Faith

 “Faith,” By Maldys Shrubb

    It was late dusk when Jacob left market to return home.  The warm autumn sun was setting, and bringing with it, the chill of the night air.  Jacob loaded the parcels into the bed of his pickup truck, opened the door, and climbed in.   He let out a deep resigned sigh.  “Why couldn't I make a clearer argument?”  He muttered to himself under his breath.  He was sure that no one would have seen him complaining to himself, but he lowered his voice out of habit. 

    The truck turned over in its usual sputtering fashion.  The sound of the engine spewing to life and the faulty exhaust system discharge continued to jostle him.  He tuned the radio to a familiar country station as he pulled out the market's parking lot.  He made his way down the main road leading from town.  He expected to be home within twenty minutes at the latest.  The music failed to drown away his irritation at the impromptu trip to the store.   

    Feelings continued to fester within Jacob.  He didn't understand why he felt so betrayed, or why he felt so angry.   Jacob grumbled, “There needs to be a reason I feel this way.”  He so dearly desired a chorus of angels or God himself to hand him an answer that would total satisfy him.  Around these parts of rural Tennessee, he had come to expect that kind of phenomenon.  A life of monotonous tedium tended to invite such visions. 

    Jacob approached the back road that led to his house.  He signaled and turned left, despite the fact that there was not another car in sight.  Jacob always took pride in obeying the rules, even if there was no practical reason to do so.  This made Jacob a target in his mind.  His willingness to be obedient and follow rules could have easily gotten him into trouble numerous times.  His father, Jeremiah, insisted that obedience and hard work were essential to remaining humble in the eyes of the Lord. 

    Jacob pulled into his driveway, only to discover another car parked at his home.  It was a silver two door compact car that he had no recollection of ever seeing.  Suddenly, Jacob was gripped with a memory from his trip to market.  John, his old friend, was insisting that he come over for a couple of beers from the store instead of heading home.  Jacob told him that he simply wanted to finish his shopping and return home.  Jacob wasn't sure why that memory triggered, but curiosity about who might have stopped over haunted him. 

    Jacob removed his parcels from the back of his truck and walked up to the front door of the house.  A sickening feeling of anxiety was welling up from the pit of his stomach.  A voice in his mind, barely audible, begged him to walk away from the front door.  The door was locked.  This exacerbated the feelings of fear and confusion within him.  He set the parcels down on the porch.  Had his wife brought over some company? 

    Jacob fumbled around his pockets for his keys, pulled them out with shaky hands, and proceeded to open the door.  He opened the door slowly, out of an unseen reflex.  The foyer was dark, but the kitchen light was still on.  Jacob looked down at the floor and saw a men's silk button down shirt strewn on the floor.  It was a revolting deep crimson in color. He could faintly hear the sounds of voices grunting licentiously above him.  Fear immediately mutated into steely resolve and irreconcilable fury.   

    Jacob crept through his own home and searched the cabinet in his living room for his shotgun.  It was a 12-gauge gun with polished oak handle; he slowly loaded shells into the weapon as he crept toward the stairs leading up.  As he moved toward the stairs leading to the bedroom, he could hear the sounds of raucous love making growing louder.  Hatred took hold of him, and he could barely contain the feeling of wanting to slay the man who was currently destroying his marriage. 

    Jacob climbed each and every stair with catlike stealth.   He even took an extra step to avoid the creaky fourth step.  Slowly he approached the closed bedroom door with bated breath.  The chorus of his wife's howls of ecstasy were filling his mind with a symphony of murder.  By this point, there was no conscious thought, and all of his blood was drawn to his head.  With no further hesitation, shotgun pointed toward the ceiling, he kicked the door to his bedroom down with his right foot. 

    The door burst off its hinges, while he moved to cradle the shotgun at a hip fire position.  Cries of pleasure turned into shrieks of horror as a shattered door and splinters of wood entered the room.  His wife and some man he didn't recognize were huddled together naked on his bed.  “I am going to kill you!”  Jacob screamed as the veins in his head pulsed violently.  The naked man immediately dove for the bedroom window.  Jacob's gun was trained on him the whole time, yet he couldn't bring himself to shoot the man. 

    The man's weight blasted through the windows peppering the air with shards of glass.  He fell from the second story bedroom window into a roll.  He sported an athletic in frame, and managed to only suffer minor injuries.  Jacob watched in disgust as the nude man burst into full sprint down the road.  Jacob fired a shell and missed.  He fired another and another, pumping the gun frantically.  Jacob failed to hit the man once, before he was well out of range. 

    Jacob looked at his wife in indignation, who was crying and shaking on the bed.  Jacob could smell the sweat and semen in the room around him.   It disgusted him further.   He pointed the weapon at his wife, who was sobbing uncontrollably at this point.  She begged him to stop.  He couldn't.  He fired the gun on her, spraying a crimson mist.  Then he turned it on himself. 

 

    Jacob wasn't sure what the afterlife would or should have been.  He was surprised to find out that God looked exactly like Dwight Eisenhower.  God spoke to him and told him, “You took that business with your wife a bit far.  You never made a thing better by shooting the poor woman, or yourself.”  Jacob was humbled. 

 

THE END