Talitha Cumi
Our dear Cal is a man who lives his life between chemicals. Cal’s a janitor at the Church of Exaltation. They like people like him: desperate, wifeless men; addicts; anorexics. People whose faces are riddled with scabs from picking and raking nails down them. People who have no one but God to find refuge in.
Cal did not want to stoop to this point. He is not an addict nor an anorexic. He only dabbles in the two. Yes, his wrists may be translucent as a mall display, and his face is littered with blood-sealed nail wounds, but he is fine. But the court said mandated rehab, what does your wife have to say about all this (nothing. They’re divorced), you’re a danger to your daughter even though you haven’t seen her since she was five. The church was willing to help him with rehab. He could work there too. So he scrubs pews and bathrooms and dusts rafters when he can reach them. At night, he takes from the icebox of wine and drinks just enough of a dosage to daze himself to sleep. Our poor Cal is a thief.
On Sundays, kids go into another room while the adults pray and listen to sermons. Cal knows all the stories and morals and how we should all be like David and Enoch and disavow Cain and blah blah blah. This boy grew up with a Bible tucked under his arm at all times. He can recite any verse from Genesis to Revelation. Test him. The kids at the Church of Exaltation will turn out the same.
Today, Cal’s in charge of manning the doughnut box. One per person, take turns, don’t take all the sprinkles, Sherry. Faces sufficiently crumbed, the kids sit on the floor and watch as the youth pastor reads them the story of Rahab. Then they put on a play. The kids always love to put on plays. This is the story of Samson and Delilah. All the boys want to be Samson and all the girls Delilah. A boy named Isaac is chosen, and another girl is chosen because it’s her first day here.
The girl, a slight thing of twelve, wears a collared dress that fits like a sack, as if to hide the fact she has a body. Her hair is pinned in curls, and her socks reach her knees. She shares the same thin, pinched face as Cal. “My name’s Talitha,” she says.
“Hi, Talitha,” everyone choruses.
Cal suddenly wishes he were sober.
❧
Talitha’s birth was certainly something. See, Cal and his wife and the doctor thought she was stillborn. She didn’t cry, and her chest was coffin-stiff. His wife thought baptism was the answer. Dunking a suffocated baby in a pit of water would certainly open her lungs. The doctor apologized profusely. Cal found it all a bit boring.
Then, cue the break of morning from the window, and there was light. The baby heaves and screams. God, it’s God, it’s a miracle (the wife thinks so). If Cal’s wife could’ve gotten on her knees and prayed, she would’ve, but the C-section wouldn’t stand for that. Frankly, it was sacrilege. Wife named the baby Talitha after Jesus’s whole “Talitha Cumi” schtick. Cal didn’t stay for the C-section stitches. Five years later, an argument with his wife would land him halfway across town and divorced, and three years later, the court would say rehab looked like a pretty solid option.
It’s shocking how much Talitha looks like him.
❧
Cal scrapes the grout of the bathroom with a stiff-bristled brush, sneaking tastes of lye every so often. What would it feel like to drink it? To do more than graze the tip of your tongue against the surface? Corrosive burns, esophagus blistered, stomach fizzled dead. But that wouldn’t get Cal in good with God, would it? Cleaning the stickiness off the edge of toilets will. So Cal scours the floor until his fingers are raw.
He doesn’t take any wine that night, so he doesn’t sleep. He sits with Reverend Brown as he prays (it’s never too late to talk to God). Colors kaleidoscope the oak floor, dust suspended between shades. The priest’s head droops in prayer. “There was a new girl with the kids today,” Cal says. Reverend Brown is too wrapped in his conversation with God to hear. “Her name was Talitha. Is she joining the church?” When Brown doesn’t answer, Cal shuts his eyes and clasps his hands. The press of his palms together, the suffocating spiritualism, the kids in Sunday clothes leave him missing his childhood. Nostalgia always comes with a sense of betrayal for him. Yes, his eyes weren’t perpetually webbed red and his wrists were more than green-white bones. But there was always a cross somewhere, and he was always breaking some commandment, and goddamnit, Cal, if you don’t change you’ll sin and die and burn in Hell. There was routine to it. Fifty Hail Marys weren’t bad if you were used to them.
