Sacrament by Mark Wagenaar
2020 Writing Contest Winner
HONOURABLE MENTION
At the author’s request, the full text of this story will not be published online. Instead, please enjoy the following excerpt.
It was only a half-second gap—a tenth—in attention, but it was enough. Mauricio had poured the rest of the sleep medicine into a shot glass, then caught sight of his face in the mirror. He ran a hand lightly across the stitches in his eyebrow, and wondered if his son Aldemar would look like this in thirty years—broke, tired, scar tissue around his eyes. He turned and his trailing hand knocked the shot glass into the sink. Oh my god. He stared at the purple liquid shot across the sink, then swiped a finger through the liquid and jammed it into his mouth, did it again, a third time, then grabbed his toothbrush and swabbed his tongue with all he scrape from the sink. It wouldn’t be enough, he knew. He weaved a path through the boxes in his room at the halfway house. Four bucks in his wallet, not counting the twenty he’d lay on the pool table at Terrible’s tomorrow. A new bottle was seven. Breaking curfew—it just wasn’t worse than not sleeping.
Denton, Texas, two-something in the morning. A low-slung red Miata prowling an otherwise empty street. Three blocks to the CVS. Four guys spilled out the door of the margarita place.
Oh hey Rocky, one said, when he caught sight of Mauricio’s face. He bobbed and weaved until he was a foot away, then toppled over on to the sidewalk. His friends burst out hooting and laughing, and moved to pick him up. Mauricio hurried on—the prosecutor had knocked the aggravated off the assault beef when Aldemar, all of seven years old, walked proudly into the courtroom in front of his mother Violet, Mauricio’s ex-wife. It was, he realized, one of the best moments in his life. Didn’t matter much, now, what happened—he’d be going back if anything happened, no matter who was at fault.
He rubbed his knuckles as he walked in to the pharmacy. Just last week that hand had cupped a little water and brought it to Aldemar’s mouth to rinse after he brushed, an ark of twenty-seven bones. He wondered how often they checked their cameras. There was the aisle, just in sight of the pharmacy counter—not quite five years since he’d vaulted it, knocked down the pharmacist and stuffed his backpack with whatever he could grab. He turned down the aisle, chose a bottle, twisted off the cap drank a third of it, and put it back on the shelf. He could probably chase it with melatonin and some chamomile, but maybe that was pushing his luck.
Slept, finally around four. Made it to the carwash with five minutes to spare, chicken from the restaurant rolled up in a napkin in his pocket. The jobs were everything, he reminded himself. The jobs meant visitation.
Mark Wagenaar is the author of three award-winning poetry collections, including the Saltman Prize-winning Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining, from Red Hen Press. His fiction and poetry appear widely, including in the New Yorker, Tin House, the Southern Review, Gulf Coast, the Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, and River Styx, among many others. A former winner of the CBC Poetry Prize, he grew up in Grimsby, Ontario, and played soccer for the Hamilton Thunder, Durham Storm, and London City, in the CPSL. He is an assistant professor at Valparaiso University, a father of two, and the husband of poet Chelsea Wagenaar.