The Man from the Wall

“I’m all fucked up in the head and no-one understands,” he grumbled as he climbed from his truck, “And someone has to pay — and I don’t care who.”

Drowning in a violent madness, Manly Davis breached the locked front door of the Catholic Church by kicking it in, jus’ as he had learned to do while serving with the Marines in Iraq.  Rifle in hand, he found above the alter, what it was he sought.

The life-sized man, hanging from the cross, his blood feet, hands and side, reflecting through the stain glass windows. Davis stood there, looking up, transfixed on the gaunt figure he once worshiped.

“Come down here and face me like a man, you bastard!” he screamed at the man stuck upon the wall.

When Davis got no response, he raised his rifle and fired, the round piercing the carving’s plaster chest. Amid the white chalky dust, the burnt gunpowder and the resounding echo, he dropped to his knees, crying so hard that he couldn’t catch his breathe.

As he lay curled in a fetal position, gasping and sputtering for air, at the foot of the alter, he saw bare blood-smeared foot. Before Davis could raise up to see who it belonged too, the foot moved away and was replaced by a pair of knees.

Then Davis felt himself raising up to face what he found to be a man, the man that had been on the cross above him, the one whom he’d jus’ shot, hearing these word, “I forgive you, my brother and I have your six. Remember that I love you and always will.”

A weight lifted from his heaving shoulders and he slumped heavily to the ground and fell into a deep, catatonic sleep. It was the first real slumber Davis had experienced since returning stateside.

When he next woke, he was in the psychiatric wing of the local Veterans Administration hospital.  While a confusion overwhelmed him, the peace Manly Davis finally felt, never again left.