1.

I have to believe it was not Mama’s intention that I should die this slow death. That the most sacred parts of me – the holy bleeding best of me – be forsaken here on Earth. 

Like her own pious mother in a world long ago, Mama is a God-fearing woman. If I were a more compassionate son, more steady in care and devotion, I would venture that what she longed for, in her deepest heart of hearts, was my pure and eternal salvation.  

For me to wind my way eventually into the loving arms of the Lord. 

Yet here I am – cast outside the world – putrid and dead at the core.  

All my young sweetness rotted to filth. 

2.

You will learn to be a worthy son of God, Elder Mike said. 

Handsome, gregarious Elder Mike. The rugged sort of man who spends a great deal of time outdoors. He wore upon his face a grey, fluffy beard, trim and neatly manicured.  

Behind his black-framed glasses: what I hoped were caring eyes.  

But I would not put my faith in their blue.  

I would not admire their beauty.  

Do you want to make yourself whole? he asked, that morning in the draughty gymnasium as we sat together captive on creaky fold-out chairs: twelve teenaged boys, sleepy specimens of future manhood arranged in military rows. 

We swallowed our sugary spit, shuffled rank-smelling feet. Observed like works of art profane motes of dust swirling through the air. Noted pinkish chewing gum hardened to rigor mortis along the edges of the scuffed linoleum.  

What do you say, men?  

Eventually – for what choice did we have – we nodded our sinful heads. I caught the eye of a boy somewhere near my age: tall and vaguely blond, pink-cheeked and robust. 

He held my gaze for a heartbeat too long, and then he looked away. 

3.

I had not known about wet dreams. That’s how sheltered my boyhood had been. In school, where teachers lectured us about ever-changing bodies and biological morphing and the mechanics of reproduction, my own physical being was absent from the proceedings because my parents staunchly agreed that questions of the flesh were best explained by the Good Book. 

You will know when you have sinned, Father said. You will know it in your heart. God will know it too. He will know your wicked ways. 

Do you understand? 

I pictured God’s great gaze like a sonic MRI, scanning the grey insides of my brain. Noting with laser-like precision the filthy yearning of my dreams. The strange and random couplings, the shameful midnight epiphanies. 

Yes, Father, I said.  

Yes, I understand.  

And so when I awoke that first morning, having conjured through the night the memory of a comrade from my class, a muscular boy named Elijah – Elijah’s lips and Elijah’s jaw and Elijah’s feverish fingers on my thigh, everything Elijah, pressing down like deliverance into my darkest secret core, and I woke in the bed alarmed and peered under the sheets and found the sticky residue oozing there – I knew that evil had marked me.  

That the scowling sins of the flesh, a world of privation and longing, was now my cross to bear. 

It’s for your own good, Mama said, watching me pack my things. 

Father waited impatiently outside, at the front of the truck. 

It’s only because we love you.  

4.

My name is Gideon R—. Three weeks ago, after discovering me with Elijah in my father’s dusty shed, both of us shirtless and sweaty behind the John Deere ride-on, my parents had me banished to The Trumpets of Salvation.  

They allege it’s a kind of camp, though inquiring eyes will find no cabin for arts and crafts, no state-of-the-art equine therapy, not a single rowdy singalong around a blustery campfire. No goofing around on docks or fart-noise boyish pranks. Only locks on doors. Only logs of rules, waivers for parental absolution. Only maniacal staff – all fervently male – built like wild stallions. And a slew of commandments everywhere: where to look and how to speak and how to daily abstain and the proper way to act and dream in every last situation. 

I am seventeen years old. A lost boy. 

A Pisces and a dreamer and a mediocre bass player. 

This is my story. 

 5.

How do we handle daily the cruel aloneness of the soul?  

How do we abide our eternal brokenness?  

In Circle, Elder Mike instructs us how to take the floor like men.  

Circle is where we are encouraged to re-enact our spiritual trespasses. To speak aloud in hushed voices the dark and plentiful ways we have transgressed God’s unwritten code, naming the twisted and shameful paths of our desires. Hovering above us, Elder Mike in slim-fit jeans offers up on squeaky hardwood the barely pent-up rage of every male, a loaded threat in every step, before Elders Mark and Stephen mimic this sad charade of masculinity.  

