Though I won’t eat today, I allow myself one cup of instant coffee. Then I go into the garage and give myself fifty lashes on my bare back with a leather strap. Afterward I climb up on a stepladder and take down the cross I keep suspended from the rafters. I built it myself from heavy lumber, wood screws, and angle braces I bought at the hardware store. I had to carry the beams six miles home with me in two separate trips because they wouldn’t fit in or on my car. That was months ago, back when I still had a car. It was midsummer then, and under the sun’s whip the sweat dripped from my vile body as I walked and melted my impure thoughts about beach girls in their bikinis. I was already learning how to suffer.

There are leather straps on the cross for me to hold on to so that I can keep it balanced as I walk. The first few times I used it I kept dropping it on the sidewalk, and by the end of the day my hands were full of splinters from trying to catch ahold of it when it started to slip from off my shoulder. Like I said, it’s a very heavy cross, and long enough so that if it were put into the ground, and raised up on end with me nailed to it like it’s supposed to be, it would still be plenty high to keep me way above everyone so they could see just how much I’m suffering up there. The splinters were actually never a problem, as they only added to my suffering and my contemplation thereof as I pulled them out with tweezers at home later, and it’s nice for the cross to hit the sidewalk once in a while, where it makes a huge noise, though better, I think, for me to fall with it, to one knee or even right onto my face, which happens more often now that I’m actually strapped to it, but once a woman with a baby carriage was walking past me and I kind of leaned over a bit to look at her and just as I was getting a good peek the cross started to slip and only the grace of God spared her child, though the carriage was damaged beyond repair. Praise be to God.