Trinity, God, & All the Rest

By Dwayne Alistair Thomas

Imagine, if you will, the lifetime (or lifetimes rather) of a soul.
The journeys it's traveled,
Histories it's experienced.
This is the story of one soul.
Live with it from present day to the ancient origins of Mesopotamia
& witness how we have always been one being
Throughout this whole moment of existence

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359115730

Book preview

Trinity, God, & All the Rest

TRINITY

GOD

& ALL THE REST

ISBN #: 978-0-359-11573-0

© m.s.w. prouductions 2018

CHAPTER 2

STEWART

The paternity test burned a hole in Stewart’s left jacket pocket

It cost $25.99. Cheaper than he expected

Traffic was heavy on Broad street going away from Temple. He needed to make a left on 16th to complete his journey home. His year 2000 model car chugged along peacefully, him having replaced it’s air box assembly in recent days. Years of use caused a tear to develop in the tubing.

The mechanic had equated the injury to a hole in one’s throat

A bicyclist to his left rapped on his window as he waited at a stoplight

do you know where the nearest liquor store is?

’bout eight blocks in the opposite direction

cheers

As he rolled his window back up Stewart, for some reason, remembered he had to buy a new pacifier before he got home. He could get that at another pharmacy on Chelten. Maybe he’ll pick up some candy as well. She’d like that

The pot holed roads bumped up the ride after he made his predetermined left coming to a rolling halt at a stop sign where a pigeon perched atop it looked at him in a peculiar way before it flapped off. As he released the brake the sky countered, releasing portly droplets that exploded upon impact on his windshield.

He suddenly remembered it was also Boxing Day in Canada

Stewart was glad that it was raining. It was always a sound his mother said would soothe him as he fussed & pooped as a newborn. Presently, the chaotically repetitive pit, patter, pat, pat, pitter eased the mild anxiety hovering just above his vagus nerve. It was a long day & even longer commute back home without the much thought of detour to the pharmacy before.

Another red light, another moment to think

Think about what he was doing about his life.

Recently, he’d stopped his belief of heaven or hell, focusing on the now instead of living for a future death occupied by angels or demons. The minor shift of thinking caused a ripple effect in all his subsequent decision making, causing him...

BLAAAAAARGGGGHHHHH...raged a vehicle’s horn behind him. He looked up at the green light above & jammed on the accelerator, lurching his car forward through the slick streets

Like Stewart, other people on the sidewalk were bustling home. Some with umbrellas, some with plastic bags covering their heads & others with damp, useless newspapers trying to do the same. He noticed one gentleman wearing a hoodie but with the hood down exposing his shock of bright blonde hair, walking calmly through the rat race around him. The torrential downpour not fazing him in the slightest A deluge of water rushed down an intersection ahead; a water main break in a rainstorm

Classic thought Stewart.

Neither law enforcement nor any other representatives of the municipality had arrived to bring any order to the resulting confusion, leaving natives with nothing to do but lean on their various car horns as they slowly negotiated a path around and or through the flood. Stewart, passing an opportune parking space, slid his car into the spot, cut off his engine, deciding to wait and not engage in the madness for a spell.

It was moments like this where he realized he didn’t sit still enough during his daily day to day. He took four random deep breaths, appreciating each one more & more. He felt it was nice to sit in the rain and not get wet. Reclining his seat to a comfortable position, he closed his eyes & treated himself to a mini dream where he shot across the sky as a rocket propelled Golden Eagle watching the earth blur beneath him with his sharp Eagle eyes. When he dreamed he was a bird he was always an Eagle. In his younger days he was also an Eagle scout, but that probably had nothing to do with it. The first time he had seen an honest to God real life Eagle was in the hot afternoon skies over Northern Carolina on a road trip with his family back in the day. It’s wings were broad and majestic as it casually hunted for it’s next prey. Stewart, even at that young age, related so much to that.

Absent-mindedly, his thumb thumped out a melodic beat against his left pocket. The rhythm reminding him how he got here. Four weeks had passed since he accidentally got into a heated disagreement with his fiancée while they were at his fraternity brother’s wedding near Pittsburgh, got her open bar drunk, left her passed out in their hotel room, went back downstairs and proceeded to waylay irresponsibly into the Maid of Honor in the dimmed lonely darkness of the vacated President’s Ball room that had (a few hours before) been the location of a very raucous well fed and well danced hell of a wedding reception. As a result of being tanked by vodka and various spirits he didn’t remember much about the encounter, just her smell. During the act he had inhaled her scent deeply, absorbing the small molecules of her essence, making her forever part of him.

As the rain let up outside as did the traffic along with it. Stewart fired up the old engine, pulled out to resume his journey. It was only a few moments more before he was making a left down his street. Fredrich Rolfsson’s house illuminated the entire block. Over the years his Christmas lighting designs had grown more spectacular. One year he even treated the neighborhood to a Saint Patty’s Day Showcase; a glorious wave of L.E.D’d leprechauns n’ shamrocks frolicking about his front lawn. Stewart enjoyed other people’s decorative lights but hated putting up his own...so he didn’t. Hadn’t for the last 3 years or so. It wasn’t so much that he hated putting them up, but he truly detested making all that effort just to take them down a few weeks later. If it were socially acceptable to leave his lights up all year ‘round he would. Maybe he cared too much about what people thought of him. Because, most likely, they didn’t...at all.

