other women, she would have never had the experience with the fake

teenager.

By seeking to engage in acts of abomination, she’d put herself in a position to be

hurt. Perhaps, if there was a God, the incident with the transvestite was His way of

punishing her for violating nature’s order.

God was perfect, therefore His universe was perfect. Nothing happened by mistake.

Even the fact that she was suicidal was part of the divine plan. But what purpose could

her misery (and possible self-destruction) serve?

Her hands shook as she lit another cigarette. Maybe God wanted her to die so that

her sin could not contaminate any other woman. That could be it. Yes, that made sense.

Suicide as a sort of self-imposed quarantine.

But the emotional pain en route to suicide: what was the purpose of
that
? Why could she not simply kill herself joyfully and be done with it? Why did she suffer a constant, ugly gray ache in her head?

All pain had a purpose. When she was a child, she’d had an intense pain in her

stomach. And the purpose of that pain was to send the message that her appendix was

about to burst. The doctors took it out, just in the nick of time. Pain had done its job. It had sounded the red alert.

Maybe the emotional pain was there to bring her – literally – to her knees. To knock

her down a few pegs, so that she wouldn’t die before first acknowledging the superiority of the tried and true path that had been passed down one generation after another.

The path of the Bible.

She was, at this moment, on the verge of tears. She took another deep drag off her

smoke, then opened the nightstand drawer. Picked up the faded, worn, and tattered

Gideons’ New Testament.

She started to flip through the book and pick a passage at random. But as her thumb

worked its way through the pages, she discovered a gospel tract tucked inside – a hidden leaflet. Under the title (
He Wants Us Broken
), there was a pen-and-ink drawing of a bald man with a sparse beard whose contorted face was the flag of agony. He only had healed

stubs where his arms and legs should’ve been. His eyes looked all fucked up – like a

goat’s. He drooled and bawled, and even the sputum and tears looked – in their own way

– malformed; oozing down his face in weird globs rather than straight trails.

The drawing was repellent, but the title...there was something about
the title
that rang true. She flipped over the cover and read the text on the first page.

GOD WANTS US BROKEN!

He wants us broken
and
freakish. And insane. Addicted to drugs

and addicted to sexual abomination!

Yes, this is what God WANTS. What He DEMANDS. Because if we

didn’t suffer such afflictions we wouldn’t need Him. The more

afflictions we have, the more we need Him. And God DEMANDS that

we both need Him AND acknowledge our need of Him.

The more we need Him, the more we pray to Him. First

Thessalonians, chapter five verse seventeen
commands
us: “Pray

without ceasing”. And the only way to
pray without ceasing
is to be in

agony without ceasing
; to be unceasingly broken and unceasingly

freakish.

At the bottom of this page, there was another pen and ink drawing – this one of a

Catholic priest performing last rites on a gnarled, emaciated old woman. A family

surrounded the bedside, kneeling with their heads bowed and hands clasped tightly

together (as though cuffed in that position).

The text sounded outrageous. Blasphemous. It countered everything she’d ever been

taught. Yet, it
did
quote scripture. And it provided some reassurance to her at an hour when she desperately needed it. All of those aspects of herself that she thought were bad, that God disapproved of, might actually be the very aspects of her that He loved.

The tract hadn’t yet convinced her. But, in a sense, it did something more important

than convincing her. It comforted her. She flipped to the next page.

MORE PROOF – TO CONVINCE THE SKEPTICAL!

1.
More Scriptural Proof:

• Jesus compared Himself to a mighty boulder. “Whoever shal fall

upon that stone shal be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will

grind him to powder.” – Luke 20:18

• “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” –

Matthew 5:5

• “...if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee:

for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish...And

if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is

profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish...” –

Matthew 5: 29-30

2.
Scientific Proof

Science is yet another demonstration of God’s plan for us.
The arc

of history is long, but bends towards degeneracy!
We now know

that the universe started as perfection: a single block of matter, united

and whole. But then it
broke
into billions of inferior pieces. From the

moment we come into existence,
we are already broken
– a shard

of a shard of a shard. God’s plan breaks us down even more. If we live

long enough, our body will
break down
. As we grow very old, our

mind
breaks down. Then, after we die, we break down even further.

Time breaks us down, flies break us down, worms break us down until

we are merely a tight leather shroud around a frame of bone. Until we

are
just
bone. Until we are just powder – pulverized when our graves,

themselves, betray us and shift with the tectonic forces of a spastic

Earth.

Ellie didn’t know how long her hand had been trembling. She didn’t know how long

she’d been taking puffs on her cigarette without tapping off the ash. All she knew is that her thigh was burning. She’d been shaking so violently that she’d flung ashes and cinders onto her jeans. They’d burned a tiny hole through the cotton, and caused a smudge mark

when she rubbed the ashes off.

The arc of history is long, but bends towards degeneracy!

She’d seen that sentence earlier that evening. In the restaurant. At least, she’d

thought she’d seen it. But here it was again. She stubbed the cigarette out into the ashtray and put both of her hands on the tract. She ran her fingers over it, to make certain it was real. She placed it right under the nightstand lamp, to verify the print said what she

thought it said.

It did.

She moved on to the next page.

3.
Evidence From Your Own Heart’s Yearning

Look deep into your heart. You
want
to be little and yielding and

sick, because this removes you from life’s burdens. (And did not

Christ, Himself, say “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy

laden, and I will give you rest.” – Matthew 11:28.)

God delivers those of us who are heavy laden with the yolk of

existence. He does this through the blessings of decay.

HE SEEKS A MILLION NEW MARYS

This is the age of the New Gospel. A clarification of the
True

Gospel. The scribes of the Roman Empire co-opted Christ’s message.

Re-wrote whole passages of it to serve their own decay-denying

purpose. Only small fragments of the actual words of Christ and the

Apostles survived the purge – those quoted above.

God has decided to interact with the world in a new fashion. After

Christ’s mission failed, He decided to enter the world through more

than one portal. A single Mary would not do. Instead, there must be

one mil ion. Rather than
telling
people about the blessings of

degeneration, we must
show
them.

Al of the new Marys shall be bound in servitude to their husband,

the Lord. All of them shall give birth to one monstrous offspring after

another. This, the Lord has decided, will be the Degenerate Gospel – a

Living Gospel to be seen and heard and felt and experienced, rather

than merely read. A Gospel that will create even more Gospels after it.

A living, breathing testimony to the broken-freakishness of the

universe! A testimony the world will be unable to avoid!

If you would like to be a vessel for the True Gospel, all you must

do is fall to your knees and call out to the angels: “I give my womb to

the Gospel!” They wil then begin to observe you from behind the

curtain of infinity. If they deem you degenerate-enough for God’s plan,

they will bring Him down from His Palace of Abominations to lay with

you.

This part seemed particularly strange. She didn’t understand all of it, and she wasn’t

sure she wanted to. She considered tossing the tract in the trash, but decided not to

because it had used that sentence: “The arc of history is long, but bends towards

degeneracy!” The last time she’d seen that, the note had disappeared. So she felt uneasy with the idea of just throwing it away.

Her intuition told her something valuable might be lost if she threw it away. There

might come a time when she’d need it – if for no other reason than to confirm that she

had, in fact, seen it. To confirm that she wasn’t crazy. The fact that the sentence had

disappeared once made its reemergence almost-miraculous.

She flipped this page, the last, and read the back cover.

HE SEEKS AN ARMY OF ANGELS!

New angels shall be needed to serve as God’s ambassadors to

humanity. Like conquering worms, they shall wriggle into the ears of