“Talitha will be joining the church,” Reverend Brown says. “She’s going to volunteer here after school.”
The next afternoon, Cal polishes the windows as Reverend Brown sits with Talitha at the frontmost pew, looking over a sermon. They study Leviticus and Corinthians, and Talitha learns to see life through the gospel. “The world is full of dirty sinners and opportunities to sin,” Brown says. “The Lord gives us his word as a guide to navigate this unholy world.” Talitha nods, knees pressed together to the point of paling. “You’re at the age where you no longer have your youth and innocence to shelter you from the temptation of sin. It’s quite a good time to join the church.”
Talitha points at Cal. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s our janitor,” Brown says. “He’s learning the error of his ways through hard work and prayer.”
“Can I help him?”
Reverend Brown eyes Cal, probably praying to the dear Lord that Cal dies of an overdose. “No. He’d taint you.”
Cal hopelessly scrubs a spot on the window, but it only streaks the glass.
❧
Reverend Brown tells Cal it’s time for his weekly repentance. Cal kneels, knuckles bleeding into the floor, back arched. The Sinner’s Prayer slips from his mouth with practiced ease. He’s had to do this two-hundred-seventeen weeks in a row. Cal is a sinner; there’s no doubt about it. If you knew what he’s done, you’d think it too. He’s bathed in sin and disgrace. Why else would his skin be all scabs and needle holes? Why else would he be divorced and estranged? Why else would he spend his life in and out of bathrooms, hopelessly retching up the remnants of his stomach, hoping something in there would be the last of him, the last bad thing, whatever demon Reverend Brown had insisted there was from the beginning, from when Cal was just a kid? He is damned to Hell. He knows it.
“You forgot to admit something,” Brown says after Cal finishes the routine prayer.
Cal lifts his head from the floor and eyes Brown. The man has always been how Cal imagined David: thinly bearded, hopeless combover. “What is it?”
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed the wine.” Brown leans against the pulpit, and he and Cal hold each other’s gaze a moment. Cal knows he can only be truly seen in the eyes of God, and Reverend Brown isn’t God. But he’s pretty goddamn close. He’s always had a knack for seeing past Cal’s lies.
Cal dips his head again. “Dear God, I’m sorry about the wine.” He raises himself to sit and glares. “Is that good?”
“Four years, and you’re still not clean. I’m beginning to think you’re a lost cause.”
Frayed hair spans over Cal’s forehead. Light, pushing through glass mosaics of Judas and Samson, bathes him in muddled yellow. “It was a mistake, Reverend. I won’t repeat it.” And his other mistakes? Dear Lord, there’s a lot: being an absent father, an addict, a homosexual, a psycho, to name a few. Our Cal can’t begin to atone. It’s not like he can fathom what Heaven is like.
Talitha can, though, can’t she? She deserves a father who can.
“Stay true to your word, Cal,” Brown says. “You’ve long strayed from the path of the righteous. This is your fate you’re playing with.”
Cal nods.
In the stark hours of morning, he lies in the bathtub, soaked to the neck in frigid water, eyes in a lulled stare at the ceiling. The light is a purgatory between night and dawn. Lye brittles his fingertips, and he knows it is only the dirt that’s been cleaned from his body.
❧
Sunday. Talitha is a wisp of a girl as she nibbles a waffle one of the mothers brought. After the youth leader teaches them about the Garden of Eden, the kids play hide-and-seek. Talitha hides (not really). Cal watches as she walks alone, hand drifting along the stuccoed wall. Rather than ducking under a table, she stations herself beside Cal. They’re a beautiful image: skeletal father and daughter standing in tender peace. A lovely shot for a family magazine. Her wrists, one of the only pieces of skin allowed to show, are more like Cal’s than any other feature. The tautness of the skin is something Cal only knows from years of staving off hunger to feel as close to nothingness as possible. “Are you always here?” Talitha asks.
“I live here.” He glares down at her. “I’ll leave if you want.”
“No. It’s fine. It’s just that Mom doesn’t like you.” She twists the skin around her wrists red.
“Why’s that?”
When Talitha smiles, her lips stretch so thin they might snap. “She says you’re going to Hell, and I shouldn’t be around you, or else I’ll do the same. You’ll rub off on me.”
