Imperfect Miracle

L Peters Thomas

Description

Nathan Gray has trouble making friends, his alcoholic father ran out on him, his mother is preoccupied with work and finding a new husband and his dog Chewy has just died. So perhaps it's not surprising that Nate comes to believe that his beloved Chewy has returned from the dead to once again be his best friend. His mother is alarmed, but the therapist predicts that Nate will grow out of his habit of "seeing things" once he comes to grips with his emotional traumas.But then, on his way to school, Nate stumbles upon what he can only describe as a miracle - a man seemingly healed of a fatal head wound by a smudge on an old, dingy concrete wall. Nate might be on to something that can't be attributed to his imagination, as many in his small industrial Pennsylvania town, quickly ascribe spiritual significance to the smudge, and healing powers too.Some of the town's leading citizens decide to capitalize on the sudden influx of tourists by turning the smudge into a shrine and charging admission. Not everybody is on board with the notion that the miraculous has somehow intruded into their mundane routine, and Nathan soon finds himself at the center of a raging controversy. AN IMPERFECT MIRACLE is a moving piece of literary fiction dealing with love, loss and one boy's attempts to find substance and clarity in a chaotic world.

Informations

• Publié par: Untreed Reads
• Date de parution: 25 juin 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611871241
• Langue: English

Extrait

An Imperfect Miracle
By Tom Peters

Copyright 2011 by Thomas L. Peters
Cover Copyright 2011 by Dara England and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
http://www.untreedreads.com

