The Relic by Leonard Kress
Another end-of-the-year, backyard high school party in the suburbs. Of course, no one danced, though all movement seemed to be solemnized by a strobe as thick-rolled joints were passed around slowly and the keg in the ice-tub out back was tapped. My girlfriend, I mean my ex-girlfriend, had dumped me the week before, and though she was invited to this party, didn’t show up. I was half-heartedly expecting her—apologetic, deferential, and horny (for me). After an hour or so and with no sign of her or her friends, I decided it was time to arise from my slack, lovesick slumber, at least enough move in on the girl hosting the party. I tried several times, finally able to get her off to the side, hidden by the barely flaming fire pit. I was easily fended off, though, as she silently led me inside her house. I followed close behind, her fingers intertwined with mine and tugging ever so suggestively. However, instead of ending up in her bedroom where I was so eager to see if I could recreate what had been, I thought, a successful year of kissing and caressing, with my ex-girlfriend—but not really expecting the huge final prize. Though now that my ex no longer longed for any sort of touch from me, I wasn’t confident that this new girl, whose name I had already forgotten in the fog of drink and smoke, would think about me so generously. Alas, there was no bed, no draped body poised to receive me, nothing of the sort, but a neat carpeted and paneled den and her mother standing by a shelf holding nothing but a tiny gold box. She beckoned both of us over as she removed the etched glass lid. There, revealed, stretched between two tiny silver clips, was a single strand of translucent blond hair. “From Saint Theresa’s scalp,” she said, and pausing to allow any questions that might be forming in my mind to take shape, added, “But it’s not from the one you think it’s from.” I barely knew what a saint was and what little I did know came from my Catholic neighbors, each of the seven kids with Saints’ names, effectively giving them two birthdays. And fragments of arcane tales of torture and ecstasy that I mostly ignored, thinking it was all made up, a sort of serial horror story. “This relic,” the mother further explained, satisfied that I wasn’t overly disappointed that it was not from the superstar Theresa, “this relic is from the other Theresa, the Little Flower.”
Leonard Kress has published fiction, poetry, translations, non-fiction, in Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. Among his collections are The Orpheus Complex, Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He has grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Kress currently lives in Blackwood, NJ. (USA) and teaches at Temple University.
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