Wooden pews dig into his crooked spine, gospel digs into his soul. Daniel’s eyelids cannot shield him from the colored beams shining through stained glass. The glass in his lungs and blood have left him here and aching. I’m awake.

     Daniel lifts his 100-pound body —– practically a skin sack of brittle bones and under worked muscle that feels to weigh a ton —– up and into a sitting position. Before even being allowed to comprehend where he is and why, he feels a hefty book cradled beneath his left arm. He could recognize this smell of aged, waxy paper and damp wood anywhere: the smell of his childhood. A church. 

      Daniel doesn't remember much these days — much from these last few years would be more accurate. The last thing he can remember (often: the only thing he can remember) is the pool of nothing that he was sinking into, a peeling couch that’s long since lost whatever its original color may be and stabs with loose springs. Although tearing apart at the seams, it holds the weight of bad choices turned to crack pipe stories. It can fit about five slender bodies, huddled together in the second story of an abandoned apartment downtown. The rest sleep on the floor. It’s become Daniels’s home, but it does not belong to him. 

     His spinning mind thrusts him back into his current situation; he looks to his left, then his right, and finds nobody in sight except for the silhouettes in the stained glass windows colored by morning light. Although there isn’t a single moving mouth in the church aside from his own quivering jaw, a melodic ringing grows into a chorus that grows into a crescendo while Daniel holds back vomit. His benders had never landed him in a church before. Is this a bender? Is this even real? 

     The suffocating spiral of thoughts is interrupted by the grand stained glass figures in the windows, who begin to morph and take the forms of people he used to know. The moving glass figures step out from the window and greet each other, exactly the same as he remembered them, only built of light softened by translucent hues: gold, red, peach, blue. They file into the pews as if readying for their Sunday service, shuffling and chattering just as they did decades ago. Prim mothers adjust their daughter’s’ hair ribbons, and balding fathers chuckle while nudging one another with their elbows. C, children step on each other's shoes and pull each other's ponytails. Although now far from the windows, they glow with morning light that seemingly comes from nowhere. 

      Without warning, Jacob approaches Daniel's pew and sits himself to his left. He’s Daniel's brother, two years older than him, although he looked to still be nineteen. His glass hair, long and golden, somehow shifted and flowed, reflecting specks of iridescence onto Daniel’s skin. As children, Jacob often got moved to sit on the other side of his mother, away from Daniel. Jacob would make him crack up mid-service by whispering about all of the funny-looking people around them in the church. He pointed out a plump lady in baby blue, whose ankles popped out of her itty bitty high heels. He pointed out a little girl who held her Bible upside down. He pointed out a middle-aged aged man with big ears and wrinkles around his nose who would close his teary eyes and extend both arms into the air while singing along with the choir. Jacob’s imitation of the man’s gestures and singing made Daniel laugh so hard he had to be walked outside and given a stern talk by his mother. 

   Jacob reaches his hand out to Daniel, which feels like neither skin nor glass, only warmth. Daniel feels this warmth travel from his palm down his arm, through his chest until he is enveloped in a blanket of tranquility. He begins to close his eyes and drop his head, but is interrupted by Jacob’s voice, which cuts through the soft chorus buzzing from all directions.

“You can’t sleep yet. Mom is waiting for you.”

       Sure enough, Daniel feels a gentle hand on his right shoulder and turns to see his mother. Her glass cheeks and shoulders are cracked, allowing painfully bright light to slip through her skin. 

      “What happened?” asks Daniel.

      “Things just haven’t been the same since you left. It chipped away at me.” His mother responds, in a hushed voice.

   Daniel didn’t always live in the crack house downtown. He was seventeen when Jacob died. His mother, whose only pride was her two children that she raised on her own, fell apart. Daniel’s reaction wasn’t much better. In an effort to feel anything at all, he discovered the medicine cabinet. When the painkillers ran out, he met and fell in love with heroin. The way it would drain his body of cold and fill it back up with warmth. The way he would fall backwards, and concrete felt the same as a bed. His mother either didn’t notice, or was too empty to care. Her indifference made it easier for Daniel to leave, and his name eventually slipped away from everyone in town.

     “I’m sorry, Mom.”

    Daniel allows his muscles to give out and his eyelids to flutter shut. He feels his mother’s hand pull him down by his shoulder til his head falls on her lap, just as she would when he was a child. His mother would lay his head on her lap and stroke his blond hair that lit up her flowered dresses. The chorus sings a soft and lulling tune, and his mother’s warmth denies him the energy to take another breath.

     “It’s okay, you can go to sleep.   

STAINED GLASS

SABRINA LIPP ‘24 (STAINED GLASS)

"Stained Glass" is a fictional prose piece about a man's spiritual experience of overdosing in a church, following a bender. I was inspired to write about a surreal, tragic experience in the third person since that's something I tend to stray away from. My intention for this piece is to inflict a melancholic reaction as the story unfolds and to juxtapose whimsical imagery with a difficult subject.

Prose