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Sister Serenity
by Zach "Oz" Brooks
“Hey Seth! Are you coming or what?” Her voice pierced through the chilled night air.
Her large, brown eyes flashed as she stared at me while her mouth was curled up in the faintest of smirks. She had her arms folded across her chest, tapping her foot, which, in itself, was rather comical given her petite frame. Frustration tended to be funny when it comes from the least imposing person you’ve ever met.
“It’s getting late and we still have another stop to make,” she continues, brushing a snowflake off the bridge of her nose. As she did this, she brushed a few strands of hair out of her eyes as well, and it fell effortlessly back into place. I had only known this girl for around a week, but her dark, red hair that had become her defining feature to me was, rarely, if ever, out of place. I also happened to know this was a freak occurrence, a miracle of sorts, as I had never witnessed her spend more than ten seconds in front of a mirror, which usually occurred as she rolled out of bed and put on whatever clothes were strewn across her apartment floor. Then, a quick glance in the mirror and she was off on her day’s adventures. It was a strange sort of grace she had been gifted with.
I was taking in my surroundings. As I stared up into the deep, black oblivion of the night sky, it stretched far beyond this plane of existence, beyond my own comprehension and underneath this juggernaut of an expanse, I couldn’t help but think to myself:
Holy fuck it’s cold out here.
And cold it was. This barren wasteland of twisted steel and concrete they call a city was void of any real spark of life…just a dull wash of gray. Even the lights dimly illuminating the windows of the tallest buildings surrounding me could not change that.
The snow was really coming down. So hard, in fact, that as I gazed upward, it was almost impossible to discern stars from snowflakes. Everything was just small, white specks strewn across a big, black background. The crystalline flakes only gave themselves away when they descended to my eye level, fluttering for a split second before colliding soundlessly with the ground. I stood transfixed by this for several moments before I realized how lost I was getting in my thoughts. I shook my head, chuckling.
Just look at me, I thought. Last week, I was only a few minutes away from redecorating my kitchen wallpaper with the contents of my skull and now, here I am, absentmindedly musing about snowflakes and starfire. Despair has made me such a whimsical creature…
Don’t get me wrong, I was still pretty sure that I was probably going to go through with my big kitchen makeover. Just not now. I had a few more things I wanted to learn about life before I ended mine.
“Seth!” she called again.
“Yeah, I’m coming. It’s fucking freezing out here. Can we hurry this up?” I wondered how she wasn’t an ice block already. There was no way that form-fitting, though fur-lined jacket and those paper-thin jeans were keeping her warm.
“Of course! I completely forgot this was all about you. Damn my inconsiderate nature! Here, do you need my jacket?” she replied with a half smile.
I knew my complaining would irritate her, but sometimes I would do so just to see that passion flare up in her. It excited me in a strange way. I guess everything about her excited me in a strange way. She was a walking contradiction, an alluring deception, as most mysteries tended to be. People who saw her throughout the city has taken to calling her “Sister Serenity,” because she lived an abnormal life of service to others, spending much of her time visiting with the city’s homeless population, making them food or giving them clothing. I guess people likened her to a nun. Personally, I didn’t care much for the comparison. They would be right…if nuns were sarcastic, swore, and lived in dirty, tiny studio apartments on the bad side of town. Plus, I’m sure the majority of men who saw Serenity, myself included, had thoughts about her that they would never have about a nun.
And then there was her name, “Serenity.” It just added to my walking contradiction theory. Indeed, I found nothing too serene about Serenity. Sure, she did nice enough things for people who had nothing, but wow, even that could sometimes be an unpredictable event.
I remember the first time Serenity took me out with her on one of her rounds, now that was a little shocking. We ended up spending the night under an overpass with a homeless guy named Gus.
We’d never met Gus before that night. We were just walking by after delivering bread to a family living in a broken down VW van a few roads over when Serenity just stopped and grabbed my arm.
“Do you hear that?” she asked me, her brow furrowed with concentration.
“The sirens? Yeah, the city gets crazy at night…”
“No. Dumbass. Not the sirens…someone is crying.”
She was right. After I knew what to listen for, the sound of cries was apparent. Someone wasn’t just crying…they were sobbing, yelling out in despair.
“It’s coming from over there,” she said, pointing to an overpass a few yards away. “Let’s go check it out.”
“Wait. Do you think its safe?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, you’re here, right? You’ll protect little old me.”
I stared blankly at her. I was thinking she was nuts.
“Yeah, I was kidding. You just stay behind me and I promise you’ll be alright, kay?” She winked at me.
She was definitely out of her mind.
It was then, upon investigating the crying, that we met Gus. He was wearing clothes so tattered that it was impossible to even discern what they were made out of. His white beard was stained with booze, his lips cracked and blistered. He looked exactly like the kind of guy that would murder you under an overpass.
