Not-Daniel by Deesha Philyaw, 2018
The magic trick:
Possibly scandalous behavior turned beautiful, or even necessary
Another gem from Deesha Philyaw’s excellent The Secret Lives Of Church Ladies collection. This one grabs your attention with its shocking juxtaposition – death and sex. Two strangers are at the hospital tending to ailing mothers. They have taken to escaping the stress and grief by spending some quality time together in her car in the hospital parking lot. It probably will strike the reader as surprising if not scandalous behavior. But as you sit with it and the story moves along, you come to see that these seeming extremes – sex and death – have a lot more in common than it may have first appeared.
And that’s quite a trick on Philyaw’s part.
The selection:
What do you call it when that someone else wears a wedding band but never mentions his wife by name? A wife and two kids back home in the next state over. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
At exactly ten-thirty, Not-Daniel tapped the passenger-side window. For a few moments, we sat in silence the way we always did at first. Sometimes I would cry, sometimes he would too, because we could come out here, beyond the reach of our mothers’ Jesus, nurses on autopilot, empty platitudes, and garbage theology about God’s will disguised as comfort. And then eventually, one of us would speak.
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