6-Church

Church

Las Vegas, Nevada

Christ’s Day Church was two blocks off the strip.

He had taken the podium four years ago, when the founder of the establishment had succumbed to schrosis. He had originally been hired to assist with music for the weddings. Although, he didn’t think of himself as a preacher, he had had to become ordained as one to keep this business alive, and back then it had been a lucrative business performing weddings.

So Chuck Handly became a preacher.

Like his predecessor he was a hard drinker. He had his first seizure last fall, and now he had the first signs of alcohol related dementia. Between that and the general generic madness that seeped into ones pours when living in this town he was no longer dealing from a full deck, as they say. He had been a bigger fan of L Ron Hubbard than of Jesus. But Tolkien was really the catalyst. His pickled brain was blurring the lines between reality and his real life. If diagnosis had been available he might have been declared insane.

He picked up a battered copy of The Two Towers. The songs in the prose read more like Psalms, and to him that was what they had become.

He topped his coffee mug with the generic vodka he was fond of. The power had been shut off two months ago because he didn’t pay the bill, and the closed building was like being inside a foundry when the liquid metal was pouring.

He thumbed to one of the poems and began to read aloud to the church, empty except for the two grey rats that scavenged lazily between the pews.