The Bells, by Richard Holinger

In the few years our family went to the Methodist church in our hometown an hour plus change outside Chicago, I liked best the bells played by women who left their pews for the choir loft. They silently collected and lined up in front of two tables where different sized and weighted bells waited for them, two apiece. We don’t go anymore. The pastor whom we liked fought the anti-LGBTQ crowd and lost. He left town and died soon thereafter. I stopped tithing, and then we stopped going. Truth be told, we joined for our children to give them a Christian foundation they could later take or leave. I suppose overhearing my wife and me talk, they both eventually gave up any pretence to faith. One night in the bathtub, my son, wearing an inflatable duck on his head, said, ‘I don’t get this God thing, Mom.’ He’s now over thirty, more atheist than I, who entertains occasionally the prospect, or maybe the hope, that something greater than anything I can conceive of knows I’m here. It’s on mornings like this one that I ruminate on such existential possibilities, when a dawn’s rare southern breeze shakes shrivelled cinnamon leaves clinging to a March sycamore like the ringing of tiny bells tinkling Onward Christian Soldiers or Little Town of Bethlehem, their soft rustle as sweet a tune as heard in any church. I listen, enthralled, with the faith in miracles that may move me to tears. 

Richard Holinger’s books include Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences, humorous essays, and North of Crivitz, poetry of the rural Upper Midwest. His prose and verse have appeared in Southern Review, Witness, ACM, Cimarron Review, Boulevard and garnered four Pushcart Prize nominations. Not Everybody’s Nice won the 2012 Split Oak Press Flash Prose Contest, and his Thread essay was designated a Notable in Best American Essays, 2018. Degrees include a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from UIC. Holinger lives west of Chicago far enough to see woods and foxes out his desk window.