George E-Book

Siobhan Nash-Marshall

• Herausgeber: WS
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 130

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

George is the protagonist of a fable telling the story of the ancient figure of St. George and the Dragon, set in a world of COVID, lockdowns and radical societal developments of the 21st century. The story unfolds as a search for the essence of reality.

Leseprobe

Praise for

GEORGE

“A great little book that confronts the dark dragons that oppress us in these times”

—Antonia Arslan

“a fascinating contemporary St. George, who . . . fights against the devious dragon that today threatens all of us.”

—Archbishop Anoushavan Tanielian, Prelate of the Eastern Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America.

“Siobhan Nash-Marshall has written a . . . beautiful story about a man who discovers, as if by accident, what life is really all about. But there never are just “accidents” in life. There are moments when meaning and truth simply show up and overwhelm us. The result is true peace through the experience of love and the understanding that reality has a meaning that permits us to make sense of our lives.”

—Fr. Gerald E. Murray, Pastor, Church of the Holy Family, New York, NY

“Siobhan Nash-Marshall reminds me of C. S. Lewis. . . . Like Lewis, she uses old stories to teach timeless truths in a new way. With the eye of the true philosopher, she shows that the distance between what is and what I want can be wider than the abyss that separates heaven from hell. . . . This is storytelling at its most depth-delvingly profound.”

—Joseph Pearce

“This little book captures what happens to people who live in unreality, they become sub-human and are more like animals. George is a seeker and one who remembers well. He is happiest when he is in the presence of beautiful music or the real love of a good family. These experiences are reality. He has to make choices.”

—Mary Ellen Bork

GEORGE

GEORGE

Siobhan Nash-Marshall

A Crossroad Book

The Crossroad Publishing Company

New York

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.CrossroadPublishing.com

© 2022 by Siobhan Nash-Marshall

Crossroad, Herder & Herder, and the crossed C logo/colophon are registered trademarks of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be copied, scanned, reproduced in any way, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company. For permission, please write to [email protected].

Cover and text design by Tim Holtz

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 9780824596095 (trade paperback)

ISBN 9780824596101 (EPUB)

Books published by The Crossroad Publishing Company may be purchased at special quantity discount rates for classes and institutional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

Printed in the United States of America

To the Little Ones

an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up!’ he said. ‘Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the Child to kill Him.’ (Matthew 2:13)

1

It was not that he didn’t love the house. He knew it. He knew the quirky wiring and inlaid floors, the hidden faucets, where the walls had been sheetrocked, where the old air conditioners had once been. There were times when he would stop and breathe in its proportions: the enameled steel doorframes, the open doors, the staircase, the high ceilings. He would gaze at the darker rooms opening behind the doors on the other side of the hall, at the outlines of the books in the tall, tall shelves, at the shape of the carob wood desk on the left, at the long wing of the piano. Something would stir in him when he did, some unknown yet recognized yearning, that same breathtaking yearning that he had felt when they used to drive through those long tunnels on the highway what felt like an eternity ago: the certainty that there was something beyond, and that he was making for it.

He didn’t see the cracks in the wall, or the chips in the floor, when he absorbed the house: the bubbled paint on the column in the library, the rust on the storm windows, the stains over the doorway, the hundreds and hundreds of little things that stood out like smudged lipstick on a statue. He saw the house and why he had come to know her secrets: the love of her builders, their hidden aspirations, their joy. He knew why he could spend hours and hours sanding and puttying the floors, while everyone else watched whatever was playing on the Screen. How could you let a grand old lady trip, or allow for her underwear to show?

“George!” a voice ripped through the rooms, as he was stretching to spackle a corner of the dining room ceiling that was nearly beyond his reach. “George?” It was his sister Eleonore, who – he was sure – was on one of the sofas in the library, with another of their sisters, Heather, close by. George put his putty knife in the bin, wiped his hands, and looked down. The worst thing to do was to make a sudden move. He had made that mistake before and plummeted, knocking the wind out of himself. “Easy does it,” he said out loud, knowing that no one would hear him, and started down the ladder.

