The Prosperity Gospel |
Issue 5
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I believe if Jesus were alive today, he’d be on TV.
My mother is a fanatic about a particular televangelist. We weren’t even Evangelical. Truthfully, I wasn’t much of anything, but she was something or another. Happier days, we’d spend our mornings watching soap opera re-runs together with café y pan dulce. Now, she sits by herself in the living room listening to Josiah Baker, as her thick glasses reflected the preacher’s only light in the darkness. His image in her frames looked like TV static to me. She pressed time and time again that all she wanted was to attend his Cathedral all the way in Pennsylvania for the Christmas morning sermon. That was tomorrow at 6 AM – as if I’d consider enabling her unhealthy fixation any further. My mom wasted my college refund donating to his Cathedral. I stupidly trusted she would repay her medical debt since her failed chemo. “Mi vida, we’ll get it back tenfold. What’s money in the Church of God?” Josiah wasn’t even his real name. It was Robert. A millionaire scam artist boomer named Robert had my college refund. My measly $700 refund that I’d been looking forward to since my statement reflected it a week prior... Gone in seven days. Mami’s only moment to herself was when she showered because every other moment I heard his voice in his house. Even as she slept he sermoned her dreams, and his voice slithered in my ears from her mind on our shared twin-sized bed. I fluffed my pillows every morning, smacking his religious mottoes out of the cushion. Josiah was striking evil out of a worshipper on a live show that morning. It was Christmas Eve, and he’d be healing people today and tomorrow in celebration of Jesus’ birth. Demanding I watch this fake exorcism with her, my mother held my hand tightly, and if I’d try to wiggle out of bed, her grasp tightened. Josiah approached the possessed man in the audience of his arena, yelled threats against Satan, and the man began convulsing as people gasped. Josiah brought out an anointing oil he’d been advertising, (it was ‘blessed from the Holy Land’) and when he splattered it against the man’s forehead, he hissed as if it were a chemical burn. I tried to stifle my laugh and keep it in my belly, but it grew legs and jumped out of me. I laughed so hard. Offended, my mother released me, and I jumped out of her reach in case she’d dare change her mind. |
LORNA REAUX won 2nd Place of the Fiction Writing Contest. She is an English language teacher born in Westchester, New York. She spends her days reading Dostoyevsky, working at the library, and dreaming of Scandinavia. Her writing is greatly influenced by her bilingual upbringing and on matters of hereditary trauma and familial pain.
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