Reading Time: 3 Mins
“I don’t know why the gods have chosen to speak through me,” Wally Boylen said to the reporter with a slight hiccup, thanks to the 10 a.m. gin and tonics he’d convinced himself he deserved. “I don’t even pray.”
But the signs were hard to refute; Wally knew things.
He knew things people swore they’d only ever said in prayer, intimate details of their lives, their hopes, their dreams. Some said, as a former astronaut, it was because he had touched heaven.
Wally himself felt it had more to do with the booze than anything.
The crowd outside his apartment was getting restless. They filled the street below, waiting for him to appear at his window ahead of the solar eclipse that afternoon.
“Tell us the Word,” they all chanted.
“What are you telling them today?” the reporter asked.
Wally took a swig from the gin bottle. “I dunno, let’s find out.” he said.
He opened his window to thunderous applause from his devoted followers. He shook his head, unblurred his eyes and saw a girl with a scarf and knew her mother’s illness would be cured.
“You there,” he said, pointing at her. “Your mother will be cured if she stays the course on her treatment.”
The woman wept.
“What about me?” a man, a foreigner in the dress of the far islands, called out. “Do the gods care enough to talk to you about me?”
Wally swallowed hard enough for the reporter to hear. He hated being called out.
“The gods have only told me about this woman’s mother,” he said to the foreigner. “But do pray tonight and come back to me tomorrow.”
“I do not pray to your gods,” the man said.
Wally stepped back from the window as if struck. His eyes went blurry, not uncommon for the amount he had had to drink already but this also usually meant a new message from the gods. The reporter scribbled.
“All are welcome in our community,” he announced.
“Our community is one whose light shines so bright that no shadow is cast and I have received a message just now for you.”
His words were slurring together. The crowd was silent.
“The gods are egalitarian,” Wally said. “My time is finished. Tonight, you will hear them; the next receiver.”
The people turned to the foreigner and asked him where he lived, interested for the first time.
Written daily using the #vss365 word prompts on twitter, compiled weekly into a story of exactly 400 words.
#pray #astronaut #eclipse #thunderous #foreigner #community #egalitarian