Jesus Loves You But Not Today

By Miles White

Jesus Loves You But Not Today is the first volume in the Canvas Sextet series of contemporary literary fiction comprised of single page stories that are darkly comic, tragic, and often hilarious. The stories are composed with only as many words as can be fit onto one standard blank page in Word, single spaced using 12-point font in Times Roman. The stories are provocative and unsettling, dramatic narrative condensed down to an essence. In The Chamber, a man commits state-sanctioned suicide; a tough young female Mexican fighter tries to earn a title shot in Wet Work. In Elevator Music a Manhattan businesswoman becomes a sexual predator, while Eat Me ‘Til I’m Gone imagines a sky funeral in Tibet. In Memory of All That finds a woman making a very troubling purchase and in Summa Cum Laude a bright young coed uses her wiles to get ahead. An aging diva gets some necessary help in Ice Cream and Gin and a slave mounts a bloody rebellion in The Devil You Don’t. The stories are told in vivid, sometimes graphic imagery with rich, evocative prose that makes for compelling and hypnotic reading that is highly entertaining and often surprising.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miles White
• Release date: Feb 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781495101922

Miles White

Miles White is a former journalist and a staff writer for USA TODAY. He is the author of the Canvas Sextet series of three-minute flash fiction.

Book preview

1 Me (heart) mommie

Dying takes a long time. It’s hard too, mostly on everybody else. All you have to do is lie there and die. It’s everybody else who has to do things – wash you, dress you, cry for you; make plans to bury you. You just have to lie there and admire all the fuss everybody is making about you while you’re dying, and maybe wonder if it’s worth all the trouble since you know you are going to die sooner than later now. What I mean is that now you’re close enough to it that you can see it coming, but all you can do is watch the last of your time go by with a kind of pitiful bewilderment. After all that it comes down to all this? People changing your bedpans and feeding you through a tube? It took me three years to die. I was glad when it was finally over.

Everybody lives their lives like they’re not going to die. Death is something that happens to everybody else. How many funerals have I been to and said to myself: Well, at least it’s not me. We like to think somehow that it will never be us. Death happens to other people. On the other hand, I don’t know how anybody could walk around every day and do the normal things required of living if we really let it in all the time that one day that will be me lying there, and people will be standing over me saying what I always said when I stood there so smug over the sad faced and recently deceased. Yeah, glad it’s not me. Well, today it is me. The procession of people coming by to gape at my mortal remains includes people I didn’t care for in life, people who were not my friends; and the women, all of them, who are now making sure Jack gets all the attention, hugs and strokes he needs. As I know Jack, he will be fucking half of them before I’ve rotted in the ground good. I do not begrudge him that – maybe one of them will stick around. He was a good and faithful husband and he’ll be a fine catch. I wish him nothing but good days ahead, but mostly I wish that he will have good fortune in raising our child.

The day I died was not the worst day of my life – there are days worse than death – but it was the saddest because I had to say goodbye to Lori. I knew it was the last day I would see her, and I didn’t know how to prepare her for that. How do you say goodbye to your child? I had left it up to Jack. I just did not have the strength or courage to say the words I am going to die, I have to leave you, so I left it to Jack and trusted him. Sometimes they came in together and they played cards and Scrabble with me and I held off giving myself another dose of morphine so I could bear to visit with them, but I was not always there anyway. Lori never mentioned I was going to die, that I was even sick. All she said was when will the doctor let you go home, mommie? It was heartbreaking, and one day, hugging her, my eyes met Jack’s and I told him he needed to do it. I didn’t have a lot of time. I was only holding on for her. When they left I lay in bed and stared out at the sky and let myself drift along on puffy white cotton candy clouds.

The next day they came back and Lori had something for me that she had drawn. I looked at the paper. She had drawn a stick figure on the left and written ME and a stick figure on the right and written MOMMIE. Between us she had glued a cut-out of a huge red heart. I started bawling right away. Then she stopped me and said Don’t cry, mommie. Look, you’re an angel. I looked, and she had drawn angel wings around me. She was holding on to the heart with both hands. I had one hand on the heart and the other one was pointing up to heaven. I was going up, but we both held on to the big red heart. I could not stop one single, small, solitary tear from falling. It was a flood. Lori wiped my eyes. Angels don’t cry, she said. I hugged her and held on to her for dear life, but over her shoulder I knew it was time to say goodbye to Jack, and to thank him. Merciful God, Jack had pushed her up to this high steeple, and it was left to me only to lay back and rest. When they left I drew a breath – long, deep and glorious – and just exhaled.

