I Used to Believe
by Maggie Hare
I thought they were rocks, but they’re turtles, moving slowly over one another to sun. Stretching out their gray necks. There’s a man behind me saying, “did you get one of these?” to passersby and holding out a pamphlet titled Are You a Good Person? He gave me one and tried to sit and talk me through it, but I said I was busy, end of the semester. I have twenty pages of my classmate’s writing to read in the next hour—the beginning of a novel where women feel closer to God when it rains. But when he leaves, I read the pamphlet. It’s a calculation of sins: One a day means five a week means 182,500 a year and God can’t let that slide. It’s to convince you how bad you are. I’m considering what to do with it. I want to shake it off. But more than that, I want to give it back, say, “I don’t want this,” and keep walking. I don’t know what that would do for me. I want to say, “Do you think this is going to do anything for anyone?”
The man moved farther behind me, but I still hear him. I think there is more than one man now, two at least, “Did you get one of these?” laughing with each other between attempts. Two of the turtles are facing me, so I can see beneath their necks where the scales are white. They all keep swaying their heads in the wind at the water’s edge. This is the point where I always say, “I used to believe—” but I don’t want to do that. I want to find the memory that’s caving my body in. Summer camp and I’m sixteen, night sounds outside, and inside fluorescents, and we’re all in our metal folding chairs while a retired-college-football-player-turned-evangelist patrols four empty seats at the front of the room, telling us how we all belong in one of them. The room smells like mildew and I’m clammy because I know after this we’ll have small groups and I have a secret sin I do and do not want to confess. He says the first chair doesn’t even know it needs God and it can find its way still, it doesn’t even know it’s a sinner yet, he loves this chair for its possibility. The second chair is trying and new. The second chair wants to give its all, but doesn’t yet know how, and it’s weak, but it isn’t the worst. The fourth chair is the chair after God’s own heart, it not only talks the talk, it walks the walk. But the third chair. He hates the third chair. The third chair says it loves God, but it doesn’t. It talks a big game, but its heart isn’t in it. He picks up the second chair, folds it, lifts it above his head and brings it down hard on the third. He smashes it repeatedly. Yelling. Spit flies from his mouth and he wipes it off. He’s hoarse, we’re crying. We keep crying in our small groups, confessing how bad we are, and I say my secret sin, which is that I masturbate. I confess it after someone says they have a lot of sex. I say, “Mine’s like yours but worse, I do it to myself.” One a day means five a week, God can’t let it slide.
“I was evangelized while I read this, can you believe?” I write at the top of my classmate’s work and start reading. I underline their sentence, “I realized that yes, there were boundaries, but no, you would not be killed if you crossed them.” Someone new comes up to me. “Sorry,” she says, “did you get one of these?” holding out the pamphlet. I stretch out my neck. “I’m okay,” I say, and she lets me be.
About the Author
Maggie Boyd Hare is an MFA candidate at UNCW where she works as a teaching assistant and as poetry editor for Ecotone. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford American, Hayden's Ferry Review, the Arkansas International, Juked and elsewhere.