All in all the neighborhood was quite wonderful. He remembers how it was almost stepping in the splashed diarrheic deposit of human excrement between his car and another’s on his way home that finally motivated him to move his family from the ‘hood to a better style of life

He left blinker’d himself into his driveway, activated the garage door opener then jammed on his brakes viciously to avoid running over a one eared raccoon sitting in the middle of his garage. The two sat there staring at each other, the car’s headlights reflecting off the dark pools of the raccoon’s eyes. It finished munching on a piece of cornbread Stewart didn’t notice it was holding before sauntering away into the night to do whatever brazen raccoon’s do. Stewart exhaled his foot off the brake & the car eased the rest of the way into the garage on it’s own inertia. He shut off the engine & gathered his stuff, did a once around the garage, carefully looking underneath his car, making sure the unsuspected rodent wasn’t still lurking about

Is a raccoon a rodent? He wondered. Whatever

Fishing around some wayward dinner mints & lint in his pocket he retrieved his keys, jangled the backdoor key out then remembered...

Fuck, I forgot the pacifier

He forgot the candy as well, but he hadn’t remembered that he forgot that yet.

The pacifier was more important. His fiancée & he had been looking all over for the last one to no avail. The wailing had gotten so bad that he resorted to giving his son a just used chicken bone to suck on

Don’t judge. An inconsolable baby will make you do anything to quiet it

He was having a hard time accepting fatherhood (making the thought of another illegitimate child that much more horrifying) & had been yearning for the solitary days of yore before he discovered that bareback sex was the best sex ever. But the kid was here & he very well couldn’t kill it...so there it was.

Tiny cylinders fell into place within the locking mechanism, opening the backdoor. Stewart instinctively stepped over the galoshes his fiancée insisted on kicking off right in front of the doorway. She said she left them there so she wouldn’t forget them, an argument Stewart wanted no part of. He had a hair trigger for such things but had learned to keep it at bay having burned many a bridge with his rage; missed opportunities buried in the ashes

Stella?

No answer

Which means she & baby were out. Where they’d go in this weather who knows, & he didn’t care. With them both gone it meant that he would have at least a few moments peace.

He took off his coat, hung it in the hallway closet knowing the paternity test was still safely tucked away in his pocket. Stella was too blessedly self involved to go searching around in his things. It’s one of the main reasons he fell in...well, not love...but more accurately...can you fall in ‘like’ with someone? If you can, then...yeah, there it was.

His shoes came off & also went into the closet (where they belonged) before he made his way to the just re-done kitchen. Stella didn’t cook enough to warrant a new kitchen but she wanted one before the holidays and that was that. Not like he paid for it. A vacuum gust whooshed out as Stewart opened the new space aged refrigerator. He retrieved from it’s interior some baloney, mayo, honey maple horseradish mustard, & potato bread, putting everything on the also new surprisingly ridiculously expensive black marble countertop. Stella despised baloney, which is why he bought it. He hated coming home hungry for something specific that he had bought, only to discover that his healthy appetite having fiancée had consumed it all

Now all the baloney was his...yay

Engagement & fatherhood was a peculiar new aspect for him. Some days Stewart was so into the whole wild nonsense of it all that it staggered him. Others, he just wanted it all to go away. Blame it on him being born under the fickle twins

Something dropped, rolled & hit a wall upstairs

Stella?

Only silence answered

An automatic instinct to investigate was over-ruled by hunger for a baloney, mayo, honey maple horseradish mustard, and romaine lettuce on potato bread sandwich that he took his sweet time in making.

It was when he finished spreading the mustard on one side of the bread that the upstairs floorboard creaked

Okay Stewart thought to himself. Stella’s probably playing games But there was a skoach of uncertainty in that thought as he wondered how she managed to keep the baby quiet. His boy got more energetic as the moon dawned.

After taking a healthy bite of his sandwich he made his way upstairs. About halfway up he felt the temperature around him drop dramatically, his breath crisping in the air

Stella?

He promised himself he wouldn’t call her name again. She wasn’t one to not answer repeated calls nor was she deaf. It was the slowly creeping fear in the upper regions of his chest causing the unnecessary pleas. The sound of his own voice gave him comfort.

The final step upstairs groaned his arrival. Their bedroom door at the end of the hallway was slightly ajar. He took careful, calculated steps towards it, his wool socks muffling his footfalls. Armed with his now twice bitten sam’mich, he opened the door cautiously

Stella?

As he broke his promise he felt Heaven’s divine retribution crash against the base of his neck.

RAQUEL SINGER ROSS

Raquel awoke with a spiderweb of dried snot under her left nostril, her face sticking on the glass of the bus window

She hated sleeping on flights and was dog tired before she boarded, so she was catching up on it now cause