Or this, perhaps: “Please, Dear Lord, grant me another day with Michael so that I can thrust myself into him over and over again.”
No, prayer delivered honestly would not have worked, she figured.
Instead, Emma had pushed through the week on the fumes of hope fueled by her hunger – hope that he would return, or that he really wasn’t gone at all and that she was in an extended dream. But as one day turned into another, she had felt herself changing with the passing of time. Her yearning for Michael had mounted as the minutes of his absence piled up.
Emma had said few words to her parents during the week, and she abandoned bedtime prayers to focus on keeping the memory of Michael as vivid and fresh as possible.
When she kneeled bedside at night, she had clasped her hands, brought them to her face, closed her eyes and imagined it was Michael near her nose. She had reached for his scent, and begged for his blood-filled veins to pump against her.
By replaying their barn experience over and over in her mind, she had hoped to etch it so deeply that it would be there forever, and she could revisit it again and again, circling her hand around her throbbing pussy thinking of Michael all the while.
Emma had managed to survive the week, until the moment she could not control arrived; the moment that left her facing such a difficult decision now, the one where she reached for the serpent and the serpent lashed back as if it were merely a reflection from a mirror.
Strike!
Emma knew her demanding lust for Michael was not hidden from God, just as she knew her unwillingness to repent was not hidden. She could not deny it to herself, and she did not try denying it to God.
She did not want to repent. She wanted to bathe in the badness.
But now, on the sanctuary floor, Emma’s lust is no longer a secret between she and God, or anybody else for that matter. It is sprawled before her father, her mother, and the only people she knows in the world besides Michael, as she fights to breathe and keep her consciousness on the sanctuary’s plank floor.
Surrounded by the voices, hands, footsteps and prayers echoing through the sanctuary, Emma faces a dilemma – one that she has only an instant to resolve. Emma’s hazy mind calculates by measuring the heightened, anxious cries of her doting mother that she has little time left to make a decision. Otherwise, she will be gone, just like that -- like Uncle Billy and others who carelessly propped the promise of salvation against the hollow wall of gratification.
Emma assesses she has three options.
One) to have any chance at God’s hand in healing from the rattlesnake poison taking her life, she must repent of her sinful lust immediately and walk away from it for good, even though that means expunging her clung-to memory of Michael and the barn. She recalls Luke 13:3 as light for this path: “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way.”
Two) she can avoid repent and pray selfishly for life alone instead, though she’s sure she will die within the hour if she chooses such a path. The serpent has already made its move, she figures, by striking her, so a prayer for life without redemption holds little promise. It would only allow her to go down with a fight for what she wanted – Michael, or at least, the ability to take the memory of Michael with her.
Or, three) if she’s unwilling to repent but also wants a chance at life so she can see Michael again, she figures there is one possible option. Emma assumes that instead of repent she can embrace her lust, pleading for life in the darkness of sin.
She recalls her father explaining before that those who refuse to reject their sin, those who refuse to repent and bask in the forgiveness of God, are walking instead hand in hand with the Devil himself.
A sinner is one thing, her father said often.
The unrepentant sinner is another, he reminded his flock. If they continue to walk the earth, they walk in a fiery sludge the same as death.
“But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death,” her father often cited from Revelations 12:8.
Emma does not want to repent because she has never felt so alive as she did with Michael. And Emma does not want to die without seeing Michael again. She wants to live.
She wants to live another day to lick the musky droplets from Michael’s neck.
She wants to live another day to wrap her legs around his. She wants to live another day to feel him passionately penetrate her, thrashing responses to her demands.
If she turns to God, in repent, she will be in the hands of her father. If she pleads for life without repent she will be free – from Earth, from her father, but also from Michael.