‘Shoulders square, chest forward. Jaw forward, always. Legs and core low to the earth. Keep your backsides stiff. Move like warriors, men. Take up your God-given space.’ 

I watch Elder Stephen, barely a few years older. His freshly shaven cheeks shine with the glow of the convert. There’s a rumour among the boys that beneath his linen button-up lies a tattoo of a flying dragon, red and breathing fire. But all I can observe from where I wait in my chair is the self-satisfied flame in his eyes.  

In every revolution, in every bloody war, it’s the newly converted who torture with the fiercest conviction. It’s the freshly inspired who kill with the least amount of remorse.  

‘Now you’ll take your turns.’ 

So, in front of our fellow soldiers, we march, a deeply pathetic spectacle. Jeremy with his slinky waddle, Derek a shuffling disaster, Jamal all knobby knees, too light in blue-socked feet. 

When it’s my turn, I try to show them how it’s really no big deal. Simply a studied performance. I pad across the floor, a lion in a sideshow, the stutter of God in my ear.  

Elder Mike nods his approval. I think I catch him watching me. 

When I return to the muted safety of my peers, I am met with a pantheon of stares: jealousy, desire, envy, despair.  

Only momentarily do I regret the small half-hearted victory of my accomplishment.  

6.

There are rituals at the compound we’re meant to perform daily. Morning calisthenics. Heaving a weighted medicine ball to build up arms and chests. Laps around the perimeter of the chilly fenced-in yard, praising Christ the King along the way. Push-ups and squats, sit-ups and planks, as if we’re training for the Marines. All these tasks we carry out while ridiculing the lowest hombre on the ladder. In the swollen name of manhood, we are encouraged to shame and offend. Some of us take this to heart, aiming for the jugular, tripping weaker guys and whispering the utmost savagery under our breaths. Ass-licker. Cocksucker. The rest of us keep our eyes trained to the frostbitten ground, wait for the unending hours to expire. 

Leo, my roommate, twenty pounds too heavy and cursed with rancorous breath, struggles in the sun, pukes up a chunky stream of scrambled eggs. 

Elder Joseph berates him. ‘Don’t be soft! Keep it going, men. God has no place in His Kingdom for weak-kneed sissies.’ 

Poor Leo cowers in the weeds. 

‘Are you a sissy? Are you?’ Elder Peter hollers while Leo covers his face. ‘Get your fat ass up, Barnaby.’ 

In the narrow room, later, I tell Leo not to worry.  

Leo has curly hair. He’s a prolific blusher. Plays the trombone. In another life, we’d be bandmates. 

‘Just try to get through it…Who cares if you can’t run laps?’ 

Leo eyes me viciously. Like I’m a rogue double agent. 

‘Easy for you to say, Rambo.’  

Then he turns his bruised ego to the wall. In the silence, I hear him whimper. In my heart, I want to console him, rescue him from the world, caress his heaving shoulder like a brother.  

But contact with other boys is strictly forbidden.  

There are cameras in every room. 

 7.

There are whispers of the boys who never made it out alive. Boys who couldn’t hack it, who hung themselves in showers, who cut themselves with razors, blood like holy water pooling on spotlessly tiled floors. Boys beaten to nothing by the Elders. Boys whose scars festered so long underground they were carried away on stretchers and never seen again. 

Did you hear about Isiah? Did you hear about Pedro? 

Leo and I murmur every night. We wonder what will become of us, who in the world cares for us anymore. And although I am not a believer, I pray for the ones who were lost.  

Pray for the benevolent power to heal and resurrect.  

But I am just a child. A solitary lost boy. 

Just one lonely light, in a dark and starless night. 

8.

Sometimes I still touch myself. In the dark, of course, for self-abuse is outlawed, though most nights I can’t help it. Any life worth living is built on shameful release. I hold my breath, hand poised beneath the sheet while Leo does the same, though we pretend to be asleep. Just before I lose myself, I try to think of God. How my sins are being remembered, just as Father prophesized: tallied up, hoarded, too many here to mention. 