Apparently none of this phased Serenity or perhaps this kind of thing was routine to her. She just walked right up and plopped down next to him on the dirty blanket he was sitting on.
“Hey, we heard you crying from over there. I was just wondering if you needed someone to talk to.”
This amazed me. In a matter of seconds, Gus was spilling his guts to her. He told her about how he used to have a house, a family, a dog, the works…until his addiction. Heroin. It cost him everything and in the course of ten years, that addiction brought him from suburbia to a blanket under an overpass.
Serenity listened to all this, holding his hand and saying nothing. Then, after Gus had finished his story, there was a moment of silence before Serenity said this:
“I’m so sorry to hear what has happened to you. You poor, stupid bastard…don’t you think its about time you stopped fucking up your life?”
This was the moment I was sure we’d be shanked in fit of rage. But instead, Gus just hung his head and began to weep again. Serenity put her arm around him, and held him all night, telling him things would be okay.
Events like this were not uncommon with Serenity. The really crazy part, however, is that when we said our goodbyes to Gus at dawn…he told Serenity she was right. Serenity told him that she already knew that.
Nothing serene about Serenity. And that was only our first night out on the streets together.
I let my mind focus back on our task at hand, one more mission to wrap up the night.
“Who’s our last stop tonight?” I ask her, curious to see where the night is going to end up.
Her voice filled with excitement as she spoke, “I just need to swing by South Street to visit Bruce. He was having a bad time with that cough the last time we visited, so I picked up some cold medicine for him.” She gestured to her backpack. “Come on now, hurry up,” she said, grabbing my arm and quickening her pace.
As she took hold of me, I could smell scent of vanilla in her hair from the shampoo she used. It made me think about how I came to know Serenity.
It was sometime last week or so when I had planned to bite the bullet. Literally. My wife had just left me a few days earlier, claiming I wasn’t the man she married, that I was uninspired and she was afraid that if she stayed with me, she‘d end up the same way. So, away she went. This was when I started seriously thinking about ending my life.
I went to a gun shop on one of those sides of town where things like waiting periods to purchase firearms were regarded more as cute little suggestions rather than laws. It was there that I purchased the instrument of my demise, a high caliber handgun. I stuck in a paper bag and began walking home for what I thought would be the last time.
The weirdest thing happened to me on the way home though. I started having second thoughts about what I was doing. I’m not saying that I started to not want to kill myself per se, but I definitely started having doubts, like maybe I would be missing out on something if I were to end it all. Like maybe, life could improve or inspiration could be found somewhere out there. I guess the real question was if I wanted to risk more meaningless pain in the pursuit for answers.
It was these feelings that led me to the Serenity’s doorstep. “Sister Serenity“, to the inhabitants of the city, was not unlike Bigfoot. She was a myth. An urban legend. The newspaper often featured letters from those who claimed they had sighted “Sister Serenity” in the ghettos, handing out sandwiches to the homeless or distributing homemade sweaters. Some claimed she was crazy; others claimed she was an angel of God; others doubted her existence entirely. Me, personally, while I never bought into her being supernatural, I was always intrigued by the stories I’d read about her. She seemed hopeful and inspired, two things that were extremely foreign to me. I’d often sat around with a newspaper in my hand, wondering how one became that way while living in the cold world that we do.
I thought of her as I walked home from that gun shop. I was someone with questions. She seemed like someone with answers. Extraordinary answers to extraordinary questions. And I realized I wanted answers. Answers to why someone like her found life to be so worth living for and why someone like me couldn’t be so sure.
I decided to find those answers before I made any decisions about my own life. So, I sought out Sister Serenity. She surprisingly wasn’t too hard to find. All I had to do was ask a few homeless people, who were all too happy to sing her praises and point me in the right direction.
I’ll never forget standing on the doorstep of her shitty little apartment, not entirely knowing what to think or what I was getting myself into. She opened the door after a few knocks and I was hit with the scent of vanilla as I saw her for the first time. She looked at me and gave me the greeting that cemented my curiosity in her.
“What the hell do you want?”
I explained my situation to her, about how my wife left me and how I had massive questions about life that I couldn’t answer by myself. I also told her about how I’d always heard about her in the papers and how I thought that maybe, given her obvious appreciation of life, she could help me. She listened to me without saying a word. It wasn’t until I mentioned my consideration of suicide that she let her guard down. She told me that anyone thinking about throwing their life away must either be very lost or a “complete fucking moron.” Then, she invited me inside. She told me that she would like to help me find answers, but she didn’t know if she could. Either way, Serenity invited me to crash on her couch for a while during my search for the meaning of life or whatever it was I was looking for. She suggested that I help her with her work with homeless, that maybe it would give me some inspiration. Lastly, she told me that if I tried anything, like sneaking a peak of her in the shower, that I wouldn’t have to worry about committing suicide because she did, in fact, own a gun.
