Read Sunday Billy Sunday for Free Online

‘meal-prep,’ ‘meal-prep clean-up,’ ‘laundry,’ ‘yard work,’ ‘trash and recycling,’” Faith recited. “Oh, yeah – ‘sports equipment.’ That’s just making sure everything’s back in the equipment shed at the end of the day. That’s about it. Oh, and, ‘classroom clean-up.’ I think there are a couple of others. You can sign up for your first choice, but as everyone picks the same stuff, most just get assigned.”
    “What’s the worst job?” Maia asked. “Cleaning the bathrooms?”
    “Latrine-clean is punishment, so hopefully you won’t get that,” Faith explained. “I like working in the mess hall. They let you play music and you just follow the recipes. You can zone out and the time goes really fast. The best thing is, everybody thinks it’s the hardest job, so no one signs up for it.”
    “Oh, smart plan,” said Maia, carefully stacking her father’s biographies on the shelf behind her bed, then when silent as if waiting for Faith to speak.
    Faith hesitated, unsure how much she wanted to commit to this sudden and friendship. But then she had her thoughts interrupted by a loud, brassy and big-boobed girl entering Cabin 6, talking to her friend.
    “Oh, God – remember last year?” the girl was saying. “You got chiggers in the worst places. It was awful. Everybody thought you had herpes or something.”
    Faith watched these girls pick bunks, a pair of flighty, popular types; the kind that ended up being assigned certain jobs like yard work and then just stood or sat around talking and waited for their two duty-hours to be up, letting everybody else do the work. Faith had gotten trapped with these kinds of girls in the kitchen a couple of times and, over and over again, the meals would almost be late, which always made her panic.
    “You want to work in the kitchen together?” Faith asked, knowing the answer before asking the question. “We could sign up for the same meal-prep shifts.”
    Maia smiled and nodded. “Do they ever let you make things on your own?”
    “Sometimes, but the meals are pretty well planned out to avoid wasting food as there’s only one delivery truck that comes out a week,” Faith said. “They let us make extra cookies and muffins on Sunday evenings, though. Also, cakes, like if someone has a birthday.”
    “Fun!” exclaimed Maia.
    Faith smiled, knowing she’d made the right decision.
    In his cabin, Father Billy was lying face down on the floor of the living room, his arms outstretched like a parody of a man who had fallen to Earth without a parachute and was now splattered against the ground. His nose was directly against the floor, eyes staring directly into the grain of the wood below. His back ached as did his groin, but he continued to hold this pose.
    Father Billy had spent every day of the past eighty days in this exact position for at least two or three hours, deep in prayer. He couldn’t imagine a more beseeching pose for these prayers, prostrating himself like a bug willfully waiting to be squashed underfoot by an angry God. It was in this position that he’d continued to ask God for a sign, for a response, for anything . What he had witnessed three months ago on Good Friday was, to him, clearly a miracle and one directed solely at him, but he still didn’t know what it meant. Why him? And why nothing since?
    The priest had wanted answers to these questions from the moment he’d risen from the pew the two gardeners had carried him to, but it quickly devolved into an all-encompassing drive and obsession. It wasn’t long before the desire for a Divine response governed his every breath, every thought and every action, driving him to nothing short of madness. Everything that had made up his old life was gone, replaced by the single-minded goal to know God’s will in revealing Himself to Father Billy.
    At first, he had believed that this was the Lord’s way of imbuing him with a more perfect faith. But then, after He failed to answer