Just a short story 'sketch'...something satirical about a megachurch pastor

By cliffordben502
- 41 reads
Ed note: No idea what I'll do with this, just some passage I've done. The character is supposed to be a very 'fake' and vain rich megachurch pastor visting the very real victims of a very real natural disaster -- the human coming from his internal monologue vs his outward image. No plot ideas yet. Any of your thoughts shall help me!
They'd flown me to the gymnasium at Cedar Point (a Tier Two site, which, in the language of the relief agencies, meant cots instead of real beds, and a scoreboard that still read HOME 42, VISITOR 38 from some basketball game that got interrupted by the hurricane.) I stopped in the doorway a moment longer than needed. The light there was good – gray, soft, the kind that flatters a man of sixty-one who moisturizes – and I figured, not for the first time, that natural disaster brings out the best in me.
A schlubby ‘man’ named Horace wearing a FEMA lanyard caught my eye and started waving me further inside. I retracted my hand instinctively in case he tried to grab it in a further effort to guide me; I didn’t like the look of him, and his voice – which I heard when he referred to me ‘Donald’ instead of Pastor Kennedy (the honorofic a stranger with more refined manners would use) – had a faggoty lisp.
Horace fell into step beside me before I could arrange my face into something more accommodating, rattling off numbers as we walked: three hundred and change, four families still unaccounted for out past the levee road, a woman in Bay Six who hadn't eaten since Tuesday. Horace had the flat, tired competence of someone who was acutely aware of the disaster unfolding but would deliver the same introduction again and again, for no one in particular, for no audience at all. I prompted myself to recall the levee road families as something to have the ministry follow up on, assuming it turned out to be the kind of story that traveled. Horace put a hand near my elbow to steer me around an overturned stroller, and I sidestepped out of reach a half-second too obviously, already composing the line I'd use if we brushed hands: We don’t need COVID on top of everything else, Horace!
On our right was a girl of six or seven, sitting Indian-style on a cot and using a purple crayon to draw a crooked house. Next to the drawing of the house she’d scribbled a particularly mangy-looking dog; I kneeled next to her, and she finished the finer details on the dog’s tail before looking up at me.
“I’m Pastor Kennedy, and it’s nice to meet you,” I said, grinning wide, gesturing for Horace to snap a photo.
The little girl, who, now that I kneeled by her, smelled unwashed, like onions and sweat, simply replied, “Me and Ma watch you on the iPad, on JesusTube.” She gestured to an obese woman sleeping on her side in the cot next to her, her cafeteria-lady arm upturned to the sky.
This, I presumed, was Ma. I noted a nicotine patch and a subutex patch on the meat of Ma’s upper arm before returning my still-grinning gaze to the girl. “Well, that’s awesome, isn’t it?” The girl didn’t say anything. “Jesus brings us together in miracles every day,” I said, “and I want you to remember that.” Ma shifted slightly in her sleep and the girl started drawing x’s on the dog’s eyes.
ED: That's it so far - as I said, tell me the truth -- where shall we go?
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I don't have any suggestions,
I don't have any suggestions, but it's grimly believable so far!
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