And so our awkward partnership began. A suicidal and a sarcastic optimist brought together with the task of trying to better the world around them. A match made in the deepest depths of Hell.
Approaching the back alley where Bruce, the last man on our rounds tonight, lived brought me back from my thoughts. I shivered and rubbed my arms. The air was frigid. It was cold before, but the temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees in the time us to walk to Bruce’s alley. Maybe it was my imagination. The streetlight at the entrance of the alley had burned out, so I considered the possibility that perhaps the darkness was making it seem colder than it was.
Serenity looked at me and smiled. Not just one of those sideways smirks, but an actual smile and I think maybe I felt the temperature rise a few degrees. Despite her somewhat chaotic nature, I’d never before seen a person with so much compassion.
“Bruce’ll be happy to see us,” she told me. “He’s such a good guy. It’s a shame his life has turned out this way.” It was in these moments with their small windows past the attitude and the sarcasm that I could see just how much she loved what she did and she loved these people, despite their statuses and stigmas.
When we reached the back of the alley, however, we were not greeted by a man dressed in rags, delighted to see us. In fact, we were not greeted at all. All that remained were Bruce’s only belongings - a tattered sleeping bag, a broken clock, a pink flashlight, among other small trinkets.
On the sleeping bag laid a note. Serenity picked it up.
As soon as I saw that not lying there, I knew what happened. This dark, damp, cold alley was a crypt. It had become as lifeless as the rest of the city, no one left to keep even the smallest glimmer of life or light in it. Its as if Bruce’s “home” had died with him…
I watched as Serenity read the note and then looked at me. She didn’t say anything, but her mouth was drawn uncharacteristically into a frown and I could see hints of tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. She blinked them away. She just kept looking at me for several minutes, then she shook her head and began walking away.
I’d later find out that the note was written by another homeless man, a friend of Bruce’s. The note told Serenity that the cough Bruce caught had been pneumonia and he had passed away the day before.
It was surprising how much the news shocked me. I had barely known the man and would have never known him if it weren’t for Serenity, yet his death hit me hard. Me, with my piss poor appreciation of life, still mourned his death.
As we walked in silence on the way home, I began to think about the events that had transpired. I had never seen Serenity upset before. Even though I had only known her for a week, the one thing I did learn about her was that she was strong, but as I watched her walk home, for the first time shivering and vulnerable to the cold, I began to worry.
She didn’t speak when we arrived back at her apartment. She just went straight the kitchen, taking a glass from the cabinet and pouring herself a glass of bourbon. She downed it, then poured another. And another.
The walls and floors of Serenity’s apartment were littered with paintings. Paintings composed by her, of everything from landscapes to beautiful women. This is how she made her living and kept her mission going. She sold little pieces of her soul to further strangers’ lives.
I was looking at one of her paintings, one of a little boy on a swing, studying it, trying to force the thoughts of Bruce’s death out of my head, when I saw Serenity’s foot go through it.
She picked up another one, a portrait of an old man, and threw it across the room. Another one broke over her knee. She was crying and cursing in a fit of destruction. This went on a few minutes before she just stopped and stared at the mess she’d created. She was breathing hard as she stood there silently for a moment, before slumping against the wall.
I didn’t know what to say. Truth be told, I was a little frightened. I felt like some kind of sick voyeur. There was no way Serenity would ever want anyone to see her like this. Still, I couldn’t just ignore her.
“Are you alright?” I asked her, not really knowing what else to ask.
“Yeah…I’m fine…Damn it. Poor Bruce….I’ve seen stuff like this a hundred times out there…it never gets any easier.” Her voice was weak from choking back sobs.
“I can’t even imagine,” I tell her.
I watched her cry like I had seen no one cry before. Her whole body shook as she hugged her knees, slumped against that wall. Then, after a while, she stopped. She got up, she wiped her tears, and looked at me.
“I’d better get some sleep. I’ve got a lot of stops to make tomorrow.”
“Serenity…maybe you should take a break tomorrow…”
“Seth, there are always going to be tragedies as long as I do this. Lots of them. If I were to take a break…I may never get back started again.”
Suddenly, a question popped in my head, one I’d never though to ask her when she appeared strong.
“If there is always going to be tragedy and pain that you are unable to stop…why do you keep doing this? This isn’t a fight you can win.”
She looked at me and gave me one of her smirks.
“You’re right. This isn’t a fight that can be won. There will always be pain, no matter what. But the only way to lose is to give up. So everyday I have to get out there and trying…because, I mean, what the fuck else can we do?”
I returned her smirk.
She had a point.
What the fuck else can we do?
Zach “Oz” Brooks is a Senior Mass Communication major at Wright State. When he’s not writing, he can be found listening to music and spending time with his wife, Sarah. After college, Zach plans to write at a newspaper while working on his first novel.