At such times what blooms inside me is an overbearing emptiness. A kaleidoscopic desperation, the universe exploding in frozen slow motion inside me.  

Do you know what it feels like to be abandoned by the world?  

To be cast outside the Circle, for simply desiring love? 

Despite the endorphin rush flooding my sleep-addled brain, the explosion I feel at the end is no more than a drink from a poisoned chalice.  

As if the world has turned upon itself, strip-mining its own perfection.  

When I was a kid in church, every feckless Sunday I’d peer up at the dusty rafters and imagine a renegade angel standing perpetual guard, welcoming me and celebrating me like some bad religious drag queen. 

Trembling in the chilly auditorium, awaiting my turn, I will admit that I am fallen, if to fall means to be alive. Ready with my performance, ready to reveal to all the Elders the long unholy archive of my past. 

They demand the pungent details: where, when, how long, with whom. 

I know it gives them pleasure. 

Still, I crave their tough forgiveness. To be scoured insolubly clean.  

I await the decisive moment, the line between who I am and who I shall become.  

The reassurance that I am chosen.  

Like the moment I conjure in sleep Elijah’s painful eyes – my lips upon his chest, decoding with my tongue all the powerful secrets of his heart. 

9.

Part of me has expired here, adrift among the elms.  

I can feel it in my blood, a dangerous lack of oxygen.  

In the cold, I lie on my bunk and despise who I’ve become. Pinned like a giant insect against a bed of stone, spilling luminescence, beady human eyes cataloguing my every move.  

Meanwhile Elijah swims inside me. He bursts from my veins like salvation. 

It would be easy to end it all. To surrender to the mystery. To complete this single life cycle, like the ghosts of the boys before me.  

But I won’t let the Elders claim victory. 

I won’t become a number. 

I see you, I whisper to the missing, holding their beautiful eyes. 

I vow each painful night to avenge their faithless honour. 

10.

We have submitted to the Elders. And one by one we have been broken.  

Once we brimmed with life, searching the endless universe for other pinpricks of light. 

Now we have been desecrated. Now we are among the chosen, sculpted into silence. We spin through the cold world inside these dim museums of flesh. Numb with the future, dumb with our privilege, emptied of all life and irrevocably tied to the Earth. 

So, it should come as no surprise that after excising my sins in front of Leo and the Elders and the vanquished eyes of my peers, I retreat to the creaky safety of my chair. While Elders Mike and Joseph welcome me into the Machiavellian vortex of manhood, I nod and bide my time. 

Bless the Lord Jesus, for Gideon is among the healed. 

Briefly Elder Mike lays a hand upon me. I feel his animal heat, all the empty places inside him. Whispering false gratitude, I smile, wait for the sting of his touch to fully dissolve. 

It will take time, I see, for the moment of my triumph, but the plot is mostly clear.  

Reformed, I will return like a good dog to Father’s generous acreage. For my eighteenth birthday, in a few weeks’ time, he will gift me the sleek rifle he has promised over the years. Decked out in camos and hunting gear, I will borrow his truck for a weekend trip to the woods. Seeing me on his porch, gruff and severe, he will praise the Christ our King for my salvation. How every drop of softness has been extinguished from my core. 

I’ll ride the long highway for a couple of lonely hours. Traversing endless prairie, savouring the silence. When I arrive at the compound, I won’t whisper any prayer but will turn my eyes to the horizon, absorbing its perfect blue. Only then – like Father and his father before, like the Elders in other incarnations – will I kick down the heavy door of my darkest fear.  

It may not be for a month, or for a whole unending year, but I will return to the Trumpets of Salvation. And there, genuflecting before the sun, I’ll hoist my holy rifle and stare down its steely barrel into the eyes of Elder Mike.  

Breathing soft – like an animal – I’ll do what I have to do.  

What I was put on this Earth to do. 

Slowly making my amends.  

Slowly leaving my own mark.  

And proving to the world – once and for all, to this cruel and impossible world – that I have, at long last, become a man. 

2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist