Prose 

The three men that stood beside the Old One’s bed looked an awkward mess next to each other. It had taken the eldest son the longest to get there, but he had arrived with his bags packed heavily, as though he feared it may be a long visit. The middle child had gotten there fairly quickly, all things considered, riding the train in from the city station. The youngest, only recently having begun to move his stuff out of the Old Man’s house, got there first, of course. He had been the one to find Him there, fallen, at the bottom of the stairs, and it was he that phoned his brothers, telling them both the hour approached. 

None of them spoke. Not to one another— nothing at all had been exchanged between them since they had each arrived, aside from a cold, frowning glance up from the all too still bedspread— and they certainly were not talking with their Father. 

When she stepped quietly into the room, the nurse’s entrance startled them as if from out of a stupor. Mercer, the middle son, took his worn out cap off— it was some sweaty, old baseball hat that he had grabbed as he ran out of his apartment the night before, bags hardly just packed, on his way to catch the last train. His style nor the way he held himself in front of people would reveal it, but Merc was old fashioned in his secret heart. She may be on his Father’s payroll and wearing pants, but he wasn’t comfortable with how casual the hat made him feel around her. This was the second time she had come in since his arrival, and he liked her quite a bit— even if the somber mood of the event did not afford much time for small talk or the possible flirtation he had been imagining before she walked in. Now, as she checked his Father’s vitals, standing right beside him, he felt as though, with his hat resting politely on his knee, he was giving off exactly the right image of himself that he had drawn up while daydreaming through the train’s flashing windows.

He was an artistic type. Not quite an artist— not of the visual kind at least, and perhaps not of any kind at all. Employment, he had found, was not particularly suitable to “the eccentricities of his character,” as he liked to phrase it. And so for several years now, in lieu of a more traditional and salaried career, he had been busily cultivating his image and building his persona. 

By the time at which our story begins, Mercer had recently determined in conversation with himself one night, that HE himself was the art project. It wasn’t about being an artist, no, what he realized is that if art, or rather, artistic expression was the point, then he had to stop trying to become an artist— that, he found, was a lesser identity— no, HE WAS THE ART.

From there on out it was as if the whole meaning of his life, all the discordant storylines, ideas, and images he had imagined up over the years— suddenly, they all came together, coalescing into a clear, crystalline image: DESTINY. He was struck by the simplicity of it. It really was as simple as, “Just be yourself.” Only now, there was a seriousness and weight to that old platitude. It was true now. Maybe it hadn’t been so five minutes ago, but what Mercer saw was that all his striving after dreams, careers, cars, women, even art— all of it had been pursuit AWAY from, instead of towards existence. All he had to do was “Be Yourself” and, he could see illuminated behind his closed, still-moving eyelids, those things would come unto Him. 

“Confidence. Strength.” He silently told himself to become these as the nurse bent over to pick up the pen she had just dropped on the ground. “You are a Lion. You ARE— she is YET; make her your own.”

Standing up and panting down her ruffled pant legs, she smiled shyly at Mercer and his brother as she excused herself silently from the room. 

Lion. He had just decided THAT is what he was, when Mercer had gotten the phone call from his younger brother that their Father was dying. 

“You know,” he began as the door closed behind the nurse in her pretty, green scrubs, “I’ve been thinking for sometime about what I’ve been doing with my life.”

He paused here, holding a clenched hand with the index figure protruding out from the mass of fingers to touch his upper lip, where his mustache might be if he hadn’t shaved it off before leaving. Pensive, as though he really were deep in thought, he gazed down at the bed upon the sleeping form of their Father.

“Father asked me not that long ago,” he began again, hardly audible at first over the droning sounds of medical equipment that surrounded them in that small room; “ ‘What are you even doing right now?’ … I didn’t know what he meant at the time— I mean, literally, I knew I was standing in my apartment, talking to Dad on the phone while I looked through the boxes of food leftover in the refrigerator. But what did he really mean? I don’t think I knew or cared to know then… But now I do. I must do something with this life He has given me.”

At this point, Mercer turned away from looking at his Father, and moving his gaze up to meet and hold that of his two brothers, and beginning again, finally he said:

“I am called to be a priest.

“I was hoping to speak with Father about it before I began sharing the Good News, but I am afraid I may have to wait longer than I had expected before He awakes again. I have been discerning it for some time now, and I am sure of it in my Heart. The Spirit compels me, Brothers! so— who is to stop me? Man? Not He who lays before us quietly, He will speak to us no more. No! — Rather, no Man can stop me for the Lord hath placed His mantle upon me now. The Word of the Lord has come unto me in a New Working, and He spake thus:

“ ‘But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.’

“And then He came down from unto Heaven even into mine own bedroom, and He spake again thus:

“ ‘For I am the Lord your God. Therefore, consecrate yourselves, and be holy, for I am holy.’

“And then I awoken to find that I must have fainted for I had fallen down onto the ground, my head pressed hard into the floor, and as my vision returned to me, I could see an Army of Ants marching upon my resting crown.

“That’s just about when you called, little brother,” Mercer trailed off, smirking to himself as he ran over the finer details of what he had just said to himself: “I must have woken up again when I heard all the ringing.”