An Imperfect Miracle
By Tom Peters

Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16

Chapter 1
One morning not too long ago my dog, Chewy, got away from me and tore into an old abandoned lot right between Joe s novelty shop and the karate place. Mom used to go to the karate place for lessons after Dad said he couldn t take it anymore and ditched us. Mom said she needed to know how to defend herself, what with her and me living all alone in a grubby little town like ours. I didn t really see how she could have gotten any good at it since she never seemed to practice much, but I figured that was her problem.
There was no point calling after Chewy, because she loved sniffing around all the sewer drains down in that side of town, especially after it rained real hard like it did the night before, since they usually backed up a little. Plus, Chewy being invisible now and all, I didn t like talking to her out in public, since people might get the wrong idea, like Mom, for instance, and think I was crazy.
Because I was pretty sure Chewy could find her way to school easy enough without me, I was about to turn around when I saw this shriveled up little guy with raggedy gray whiskers and a muddy raincoat rise up on a dingy concrete slab sitting right in the middle of the lot. There were five concrete steps leading up to it, as if the slab used to be a porch or something, and the steps were all full of deep zigzag cracks with bushy plumes of crabgrass and dandelions growing out of them. All around the slab were shiny silver hamburger wrappers and dinged-up beer cans and rusted-out license plates and other garbage tangled up in the weeds that people must have dumped there, like the place had been turned into a trash heap almost.
The little guy was pretty wobbly, and it looked to me as if he d just been sleeping it off, like Dad used to do out on our front yard sometimes. After coughing and spitting some, which was kind of gross if you asked me, he let out a deep squealing groan and started swaying back and forth, like he was the sail on some ship that a brutal wind was whipping all around. I was wondering if I should go over and try to steady him, when all of a sudden he tumbled right down the steps and cracked his head wide open.
It wasn t clear to me if he d tried to kill himself or whether he was so drunk and groggy that he just toppled over. One thing was for sure, I d never seen so much blood in one place before. I remember thinking how much redder and brighter and thicker it looked than my blood whenever I banged myself up at school getting in fights or whatever and Mom had to patch me up, which she was pretty slick at, her being a nurse and all. What really shook me though was how the blood was sort of ponding up among the weeds beside his head before sinking into the wet ground. I expected him to die in a minute or two, if he wasn t dead already.
I thought about running for help, but the truth was that I was so scared I could hardly breathe. Then all of a sudden the guy stood up and rubbed his pasty forehead a little, before sort of hitching his way past me toward the street like nothing much had happened to him other than banging up his knees a little. He d stopped bleeding too, just like that, it seemed, and his cut was all closed up and there wasn t a mark on him, except for some brown veiny splotches on his cheeks, which seemed like they d been there a while.
I ran up to within a few feet of him to make sure I wasn t seeing things. I was even about to ask him what he d done to stop the bleeding, but he started cussing me out so loud and nasty that I decided I better let him go. Mom was always saying how you could never trust those drunks down along Main Street, especially early in the morning when they were still feeling under the weather, and being married to Dad for so long it seemed like she ought to know.
I was still wondering what was going on when I looked back and saw Chewy sitting up on the top step gawking at something. Even though Chewy was invisible now to everybody else I could still see her in my mind and hear her talking to me sometimes too, but I ll get to that soon enough. I ran toward the steps and found what Chewy was looking at. The woman s face was right there on the concrete wall between the top step and the porch. It was the only part that wasn t all cracked and weedy, and at first I thought she was just a big yellow and brown blotch. After all, you don t see somebody as famous as her showing up every day, especially on some grimy old block of concrete in a nothing little town like ours. But when I climbed up next to Chewy, I could see the woman staring at me as clear as if she was standing there talking to me. She had the kind of eyes that seemed to find you no matter where you were standing, like you see in advertisements sometimes.
Because I wasn t Catholic, you might be wondering how I knew it was her. Well, to begin with I was pretty smart, just like that doctor said who Mom had dragged me to after my English teacher, Mr. Grimes, caught me talking to Chewy out in the hall one day. I guess they thought I was seeing things. Of course, Dad had dumped us by then and my last few report cards hadn t been so hot either, which might have had something to do with how worked up Mom got. But the doctor told me that I just had a good, strong imagination for a kid my age, and that they were going to stick me in some special reading class at school to get my grades up. The only thing I didn t really like about that doctor was how he kept asking me if I had any friends, even though I d already told him that I had plenty of friends. And even if I didn t have all that many friends, I didn t see where it was any of his business.
The other reason I knew it was Mary s face on the concrete was because I walked past her statue every day on the way to school. She was standing there guarding the playground right outside St. Sebastian s, with her head pointed down a little and holding the baby Jesus in her plump, creamy arms. And she had this little yellow plastic halo set up over her head at the end of a skinny tin cord that was stuck to her back somewhere. Sometimes the halo would blow off and Father Tom had to climb up on an old rickety ladder and hook it back on. I even heard him grumble once that if it happened again he might just leave it off her for good because everybody knew that Mary didn t need some fake halo to be holy. But it had blown off a few times since then, and he d always ended up fastening it back on.
There was no halo on the concrete, but I still knew it was Mary, and not just because of her eyes either, which were big and round and looked kind of sad, just like on the statue. It was more the way her head was tilted down a little, and how her cheeks curled in toward her chin real smooth and soft, and the way her lips kind of melted together straight across, so that she wasn t smiling exactly but she wasn t frowning either. And her brown hair hugged her head real close all the way around just like on the statue so that you couldn t see her ears. I figured that she was probably looking down at the baby Jesus, even though Jesus wasn t on the concrete. There really wasn t enough room because her head took up almost the whole space from top to bottom.
I was admiring how pretty and sweet she was when all of a sudden I felt somebody standing right next to me, and it wasn t Chewy either. I could tell by the sticky, hovering sort of smell that it was some girl, and I turned my head and there was Marcie with that round mushroomy face of hers grinning at me out of her braces. She sometimes followed me around at recess and in the hallways too. It was kind of gross actually, but I wasn t sure how to get her to quit because Mom would have grounded me for the rest of my life if I ever got caught punching out a girl.
I was just about to tell Marcie to beat it. But then I started staring at Mary again and wondering why Mom couldn t always look so nice and peaceful too, when all of a sudden it hit me what must have happened. Mary had saved the little drunk s life by using her holy powers somehow to close up the bloody gash on his head and it was probably a miracle, like the preachers at my church were always talking about Jesus doing in the Bible. I d never heard them preach about Mary doing any miracles, but I figured that being Jesus s mom she probably knew how to go about it.
Just then Marcie decided to bend over for a closer look too.
What are you gawking at now? she snorted, a fountain of spit spraying out of her glossy red mouth. It s just a bunch of dirt after all.
A few drops sprinkled onto Mary s nose, and I was quick to rub it off with my fingers. The concrete felt so grainy and cold that it