A priest to no god

Thirteen steps to the kitchen: five forward, three backward, six forward, two backward, one forward. But that was only when he thought about Sarah dying, which was nearly every morning. Otherwise, Dean’s coffee was just seven steps away. 

The teaspoon only ricocheted off the inside of the mug once, producing a single concussive sound, which was never enough to stop his son’s school bus from skidding on black ice and flipping on its back as it collided with a speeding Mack Truck.

Three clinks. He needed to hear three clinks. But they couldn’t be forced, either. A single tap should allow the sugar to fall from the spoon, and the displaced weight should propel his wrist like a pendulum, ringing in the subsequent twin chimes.

He had four teaspoons of sugar this morning. He preferred his coffee with one, but the bus needed to arrive safely before he could put on his jacket.

“Good luck with the pitch.” Sarah kissed his cheek before grabbing her purse and swallowing a handful of vitamins as she ran out the door.

How does she do that without water? 

She was choking. In his mind…she was choking. And those vitamins weren’t FDA-approved. They could cause cancer for all he knew. Sarah was choking to death during chemo. A scene that played out in his theater-of-one thousands of times before. He was eternally bound by the shackles of relentless thoughts, watching rehearsals for a show he never wanted to see. Praying for release.

But he couldn’t ask her to change her routine. He always concealed his obsessions, though his compulsions were hard to ignore—making him late to work and awkward at parties. But Sarah loved him anyway. 

And he couldn’t imagine his life without her. 

So, he slid his fingertips along the groove of the backsplash while quietly counting to seventeen. It used to be seven, but she had a particularly bad headache one day last year, and he’d lost ten more seconds of his life every morning since.

“Stop one ritual for one day,” the experts say. “See what happens. See that everything will be okay.”

But what if it wasn’t? What if one more clink could save his son from an unending coma? What if one more step keeps his wife from being stabbed at the supermarket? What if three perfectly aligned pencils could prevent a catastrophic stroke? How could he live with himself? He was sealing his family’s fate with thirty-two flicks of a light switch. A small price to pay for peace of mind. How could he risk changing anything? Things needed to stay the way they were. Always. These ceremonies, these observances, mattered. They were—

—where was his wallet? 

Right. In the dining room. Where his world was ending. 

Five steps forward, three backward, six forward, two backward, one forward. 

He sacrificed his time to a second cup of undrinkable coffee.

A priest to no god. A suppliant to a strange faith.

He was late for work again.