The Passion of the Spleen

The nun with the broad shoulders and hypochondriac dwarf rocked back and forth on their bar stools.   "I can't stand the silence" the nun sighed- "it's not really the silence but the noise in the silence, the gap between words".   With that thought she took a drag from her spliff as the dwarf rubbed vascaline on his lips thinking about herpes.
 
It was only a few weeks before that sister Theresa was preparing to take her sacred oath of devotion to the lord our god, Jesus and the ghost who makes them a whole.   But then the world came crashing around her and her she was sitting on a bar stool getting stoned in preparation for more dreams about Johnny Depp and his high cheekbones.
 
It all happened on the way to the church.   Her nerves were killing her and the pounding in her heart was increasing to a steady drum.   One of the altar boys suggested a detour to take her mind of the divine marriage.   They stopped at a bar and had three shots of whiskey; the altar boys tender age never came into question, it was one of those small inbred Irish towns in Wexford were anything goes.   After leaving the bar Theresa ranted and raved.   She couldn't endure the silence, and the doubts echoing in each word she could not say.   She had been waiting for a holy calling all her life but now it seemed that God would never come.   He was just a crazed mind reader, a biblical pervert dissecting her thoughts.   She could not breathe.
 
The altar boy, Fred, sensing her anxiety held her hand tenderly -"I may be only twelve, but I know a lot about women, I hear my sisters, howling at night, yelling down phones and sobbing into bowls of ice-cream as a guy in a leather jacket zooms across the TV screen.   There is one way you can know for certain if God really is the one for you".   In saying this he slowly drew something from his jacket, it was a DVD, Don Juan to be exact.
 
Theresa had always been a good girl, she never noticed the tightness of boys bums or obsessed about strong arms and V shaped backs- poetry and music were her passion.   She couldn't even conceive of letting a man touch her virgin breasts, or press clammy wine stained lips against her neck- she was sweet like that.   Most of her friends thought she was asexual, though some believed she just hadn't found the one.   She knew it had to mean more than that; she had a spiritual calling.
 
-The movie screen flicked on-
 
Johnny Depp enters in costume, bent on his own destruction.
 
Her heart flutters but does not miss a beat- just another cute boy repeating scripted lines to an audience of teenage girls.  
 
-But then the love story begins-
 
Music plays in the background as he explains his love, so overpowering, for women, and more importantly the love of his life to whom he could never show his face.  
 
Her heart missed beat after beat, her breath grew warmer, her mind rushed with thoughts and emotions.   ‘This is love, identity found in a like minded soul'.
She knew why she could never get a calling, no matter how much she prayed.   Her other half was out there, somewhere.
 
Fred released her hand with a sigh, he knew by looking into her eyes that she wouldn't be sitting faithfully on a church bench anytime soon.   She had caught the passion that devours and spits out most women, driving them to feverous madness, causing them to scratch, bite, kill, pray and wear pink cardigans giggling at the appropriate times.
 
It was too late to back out however, she could hardly turn up at the church quoting Nietzsche with his dead gods and tell them all about the passion or the quickening of the blood or Johnny Depps cheekbones.   They would never understand (well Father O' Brian might but she suspected that Johnny was the catalyst which sent him running to take his vows in the first place).   So she stood before them, swearing oaths to dead deities, munching on wafers and pretending it was flesh and searching for red blood cells in altar wine.
 
This is where the dwarf entered the scenario.   When Fred was ten he had a slight problem with pills, he found them in his sister's bag and all of a sudden purple elephants were painting murals on the bathroom wall.   The dwarf found him later that day, hugging the playground swings muttering prayers to the Easter bunny and begging Santa to return his spleen.   The dwarf on hearing his pleas was intrigued.   He had always been worried about the function of the spleen; it struck him that while no one really knows what it's for it is somehow vital to peoples' existence.
 
He took Fred home with him, put him in a bathtub full of ice cubes and frozen peas and quizzed him on the mysterious spleen.   Their minds instantly connected- Fred wasn't quite sure but thought spleens may regulate hormones, helping women fight moustaches and fall in love with the opposite sex- or in the case of an unhealthy one- enhance hairy arm pits and draw women closer to each other in a biblical sense.   He assured the dwarf that he had never known anyone to die for want of one, or get mad cow disease or cancer dancing around inside one.   The dwarf was satisfied and in return shared with Fred the wisdom of the universe, that being never eat sweets you find in girls purses.   Mostly, he said, they'd probably stop you obtaining a baby which would be a tragedy in itself, for should a man become pregnant it would be such a novelty he'd become a millionaire.  
 
Fred knew girls were psychotic from that day forth, and also suspected that he was destined to give birth to Christ for the second coming.   The friendship flourished.   Fred informed the dwarf of diseases such as meningitis, the mumps and Chlamydia and the dwarf warned him of the passion that consumes the female sex.
 
On seeing Theresa's eyes after that fatal movie screening Fred instantly phoned the dwarf for help "What would happen if a woman who had impure thoughts about long haired movie stars entered a convent".   The dwarf was adamant that he should stop the ceremony- a sexually charged nun would be like a paedophile running a day care centre.   Instead he insisted, this wayward woman be brought to his house to learn the ways of the world, and the passion.
 
Fred dragged his heels, feigned several injuries and hit Theresa's habit, but to no avail.   The ceremony went ahead.   He knew God would be mad, he'd never be impregnated with Christ or the anti Christ for that matter.   As Theresa left the church, the dwarf arrived on a black scooter with the words "lady killer" printed in silver letters on the side.   Theresa looked at him, with his long locks and chiselled cheekbones and her faith was sealed.   That night, the first night of being a fully-fledged nun, she lost her virginity in a game of poker to Fred and a transvestite called Michelle.
 
The next morning the dwarf woke up in a state of despair, screaming about Chlamydia and genital warts.   He recited the medical dictionary Fred got him for Christmas, he had learned it all off by heart.   The romance was dead.   From that point on the sex became routine, the compliments turned sour and the dwarf shaved his head.   Theresa was inconsolable- even Michelle couldn't light the fire in her belly anymore.   She began to dream of god- and smoke a lot of strange things like banana peels.   She felt like a nun in a Chaucer story who keeps dogs and shows men her forehead, a high class hooker, a fallen woman.   She knew now god was alive, he had tested her and she failed.   Now he read the gaps in her words, adding them to her list of sins turning the soul lodged in her spleen a little more grey.   And there was the noise in the silence; the legs on the bar stool snapped, her spleen ruptured.