Cal remembers her mother. An angel, wore Mary Janes, never talked back (especially not to men), cooked like a charm, always smiled. They married at twenty-one, when Cal was legally allowed to drink. Not that he cared. Their first apartment was cramped, and the walls were thin, so the neighbors always heard their arguments. At their second apartment, it turned out it wasn’t the thin walls that made their arguments so easy to hear. Every day, the wife found something to gripe about. Oh, Cal, you came home drunk; Oh, Cal, you missed work and now we don’t have money for dinner, nag nag nag whine whine whine. It was the night he came home and vomited over the toilet for an hour that she dumped a bottle of drug-store wine on him while shouting, and it was that night Cal said his first genuine prayer since age thirteen: please, Lord, send me to Hell already. “Charming,” Cal says.
The youth leader is too busy cleaning up after the kids to hear them. Talitha cocks her head. “I don’t remember much about you.”
Good thing, too. “That’s too bad.”
“You’re so much more interesting than my mother. She said you were a perpetual drunk. Is that true? She also said you had to get an exorcism. What about that?” For once, her cheeks have some color to them, and she leans towards Cal. A strand of hair strays from her pinned curls.
Cal hesitates. “Yes, those are true.”
“Why did you get the exorcism?” She’s too excited.
Because Reverend Brown said there was a demon inside him when he was sixteen, and Cal needed to stop sinning and follow Christ, and it wasn’t his fault because we hate the sin, not the sinner, but it was his fault and he needed to change because if you don’t change you’ll sin and die and burn in Hell. Cal presses the heels of his hands against his eyes until colors spot his vision. “I drank too much,” he lies.
“Can I help you with one of your jobs? I hate all these activities. They’re too kiddish.”
“Oh, adult church is so much better.” He glances at the youth pastor, then at the door, then at anything to keep from looking at Talitha. “Maybe one day after school. But all I do is clean. That’s no fun.”
It doesn’t matter that she’ll be hands and knees on scummed floors for an hour. She nods vigorously. “I’ll do it. I’ll be back Thursday.” When she smiles, Cal can faintly remember when she was little. Once, he held her, and she smiled just like that. He nods back and wants to say, yes, yes, that’ll be great, but instead he mutters about how he remembered some top-secret church activity he needs to do and leaves the room.
❧
On Tuesday, Cal lies in bed, a bottle of unopened communion wine clutched in his hands. It’s magical how it ends up there sometimes. He hardly notices. It must be God’s will. Wednesday, he can’t afford to drink because that’ll mean a hangover on Thursday, and he can’t be like that around Talitha. She already sees him as a tourist attraction. It’d be worse for her to see him as he really is. So tonight it is. He unscrews the lid and takes a few gulps, then shuts his eyes. Reverend Brown will be here soon to scold him and make him Hail Mary until his mouth bleeds.
But he doesn’t come. Cal knows he’s here. He was in the pews, counting money from collections when Cal took the wine. Cal downs half the bottle, then sits, knees knocking against each other. Another quarter of the bottle, and Cal waits in his open doorway. The hall is silent, and the sunset scorches the hall in knife-like beams. He sips what’s left of the wine and marches into the nave. Brown sits at the frontmost pew and writes numbers under names on his clipboard.
Cal stands in the center of the room and holds the bottle out. “I did it again.”
Reverend Brown keeps his eyes on his clipboard. “What do you want, Cal?”
“I don’t care what you tell me to do.” The neck of the bottle is smooth in Cal’s hands, fragile and easy to break. “I’ll drink all I want.”
“You obviously care what I think if you came to tell me.” Brown’s voice stays level.
Cal does not care. He demonstrates this by throwing the bottle at Brown’s feet. Shards scatter across the floor, and beams of colored light slit through the stained glass on the wall, and it reflects on the shards and back again, glass on glass on glass. Brown glares. Cal is still. What can Reverend Brown do? Give him another Godforsaken exorcism? Baptize him a seventh time? Cal will not do what he says, but God, Cal needs to change, Talitha’s back and he needs to change for once.
Brown’s eyes heat Cal’s forehead. His spine grows hot. His heart burns his chest to his stomach.
