A Mysterious Night

One night Rachael called and asked what I was doing. What I was doing was resting from the previous night of wild partying with another woman I’d been dating. As soon as I told her I was staying home, she invited herself over. She lived in my neighborhood, so I knew there would be a knock on my door soon.

Five minutes later, I opened the door and there was Rachael and a little girl, her two-year-old daughter, Sarah. I led my two guests to the living room where they made themselves comfortable on the couch.

After flicking on the TV, I went to the kitchen to fetch some sodas and munchies, returning with a small plastic bowl for Sarah to eat out of so she wouldn’t drop crumbs onto her nice clothes.

Sarah started eating the munchies but turned away from me to her mother. “Mommy, let’s go home.”

“Now?” said her mother.

Rachael didn’t understand what was wrong, but I knew. The young child had picked up the bad vibes from the unclean spirits in the apartment.

Rachael spotted some of my religious paraphernalia lying around that spoke of espiritismo, Santeria, and Palo and asked what I was into. I told her she had nothing to worry about. All I did was burn candles. Thirty minutes later, I walked her home. That was when she revealed to me that her parents, Robert and Anna, were born-again Christians and that she at one time had gone to church with them. Now she was a back-slider, seeking that which she had left, she said: the love and power of Jesus Christ.

“How deep are you involved?” she asked, her dark eyes filled with concern. “In what?”

“Witchcraft.”

She had me. I turned to her with a reassuring smile. “Look, you don’t have to worry. All I’m doing is burning candles to Catholic saints. No harm in that, right?”

That was when the backslider started to preach to me. “The Bible says you shouldn’t worship anything or anyone except Jesus Christ. What you’re doing is called idolatry.”

I let out a loud, defensive laugh. “You’re so old-fashioned and funny. If you want to know the truth, the Bible was put together by forty losers who had nothing better to do than to create a money- laundering religion.”

Rachael looked at me strangely and without a word walked away. It would be days before we saw each other again or even talked on the phone. I decided to break the long silence with one call. The line rang and rang, and finally someone picked it up. It was her. A sincere hello from me was all it took to start a string of restaurant dinners and movie matinees over the course of several weekends. We were spending more time together than ever.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 839