Status: completed.
Not Even a Chapter
Verse 2
When Jack met Jill there wasn’t much of a hill. That came later. Everybody always thinks that they were always falling but that’s not true and they’re wrong; Jack and Jill didn’t find the hill until their sophomore year. By then it had grown colossally, big enough to steal Jack’s breath and make Jill subside her relentless puffing on cigarettes. Every day after school, after checking in with the missus, they went up the hill and entered the church.
It was an abandoned place; Jack secretly found it divine. He would run his fingers over Bibles reverently as she pressed a tobacco burn mark into their pages with a sneer. He would sit and stare up at the depictions of Jesus before she tore them down and slashed them to ribbons. He would trail his hands in holy water before she knocked it over. Sometimes he would even pray during her long, droning speeches about how grown-ups didn’t know anything.
Jill let herself resent Jack late at night when no one could tell she wanted to be the girl the teachers loved, the one her parents were proud of, the one with too many friends to keep track. She wanted to be pious and virtuous and good and set upon a pedestal so tall she couldn’t even see the ground, but that was Jack’s job and she was stuck breaking windows and cutting school and getting high. So in that respect she kept quiet and continued being the Bad Kid and he continued being the Good Kid and they continued going to separate mass in the same church every day.
It was an abandoned place; Jack secretly found it divine. He would run his fingers over Bibles reverently as she pressed a tobacco burn mark into their pages with a sneer. He would sit and stare up at the depictions of Jesus before she tore them down and slashed them to ribbons. He would trail his hands in holy water before she knocked it over. Sometimes he would even pray during her long, droning speeches about how grown-ups didn’t know anything.
Jill let herself resent Jack late at night when no one could tell she wanted to be the girl the teachers loved, the one her parents were proud of, the one with too many friends to keep track. She wanted to be pious and virtuous and good and set upon a pedestal so tall she couldn’t even see the ground, but that was Jack’s job and she was stuck breaking windows and cutting school and getting high. So in that respect she kept quiet and continued being the Bad Kid and he continued being the Good Kid and they continued going to separate mass in the same church every day.