2 Wet Work

Sheila Gomez had beaten nearly every female fighter south of the Rio Grande and every woman in her weight class east of the Mississippi. She was working on the rest at 21 and 2, no draws and no regrets. She sent money home every month and was saving up to buy a new Silverado. What was left supported her and Jesus – her manager, promoter, trainer, corner man, cut man, boyfriend and mechanic. Jesus was her rock. He got her fights, kept her in shape, sewed her up, and kept the old Ford pickup running. Then there was Saxe, her black stray cat, her good luck. Saxe had to be at every fight, in the corner with her, in her little cardboard wine box stuffed with old hand wraps. At the break, while Jesus was yelling at her to keep her hands up, to move and feint more, to keep going to the body, all the while trying to keep the swelling down under her eyes, she only needed to look over at Saxe – curled up, licking her paws and preening herself – to know if she was winning. If Saxe looked up and fixed on her in a certain way during the fight, she knew she was going to win. Jesus pulled the truck into the parking lot as she woke up. Saxe was curled up in her lap. She did not know how long they had been driving or how long she had been sleeping. Colorado Springs, Jesus said as he brought the truck to a stop at the back door of the cinderblock building. Betty Bang Bang. He grabbed her boxing kit. You beat her, maybe one more to keep you tuned up, we get on the undercard in Austin. You win there and we fight for the title. You can’t lose no more. Time to catch that train ‘cause it ain’t gonna be running forever. You with that? He didn’t wait for an answer. He was moving. Let’s do this.

She let him wrap her hands, warm her up, slap her in the face a few times to wake her up. She put Saxe in her box and Jesus tied on her gloves. Betty Bang Bang Lopez was 36 and 6 and had fought for the title but lost. She fought low and mean. Jesus said You stay out of her way, stick and move, but if she tries to fight you inside, you bust her up. Use the jab like I showed you. Sheila took her mouthpiece and looked over at Saxe sleeping in her box. Betty Bang came out wild, swinging and missing. Sheila got her jab going quick, using her reach, finding her range and starting blood flowing from Betty’s nose. Betty caught her in the face and she had to cover. Betty went to work inside, trying to bust her ribs. Sheila turned her around on the ropes and threw hard rights to her head, drawing a cut over her left eye. Saxe was still sleeping on the break. Jesus put a cold iron under her right eye to slow the swelling and yelled at her to stay off the ropes. Betty came out fast again, throwing slicing uppercuts to get it over with. Sheila used the ring and made her come in, then punished her with counter shots. Betty had thin skin and cut easy. Jesus told her to keep working on the eyes with the jab. Make her pay. Make her bleed.

At the end of round six Sheila was spitting blood. She felt Betty’s hard rib shots. She tried to block them with her arms but Betty’s hooks got around her. Jesus yelled to keep moving. The next round she shut Betty’s left eye with the jab and tried to break her nose with right leads. Betty smiled and said something in the clinch. Sheila picked up chocho. She used her elbow to push her off, then hit Betty with a power right flush on her cheek that stood her up. Saxe peered over the top of her box and Sheila followed the right with two quick lefts to set up another right. Betty tried to back away and found the corner. Sheila caught her there and started to work on the eye, trying to see through the blood gushing from the cut. She found a good rhythm and worked slowly, throwing body shots to bring Betty’s hands down so she could finish up the job on her face. She let her hands go, finding Betty whenever she wanted now, taking away her legs, hurting her. The referee moved in waving. The room was spinning clockwise. Jesus ran towards her yelling something. She raised her hands victorious. Then she vomited in his face.

3 The Dog Ate My Homework

I don’t believe that. You’re lying, Miss Moss said. She had been standing there at Scott’s desk for a whole five minutes now while the rest of the class giggled in glee. Emily, who Scott had a crush on, feigned embarrassment and wouldn’t look at him. Jimmy Witherspoon was making faces at him behind Miss Moss’ back, sticking his thumbs in his ears and wiggling his fingers. Scott looked up into the stern face of his homeroom teacher and beseeched her once more. I’m not lying, he said. Really, I’m not. She looked down from on high with calm but determined reproach. Well, she said, we’ll just see how long you want to persist in this. You will go to the blackboard and you will stand there for the rest of the day and write one thousand times ‘I am a big fat liar,’ because I do not like people who lie, Scott. I don’t like them at all.

This was the worst. Now he had to endure public humiliation and torture. Wasn’t this against his human rights or something? Probably not. He was just a kid. He didn’t have any human rights. He started writing I am a big fat liar in block letters as high as he could reach on tippy-toe. Scott knew Miss Moss did not like him. She had not liked him ever since she found out how big his house was, which was probably bigger than her house, because his father had some kind of job with the government that he was not supposed to talk about. His father went overseas a lot and would bring him things from all over the world and tell him stories about what was going on in other countries, about how other people didn’t have as much as people had here. His father told him about people going to prison or just