"Little Bridget and The Flames of Hell"...a story
"It climbed up the cape, and Bridget bit her lower lip, anguished by this appearance of hell in the Virgin’s clothing."
The Holy Virgin Mary hovered above Little Bridget Kelly’s soul like a lace-embroidered moon. She smiled and extended a hand, bringing it down upon the girl’s head. The fingers were diaphanous and imagined, weightless with kindness. Bridget, who that day had had her tenth birthday, lay in bed, the covers all the way up to the top of her head. She had prayed and prayed for it, and now here She was! The Virgin Mary!
This Virgin looked just like the painting at Mission Dolores, the one on the side altar, of the Virgin of Guadalupe. So, Her light blue cape was stiff and stuck out to the sides, making a kind of halo all around Her body. Its interior was encrusted with gold and jewels, and the crown that Mother Mary wore, like a round fence of gold spikes on her head, made Her look like a queen in a storybook. But that’s what She is! Bridget thought, recalling Sister Justine’s prayer just that morning at school, to Our Lady Mary, Queen of Heaven.
“Please bless Bridget today on her birthday, Holy Mother,” the nun had said, her Irish-accented voice rolling across the sentiments she expressed. “Grant that our class doughnut sale next Friday be a success, too. And help our lovely city of San Francisco get through this year without another earthquake.”
There had been an earthquake a few weeks earlier, almost fifty years to the day after the famous one of 1906, in the morning while the children were in school. It was Sister Justine’s first, who had arrived some months before from Ireland. The children, accustomed to the earth when it quivered, had had to calm the poor nun down. Gripping her desk as the floor spasmed beneath her, she believed that this was the Day of Judgement, and shouted it out. The children knew better, and succeeded in making her understand after a while that this was just a little one, Sister. Really! Just a little earthquake. We have lots of them, Sister.
Sister Justine was nice to Bridget, making sure that the little girl got her homework done early on Tuesdays so that she could go to her ballet class at Madame Rousselot’s Dance Studio after school. Bridget’s mother picked her up each Tuesday and they raced to the class, which was all the way across town in Pacific Heights. Bridget constantly talked about her dance classes, and Sister Justine wanted to make sure that she got her arithmetic done so that she could go. Arithmetic was always a bother for Bridget. She could do it, but she didn’t like it. Arithmetic was a drag.
She liked to draw, and of course to dance. She liked reading as well. But the thing she liked most was to yearn for the Virgin Mary to appear. She recited the prayers at the beginning of each school day, the Hail Marys and Our Fathers, with messianic intensity. Most of the girls did this, and some of the boys, too. But as far as Bridget could tell, no saint or member of the Trinity had ever appeared to any of them. Not God. Not Kevin of Glendalough, after whom the school was named. Not even Father Keller, the old parish priest who had died the previous Christmas, and to whom all the nuns recommended that the children pray. Not many of them actually prayed to Father Keller, who had been a portly, snarling man who rang the bell in the boys’ playground at the end of each recess as though he were hitting somebody over the head with it. The children didn’t pray to him because they were afraid he’d actually appear.
Bridget wanted a vision, like the little girl in the movie that the school had gone to see a few weeks before, The Song of Bernadette. Little Bridget visited in Lourdes by the floating Virgin, all grace and beauty.
And now, as she placed her folded hands between her knees and prayed, lying on her side beneath the toasty-warm comfortable sheets, Bridget became electrified by the vision before her. Her soul raced. But she suddenly began to worry that the Virgin Mary, who’d just gotten here, would turn right around and disappear. She wasn’t saying anything at the moment. She was just looking out from the clouds, Her hands extended in a gesture of ecstatic acceptance or, Bridget noticed, as though she were about to sing. But what kind of song? Bridget wondered. She thought of her own favorite, “Great Balls of Fire”. Gosh, she thought, Jerry Lee Lewis! Would the Virgin Mary sing “Great Balls of Fire”?
Bridget was shaken by doubt. What’ll I do, she asked herself, if the Virgin Mary won’t let me see Bernadette? What if She’s like Benny and just tells me to go away?
Benny was Bridget’s brother and nice too, even though he carried a baseball glove around all day and didn’t like to read. He had this habit of telling Bridget to go away. He was twelve, and Bridget thought he was just the prettiest thing she had ever seen. She wanted to spend as much time with Benny as she could, and that was the problem. Benny’s friends were always telling him that his sister was a drag and couldn’t he get rid of her? Benny resisted them. He seemed to like Bridget as much as she liked him. He had even had to fight for her a few years earlier, when a bully at school, a ten-year-old twirp named Barry Malatesta, whose left eye seemed to circle like an airplane looking for a place to land, had made her eat a jar of peanut butter. Benny had lost that fight, quickly, and come home crying. Bridget, waiting for him—for her triumphant brother—had had to help her mother stop the blood running from his lower lip. Bridget’s fingers had ended up covered with it.
