By Brett Biebel

On our second date, Mike took me to his church. The building looked abandoned. It was between the Bomgaar’s and the bowling alley, and on the way inside he told me this wasn’t a permanent spot, that they met somewhere different every week. The preacher, who everyone called Lightning or Lightning Bug, would announce the next location at the end of each service. They didn’t use email. Sometimes, somebody would volunteer to hand out flyers. “The idea is to keep it small,” Mike said, “Keep it chosen.” And word would spread through flaming tongues or the grace of the Holy Spirit.“

Like the early Christians,” I said, and he looked at me like I was some kind of genius, or maybe like I was from outer space.

The sermon was about agriculture. We could see plants and seed bags and rusted pickups out the window. Lightning Bug said he’d just read an article about erosion, and the author guessed that, in places like Iowa and Nebraska, we had maybe only 80 or 100 harvests left. After that it would be starvation and pain and complete, food system collapse. He said he stayed up real late, and if you wanted a picture of what it might be like, all you had to do was think about them commercials for UNICEF or the Red Cross or whatever it was, and there would be a lot of rib cages and a lot of flies, and no one would have the energy to swat them away.

I looked around. People had their eyes closed. Some of them were nodding a little, and it was hard to tell if they’d fallen asleep. Lightning said he didn’t know what to make of the article, except he kept thinking about pride, which was really arrogance, which we all knew was a deadly sin. He said maybe the author was arrogant. After all, the ways of God are a mystery, and the signs you’re reading may not be meant for you. Then again, if the author was right, then we were arrogant. We’d spent the last hundred years wasting His gifts. Mike shouted at that. Everyone else seemed to agree. Then, Lightning Bug said there was only one lesson to draw, and it was about the future and our utter lack of control. He said comeuppance was in the air. Comeuppance was real. Comeuppance was coming, and we were all sinners, and every last sinner would get his justified due.

Brett Biebel teaches writing and literature at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chautauqua, The Minnesota Review, Great River Review, and elsewhere.