Fiction: Lead Me Not Into Temptation

by Heidi Matz

I am sitting in my living room watching some psycho evangelist on TV. He’s very compelling, actually. He wants money, of course. It’s three in the morning and I can’t sleep. I feel numb but not too bad this time. I’m down for the count and counting. Let’s see. I’m drinking my third cup of hot chocolate, smoking my fifth cigarette since midnight; and I’ve just broken up with my seventh boyfriend this year.

Which brings me to the question. How did I get here? Whose fault is this?

“Be fruitful and multiply.” The Good Book says. “Fill the earth and conquer it.”

My existence in absolute devotion to the Word, superstar! I believe I am spawn from my parents’ loins, fruit of the earth, created in the image of God! The TV speaks!

I actually believe I was born on this planet as a result of an act of violence. But really, I’ve got to face the facts: I was born. I was officially given a gender. Female, and baptized a good Roman Catholic.

In 1983 my family moved to Encino. Our backyard had fruit trees and the air smelled sweet. It became my sublime lullaby. “God planted a garden in Eden toward the east and there he put the man that he had formed.”

I attended Holy Mother Mary Pre-school. Positive in morals and understanding, I learned to have impeccable hygiene. I would recall from some twenty years later, I hated every school from the gate.

But I was a “pre-teen,” and the differentiation between “boy” and “girl” was at least becoming more noticeable, if not glaring. The next time I saw one at age 12 while engaged in a friend’s game of hide-and-seek with her little sister’s kids, I found myself in a tight corner behind the local Anglo-Town and Country store.

[Partial transcription from image inspection; OCR returned a refusal for this page. See original scan img-4298.jpg for full text of the two-page story.]