Transubstantiation by Amy Barnes
If the body of Christ was made of communion wafers and not bones, he would have crumbled off the cross. His cracker bones would get soggy from cheap convenience store wine, the kind that gets the bishop and altar boys drunk because it has to be disposed of once they open the bottle. No one eats all the crackers though. They sit in the back room getting stale until they taste like styrofoam. If baby Jesus had played in communion wafer packing peanuts with his cracker bones and wine blood, there would have been a mess and no Savior. My dad has wine blood. It makes me closer to God, he says drinking out of a paper lunch sack. I touch his cheekbone when he’s sleeping on the couch in the den to see if it will cave in but it’s still sturdy, sadly. I smell Jesus blood in his snores and when he yells at me for waking him up. One Tuesday, he doesn’t. We scatter his bone crumbs with a prayer.
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Amy Barnes has words at FlashBack Fiction, X-RAY Lit, The Molotov Cocktail, Flash Frog, Janus Literary, Perhappened, Spartan Lit and others. She’s a Fractured Lit associate editor, Gone Lawn co-editor and reads for Narratively, CRAFT, and The MacGuffin. Her debut flash collection was published in June, 2021. A full length collection is forthcoming from word west in 2022. @amygcb