Short Story (Fiction): Damascus

Damascus

by Veronica McDonald

I once had a dog named Damascus. I don’t know for sure why Dad named him Damascus. I especially didn’t know when I was a five-year-old, squawking kid who was constantly picking his nose and sometimes eating what he finds (you can’t trust what that kid knows, trust me). But now that I’m older and all and educated by some standard—at least thirteen years more educated than that pathetic kid—I would guess that Dad named him Damascus on account of his “road to Damascus” experience. Dad’s experience, not the dog’s.

I guess Dad was some kind of brilliant atheist once, before he fell for my pure-as-vanilla Christian mother and had some kind of religious “awakening;” Some radical, open-your-blind-eyes kind of thing. Except when he explained it to me, it didn’t sound all that radical. Not like the way it happened to Paul the Apostle, where a blinding light of God Almighty tells you point-blank He exists and, now that you know…you know…go do something important with that information. Naw, not at all like that. The way he tells it, he fell head over heels for this Christian girl, even though he thought all Christians were dumb. And when he took her out to dinner he had a whole spiel ready about how the cosmos were all there is and ever was and ever would be. But she looked so calm, so happy, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. And while his guard was down, she said something to him so simple—too simple really—that I didn’t believe it when he told me.

“Johnny Boy,” Dad said (he’s always calling me “Johnny Boy” even though no one else does, not even my sweet-as-dollop-cream Christian mother). “Johnny Boy,” he said. “During dinner, that cross around her neck burned my eyeballs like a hot coal. And I kept thinking the whole time, why am I here? What am I doing with this die-hard Christian girl? That wasn’t me, Johnny. It wasn’t me, ever.” Then my dad rubbed his eyes like he could still feel her little gold cross on them. “And I said to her, over a plate of noodles and marinara and the candles lighting up her face like an angel in that dim, dingy place, I said ‘Why do you wear that?’ And I tilted my head at it like a monkey. I couldn’t get any more words out, she was just so goddamn beautiful right there and then.” Dad couldn’t look at me when he said this part. He was lost in it, seeing my Christian mother like she was then, all brown hair and big eyes and bright white teeth. So lost in it, he let himself say “goddamn” when other times he wouldn’t dare. “And you know what she did, Johnny? She laughed at me. Not a mean laugh that some girls do that’ll make you shrink into your belly wanting to disappear. No, it was a giggle. Happy and light. And she told me… she told me…”

And this is where I swore. I was sixteen then, and I liked to swear, and most times Dad let me get away with it, wanting me to discover who I was or find my own way through mistakes, or some other parent-philosophy junk. At least sometimes. Other times he’d clench his fists and walk into his bedroom, close the door, and I could hear him mumbling in there, probably praying for me, for about an hour sometimes more, and then come out with a straight, calm face that said I was grounded for a week.

“Jesus!” I said then. “Spit it out! What did she say!” Dad looked at me then, not angry-like, though I’d broken that vision he was seeing in his eyes, but like he wanted to do something with me. Like send me away to special Bible boot-camp until I turned 21. The words “Bible camp” were on his lips, I could tell, but he shook them away and the sappy smile came back.

“She told me… ‘because I love Jesus.’ And I would’ve left, would’ve walked out right then and left her there, but she looked at me with those big brown eyes and everything around her shone like the sun, like heaven itself descended on her like a dove. She became a miracle right in front of my eyes, Johnny, and I tell you, I told myself right then that I’ll never look back. I never have.” His eyes started to get all watery. “I decided then that something good had to create that woman. That she couldn’t have just happened, spurted into being by the random workings of this universe. Something good and loving and pure made her.” He whispered that last part, talking more to his hands than to me.

Anyway, that was it. His “road to Damascus” moment. After that, he says everything became different. He was different. That his mind was clear as crystal after living in a fog his whole life.

But anyway, the dog. He named the damn dog Damascus, and he was a present to my bright-as-light Christian mother; An ugly, brown, puppy mutt with hair missing in patches that Dad found on the way home from work, looked like from a trashcan. And my Christian mother loved him like he was the most adorable thing she’d ever seen. Then she promptly died a year later, leaving Dad and me with the ugliest, stupidest dog in town, and a dead Christian mother to boot. On that hospital bed, saying her goodbyes, she told my six-year-old self to take care of that damn dog like it meant something, and I cried like a baby and had to be carried out a sobbing, old baby mess by one of the nurses. And I grabbed hold of that ugly dog like he was a piece of her and I guess that’s how she remembers me in her supposed heaven with other dead things and dead dreams and dead lives that never amounted to much more than late night stories between a lonely, old man and his son.

Photo Credit: “Man and his faithful friend” by Helena Emery