He knew what they wanted. Smiling, he made his way through the Yellow Room, turned left, then right, and continued on through the small foyer that led to the kitchen. He flipped the light switch next to the kitchen door frame, more out of habit than real need. It was not close to being dark out yet. He hadn’t even turned on the light in the dining room.

The curtain was swaying, and a pigeon was perched on the sill. The purplish, greyish, greenish markings on its neck mesmerized him. Who knew that pigeons could be beautiful?

They were hungry, and probably thirsty, he knew. And dinner was still hours away. But he had put aside some snacks – leftovers, really, from last night’s delivery. He knew his siblings, his parents, and their rhythms.

He never served everything that arrived at 7 p.m. in those anonymous grey boxes that had an address and numbers stamped on them: 311 Prospect Street, 7, 8, 2025 (2), 2045 (3), 2050 (2), 2055 (1). He would carefully store at least half of the meals in the old refrigerator (that he had discovered still worked) in the pantry: sides with sides, on the upper left-hand side of the fridge; entrees with entrees, on the bottom shelf; desserts on the middle shelf. He stored the drinks in the official refrigerator, the one in the kitchen. The dry foods he kept in the cupboards.

It had taken him some time to understand how to store the meals. The delivery people demanded that you return all of the tins that they had brought the day before. In the early days of the new normal, he had tried to keep a couple of them: they were exactly the right size for mixing spackle and putty. But when the delivery people had looked inside the grey box that he had handed them in the enclosed porch at the house’s front entrance, the box with the big bold letters STORE TINS AND FOLDED BOXES FOR COLLECTION HERE stamped on it, they saw that there were only 22 tins. “Where are the remaining two?” they had asked through the microphones embedded in their hazmat suits. And with a smile – that he knew no one could see through his mask – George had said, “I must have left them in the kitchen. Why don’t I grab the boxes that you have and get the tins back to you tomorrow with today’s batch?”

“We will wait,” the hazmats had replied, “Just close the door behind you when you go back in.” And that, George had understood, was an ultimatum: missing tins, no food. He complied. It made no sense to take a stand.

It took some thinking – and rummaging through the old kitchen cabinets and attic – but he had found a way. He didn’t want his family eating all of the food: the entire portions allotted for their breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. It was too much food, too much bad food. – Were they trying to gorge them all? – And he found a way to fix the “bad” part too, some, at least. Pots and pans, salt and black pepper did wonders for broccoli and tofu. The worst of it he just flushed down the toilet.

Searching through the “sides” that he stored in the Tupperware containers with yellow tops – old relics from the days when plastic was still being made and used – George found some broccoli that had been delivered the night before. He pulled out a pot, poured them in, added salt, and went to the “cooking” section of the kitchen.

There was no gas in the stove, of course, and no one had electric cooktops (they taxed the electric grid, or so the new normal had it). But he had discovered that if you re-pipe the water from the radiators you could generate decent heat. All you had to do was add a loop from the feed to the radiator, that is if your grandfather too had loved fixing things and had never thrown out a useful cylinder, coil, plumbing tape, or tool.

He placed four plates on one tray, and three on another as he let the “stove” heat the broccoli. He added glasses, forks, knives, and napkins. He was calculating that Helena and Brad were also with Eleonore. They hardly much moved anymore. Sam, he knew, was with his parents in the Green Room. His mother would never let her firstborn – her ‘Sammie’ – out of her sight for long. They too would be hungry, and thirsty.

He pulled two bottles of water out of the kitchen fridge: one for each tray. He had to move quickly. It was still cold out, and the “stove” was working well. With practiced motions, George turned, grabbed some bread from the old red and white checkered box in the cabinet, and laid a slice on each plate. He turned, headed towards the open window, reached for a towel hanging on the wall next to the radiator, took out the tongs, and clutched the pot with the broccoli. It was hot. Circling back, he went to the trays and laid broccoli stalks on each slice of bread. He poured a bit of “sauce” on each portion, put the empty pot in the sink, filled it with water, took the mask that he had hung on a nail by the sink, and wondered where he should bring the first tray.