But the one thing now that she wanted was to be like Bernadette. Can’t I just be like her? Bridget asked, her heart aching with the wish. She imagined thousands of people coming to the holy grotto in her father’s workshop below the house and leaving their crutches and wheelchairs hanging from the falling-down wooden fence that separated their driveway from Mrs. Torquemada’s next door. (There was no grotto, actually. But Bridget thought it’d be nice to have one. Maybe a statue of the Virgin next to her father’s buzzsaw, framed by a big seashell or something, with Saint Peter’s fish carrying Her over the iron-grey waves.)
She hoped that Bernadette had at least looked like her. Bridget was a small girl with soft, light skin that Sister Justine always complimented, and very large eyes. She resembled her father, whose photo she had in her room on her dresser. It was a hand-tinted picture of Sedge Kelly in a shirt and loosened tie, a cigarette in his left hand. Her father looked like some kind of movie star, his heavy-lidded eyes so exotic in their intense beauty. Bridget’s eyes were the same, and her mother had once broken into tears as she had described for her daughter the way she had fallen in love with her father’s eyes. . . “They were just so lovely, Sweetheart. They were so dark. . . they seemed so ready to cry,” she had said.
Bridget’s father was dead now, drowned as a suicide the year before off the Golden Gate, at the age of forty-three. It was he who had started calling her Little Bridget when she had been a baby. She loved the name.
The Virgin began to fade. Bridget redoubled her efforts, the whispers of her prayers rising up into the darkness like small commas of light. She lay still, afraid that if she moved or stirred the sheets in some way that the Virgin would suddenly evaporate, leaving Bridget alone in the close hold of her blankets like some kind of scrabbling crustacean lost at night, convulsed in the mud.
The light around Mary was quite sugary, the colors of Her cape like orange and raspberry sherbet. There emanated from Her the same kind of light as that of the fluorescent bulbs in Bridget’s father’s workshop. It was ice-blue, like the moon when it cast itself across the bay, causing a broadening glow across the black water. That black water frightened Bridget whenever she saw it. Her father had loved to go view the bay from the Golden Gate when the moon was full. Bridget and Benny in their pajamas in the back seat of their ‘53 Mercury, Bridget with her arms around her father’s neck as he and her mother looked out on the bay and the moon. She liked that. She liked the light. But she always wondered what kinds of bugs and fish and stuff swam around down there at night, trying to get away from the moon.
Could she ever swim with them down there in the dark, with all those scales and mollusks, terrified, the seaweed caressing her face? She had been unable to put such thoughts aside during the visits her family had made to the bridge on full-moon nights. So, the bridge had almost been ruined for Bridget, every time. But only almost. Because in the end Bridget had known that her father would come down to get her. He would push aside the clammy weed and sodden salt-moss in the dark waters to carry her up to the light. . . the moon like a lace curtain on the water charged with light. Up through the pulpy black water, past the floating debris of dead fish and dead birds sinking down, the swirling dark sand and dark sand creatures, up toward the crinkly glow of the moon scattered over the surface.
Just now, though, Mary’s glow put all that aside. She pulsed in the distance, coming back more intensely. She still did not speak, and Bridget, holding the edges of her blankets up around her chin, felt that she dare not move, even though the dazzle of the Virgin’s appearance was electrifying her. But now she was even more afraid that the Virgin would disappear. Especially when a small lick of flame trembled about the hem of Mary’s cape.
It climbed up the cape, and Bridget bit her lower lip, anguished by this appearance of hell in the Virgin’s clothing. The flames raced quickly up the gold-threaded dress, up the blue cape toward the Virgin’s face. They were gold flames, brocaded with moiling yellow-red light. The Virgin became engulfed, and Her arms fought against the flames until shards of bright ash floated from Her body. The conflagration wrapped itself about Her like infernal feathers twisting from foot to head. Bridget could hear the sizzling of the Virgin’s soul.
Like her father’s soul, suffering the anguish he had caused it by killing himself.
Bridget brought her knees up close to her chest and folded her arms before her. Her heart pounded in her ears.
“Oh, Daddy.”
It raced one moment and stopped the next. She began crying, unable to do anything to save the Virgin Mother when, suddenly, the flames were doused in a great surge of dark water, the red glow of them still bright in the flow of it. Mother Mary was caught up in black, mud-laced seaweed. She appeared to be drowning. Bridget swirled about with Her, trying to swim to Her. But She cried out in silence to Bridget, imploring her to swim away, that everything was all right. That She’d been saved. And then She disappeared, leaving Bridget alone in the grey swelling sea.
Crying. Drowning.
The light to which Bridget awoke the next morning speckled the lace curtains before her bedroom window. She peeped from beneath the blankets. Her room was the same as it had been the evening before. The photograph of her father remained on the dresser. The tinted green shirt and red-pink of the loosened tie had the same brightness as the light that had surrounded the Virgin in her dream. Her father’s cigarette remained, as always burned down to half its original length. But the coal at the end of it, also tinted red-gold, appeared to pulse with fire, briefly, until the fire disappeared and the cigarette became simply a photographed cigarette once more.
Her father’s eyes surveyed Bridget, glowing like soft black sand.
Bridget shivered a moment, and fresh sunlight engulfed the curtain. She shielded her eyes. She worried that she might have been lost forever in flames, had it not been for her father’s mortal tears.
© 2012 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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The collection, Little Bridget and The Flames of Hell, is available in print and digital versions.
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