salt in the wound 1

        On the morning of her twenty-first Summer Solstice Leah Cartwright commenced an untimely issue of blood. She was out on Antelope Island, sitting crosslegged some distance from the others, when the floodgate opened. Instinctively she strode fully clothed (bluejeans, calico blouse, canvas shoes) into the Great Salt Lake. Waders from the nearby state park frolicked in patty-splash coveys. She smiled hello to an elder from her Church stake in Bountiful and progressed into deeper waters.
        With each step she retreated into a pleasant compartment of her mind. A false memory of blissful childhood. She could hear herself singing from far away: "The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning."
        Salt seeped into her and she felt a divine cleansing.
        Jesus met her half way. His hair was snow white.


        She understood stigmata. This was not stigmata. Nor was it an aberration of menses. No doctor was needed to confirm what she already knew. And whenever the blood frightened her, Jesus would place His hand into her core.


                                                                                          *


        Her Uncle Nathan was holding court at the Aces And Eights bar downtown.
        A spiritual nomad, he gloried in apostacy.
        Friends called him Azul because his eyes glittered like gemstones. Gaunt, with all flesh burnt away, his body resembled desert greasewood.
        Today he was wearing his "boony-rat" floppy hat as a badge of something. Blithely spending his VA disability check on Slim Jims, Vienna Sausages and Olympia beer, he was a certified barfly.
        Rays of the three o'clock sun were streaming like gold sluice down the concrete canyon outside. Office windows blank as Little Orphan Annie's eyeballs radiated the heat of a blast furnace. The sidewalk in front of the bar could vulcanize the rubber from a pair of gym shoes.
        Yet the barroom was dark as a planetarium. Velvety coolness kept a man alive.
        Uncle Nathan had been pontificating to a buzzcut punk, pierced  and tatted like a South Seas cannibal: "I know where you're coming from, lad. This is a divided city. With a place for Saints and a place for Dark Ones."
        "Yup." The youth nodded and departed. "S'long, dude."
        That left Uncle Nathan with no one of substance to talk to. A biscuit-eared geezer sat three stools away, absorbed in a Las Vegas gaming tabloid.
        "Reminds me of the Second International," Uncle Nathan said loudly. "The Moscow Trials."
        The barman rolled his eyes and uncapped a Coors.
        Uncle Nathan droned on. "The way those BYU professors are being purged. Yessir. It's a darkness at noon, if ya get me. The bright boys are escorted from their classrooms by Church goons in suits and taken to a secret basement and shot in the head."
         "Thas turrible," said the geezer. Eyes not leaving his page.


                                                                                             *


        A glare intruded upon the barroom. It's transit told time as accurately as a sundial.
        Leah would be coming by soon. This he dearly anticipated. She read and interpreted scripture for herself. Yet she never testified, never confided personal truths, for these were treasures of the soul.
        To only one person would she confess her sins of prophesy.
         Uncle Nathan. Free thinker.