Sunday Service

The priest is mixing metaphors and droning on, too many ums, 
too little edgy truth that stops the brain from wandering,
from noticing that the tag is sticking up from a woman's baby blue linen suit,
and the man who notices wonders what it would be like to gently push
it down and feel the faint perspiration on her neck because this is Florida,
still too warm for a suit. She's visiting from the north, packed the wrong clothes. 
At home, September's chilly, not as chilly as what she faces across the dinner table,
but getting brisk. She should have asked her mother, checked online.
She doesn't know she's being scrutinized by a man three pews away.
If she did, if someone simply mentioned that the suit brings out the color of her eyes,
she would burst into tears and not even know why.
Every woman is as beautiful as some man thinks she is -- as a girl, she read
that in a book and only remembers it just now, suddenly. She listens to the priest,
thinking that perhaps he'd said it, but no, he's stuck in Leviticus, um, or Deuteronomy.
Something makes her turn her head, but the man three pews away has gotten a jab
from his wife and is paying attention to the sermon now.
Halfway through the almost imperceptible shifting in her seat, 
the woman from the north in the blue linen suit
spots a young girl doodling on her bulletin. Bored, made to be there, she fails
to see the point of dressing up to please a God who loves us as we are.
She hates dressing up in pastel perfection, she's made for blue jeans and t-shirts,
for climbing and planting and spending perfect Sundays at the beach. Someone
clears his throat in the choir loft and it makes her look up, catching the eye of
a woman who isn't beautiful, but only because no one has bothered to tell her,
that she is. A man, anyway. For just a second, not even that, rebel girl and yankee woman 
lock eyes, discerning everything, every detail. The woman winks. The girl grins back.
They'll both remember, for the rest of their lives, this Sunday morning but not remember why.
And heaven smiles while the priest drones on.


(c) Ellen Gillette, 2012