Walking out of the kitchen back into St. Michael’s church basement, I scanned the crowd and saw Father Reagan surrounded by guards dressed in riot gear. It seemed to have been years since I last saw him at Foley’s, and he was now in a state equivalent to that of a late-stage, fat-Elvis version of himself, sporting mutton-chops and a bell-bottomed, rhinestoned cassock. I called out to him, “Hey, motherfucker!” He spun and darted away, the group of guards going ‘hut-hut-hut’ while accompanying him at a slow jog. I decided not to give chase and instead returned upstairs to my trial. Back upstairs, while the guard was preoccupied with locking the door behind me, I nonchalantly tossed a folding chair I’d brought back up with me from downstairs to arc in illusory slow motion through the air before landing with a #slam to skid across the uncarpeted nave as I followed behind on promenade. The congregation booed me as I was escorted back up to the altar. As I passed the pew where I knew my parents to be seated, I bent in and whispered, “I'm getting the fuck outa here.” My mother inhaled before responding over the stonewall of a heavy sigh, “Just don’t shame the family.” On the altar I made a big show of clearing my throat and hocking a loogie onto the marble floor. My plan of escape was to posture as a possessed heretic, to stand up in the middle of my execution mass and jump around while screaming vulgarities mixed with the odd bit of truth here and there. Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to do so. While I was downstairs, there had been an eschatological ripple effect reaching beyond the schismatic New American Traditionalists all the way to the very top of the hierarchical, papal pyramid in Rome, and The Church had initiated a sequence set for the end times. While still visibly cross-shaped when glanced at out of the corner of one’s eye, when viewed directly the crucifix on the altar became non-canonical, taking on the appearance of a Mandelbulb fractal evolving into tesseracts both beyond dimensional and ontological explanation. The priest ordered the congregation to leave The Church and to never return unless shamefully late more than halfway through a mass. #MastoPrompt #NovelExcerpt