It was his constant quandary. Seeing his sisters and brothers sprawled on the couches, watching the images flicker on the Screen was torture. How could Brad, who had thrown the meanest fastball when they were kids on the baseball team, who used once to grip seams all day to strengthen his fingers, have become so soft? And Helena with clean hands? Where were her sculptures? And Heather’s jokes? Her daring to say what no one else dared to think? Her lightning flash jabs were as dried out as Helena’s clay. He hadn’t heard a laugh in months and months.

But seeing his parents and Sam was almost worse. Their dull looks at the Green Room Screen made him ask himself if his memories of his father playing the piano or hitting a baseball, and of his mother canning tomatoes or sewing a dress, were just dreams. Had there ever been a time when there was music in the air, the smell of fresh food, and light streaming through the open windows? Was the tire swing on the old oak tree really still there? And the cherry trees? The swing set? The gravel, the linden trees, the grill, the roasting pit, the bread oven, the fields and fields of vines?

As he took off his sweater and put on his mask, he decided that he would face his parents first. There was nothing worse than the “Why are you wearing a mask, George? We’re not infected, you know!” ritual.

2

Gearge made his way through the rooms with the smaller tray, shivering a bit. The open windows made the big rooms cold. How much smoke would there be this time? he wondered. The smoke. That’s what really scared him: the steady stream coming out of the Green Room. It slithered while it was near the floor, and untangled in whisps and tendrils as it rose up towards the ceiling. It almost looked hungry, like it wanted him too.

He could already hear the voices coming out of the screen:

“It was a .33, shot at close range, and the shooter was left-handed, ” a male voice sentenced. “There is residue on the neck. See?”

“It was clearly a racially motivated crime, ” a female voice chimed in. “The victim has to have belonged to some racial minority. ”

“Clearly, ” the male voice assented. “We should study our charts when we get back to the station. ”

“Did you get the new ones?”

George nearly tripped as he made his way past the dusty sofas in the hall. It was a big chip in the floor, and

he had almost wedged his left foot in it. “Idiot,” he told himself. “Pay attention.”

“George, is that you?” he heard his mother call out over the screen voices.

“Yes,” he said with a smile, firmly believing that they could feel the smile through his voice. “I’m on my way with a surprise for you and Dad. Figured you would be peckish around this time.”

There was no response. Only the drone of the screen.

“The victim cannot have been White Caucasian, ” the female voice solemnly intoned.

“Of course not, ” the male voice gravely assented.

“There is surely some explanation for this mystery. ”

The voices were properly weighty. George knew that there would be no sound of another real human voice until his mother noticed the mask.

He walked quietly down the hall and turned right. There they were: his mother, with her Sammie’s head on her lap; Sam with a beard, looking like he had spent decades in a drunken stupor; his father, with his grey pants unzipped, his shoes unlaced, and feet resting on the coffee table. “Dad?” George asked, as he walked in, “Dad? Can you move your feet? I’ve brought you something to nibble on.”

“George!” his father said, getting up and reaching for the zipper on his pants, “let me help you with that.” George’s heart skipped, as it always did when his father actually sounded like his father. There was hope, he thought.

As his father reached out for the tray, his mother exclaimed, “Is that a mask you’re wearing, George? Why are you wearing a mask? We’re not infected, you know!” And the glimmer of movement in his father just died. He slumped back on the sofa like a mechanical toy whose battery had fallen out.

“You know me, Mom,” George said with a chipper voice as he laid the tray on the coffee table, “I’m always mixing paints and things. Can’t be too careful with chemicals and powders. Am doing the dining room ceiling. Have the ladders out, and pails. You should come and see.” “That’s a good boy,” his mother purred, as she stroked her Sammie’s head “but you’ve got to rest sometime. Why don’t you eat with us? What have you brought?” “Broccoli,” George said, “on bread.”