Cal drops to his knees and gathers the shards of glass in his palm, brushing them into his fingers until the floor is clean.
❧
Cal resists the urge to chug the bottle of lye as he greets Talitha on Thursday. His fingerprints are smoothed from soaking his fingers in cleaning products the day before. Papery and tight, his skin constricts his muscles. He wishes it’d just burned off. Talitha follows Cal through the hall. She moves jerkily, legs stumbling, as if her bones are being moved by someone else. Her mother would claim it’s God puppeteering her. Cal thinks it’s Osgood-Schlatter disease.
He shows her how to dust the rafters by standing on top of one of the counters and how to clean the stove without really cleaning it. “Is it true you cheated on my mom?” Talitha asks, perched on the edge of the kitchen counter.
Cal dunks his rag into a bucket of soapy water and wrings it, then slaps it on the floor and scrubs until his knuckles whiten. “I thought you wanted to help me clean, not interview me.” But if she kneels like he does to clean, her dress might get wet. Can’t have that. Wrinkles already line Cal’s knees, and it’s only been a few minutes. Dirt and dust swirl in the water, streaming through the tile grout.
“But you’re so interesting.” She slides from the counter and lands on her tip-toes. Droplets of water scatter across the floor. “Why couldn’t I have gone with you instead of my mother? She’s so dull, and she makes me do all these lessons with Reverend Brown because she hates the thought of me turning out like you. She has all these rules. I have to have long skirts and dresses and never be around boys and pray every day. I’m sure you wouldn’t make me do any of that.”
Cal releases the rag from his grip, flexes his fingers to keep them from aching. “You stayed with your mother because your mother is better equipped to deal with children.”
“But no one likes my mother. You cheated on her, and you married her, so even her husband couldn’t stand her.” Baiting him again with the cheating thing. Does she really want to know what he did? How he committed homosexual acts even after he’d promised not to during the exorcism? She’s a little devil (Jesus Christ, Cal, that’s your daughter). It makes perfect sense though, doesn’t it? She’s just like him. As long as there’s a part of him in her, she’s corroded from the inside out.
“As bad as your mother is, be glad you’re with her instead of me.” He drops the rag into the bucket and orders Talitha to grab him a dry towel from the cupboard. She does as told, and Cal stamps the towel on the floor until it’s dry. He waves her down the hall and into the bathroom. Talitha stands in the doorway as he polishes the mirror.
“I’m hardly glad for anything anymore.” She moves to the counter, where Cal’s cleaning supplies sit. Her hand falls on the bottle of lye, cupped so naturally around it. Cal doesn’t see this for a moment and instead focuses on attacking that one spot on the mirror he can never get off. Then, in the reflection of the mirror, Talitha hikes up her dress and kneels beside the toilet. Lye should only be handled with gloves, if even that. Cal darts away from the sink and grabs Talitha’s shoulder. Kneeling, he tears the bottle from her hands. Their eyes lock on each other. Cal’s never noticed how alike their eyes are: sunken, the color of rainwater. “I’m trying to clean,” Talitha says.
He eases the bottle into his grasp. Exposed lye-water rims the cap of the bottle, and it drips onto his fingers. Singes them. He catches Talitha wincing, hands clenched, and he takes her hands in his and finds some lye has rubbed onto her fingertips. Cal’s spent all his life between chemicals, scrubbing with lye until his fingers feel they’ll burn, being told by Reverend Brown that he can’t change, hopelessly vomiting after hoping for alcohol poisoning and getting a hangover instead. He’s used to the burn. Often craves it.
He stands, bringing Talitha with him. They stand in front of the sink. Water bathes her hands. Lye washes from the grooves of her fingerprints. Our Cal stares beneath the flickering bathroom light, the flaxen tint of the room, the sight of him and his daughter somehow standing with each other. Something in him burns. Talitha scrubs her hands.
He holds his hand under the stream of water besides Talitha’s, and the lye cleanses from the last indents of their fingers.
Oliver Reimers is a freshman at Southern Oregon University, where he is pursuing a degree in Creative Writing. His work has been featured in Prime Number Magazine, One Teen Story, and Gold Man Review. His portfolio of short stories received a national honorable mention from the 2024 Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards.
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