Short story: The Adventures of Minor Jesus By Karl Whitney - - - - She referred to it as ‘minor Jesus’ – the small statue of Jesus she kept on the shelf in her bedroom. It was grey because it was years old and all the paint had been chipped off somewhere along the way. She found it in a little antiques store around the corner from her flat. It had been sitting anonymously in the window amongst a heteroclite heap of bric-a-brac and above the heap a sign saying ‘All items to clear, £1’. She brought it home, and put it on the shelf where it still sits, as she lies and listens to music. Tears in her eyes, which soon stop. Then she sits up, rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands, stands up and stares out the window, brushing the opaque nylon curtains aside to get a clearer view of the street. She turns the music down, to listen better to what’s going on outside. In the street, two people, a man and a woman, are talking loudly at each other. Now they’re shouting. The man gesticulates, then the woman does too, mimicking the man’s movements almost exactly. This makes the man angry, even though it seems that the woman, thrown by the situation she finds herself in, is unconsciously copying what the man has just done. It’s as if she can’t remember anything outside the current scene, as if everything she’s learned in life prior to this has been forgotten. In her room, Susan moved to the table, picked up her still-warm cup of tea, then moved back to the window to follow the couple’s progress. They were respectable, this couple, and not very young either. The man was bald, red-faced, and wore a green tweed jacket. The woman was dark-haired and carried a newspaper, which she held tight in her right hand like a truncheon. She stared at the ground while she replied to his accusations. “You did – you were staring at him!” “At your age, it’s disgusting” “Why do you do things like that – to make me jealous?” And the more shrilly he confronted her with his observations, the lower her tone became and the more closely she examined the cracks of the cement pavement she stood on. She sat down. “What are you doing now? You sit down in the street? What will people think?” Susan stared, thinking of nothing. Soon she got tired of standing by the window, and sat down on the bed. She looked at the miniature figure of minor Jesus which sat still on the edge of the shelf. It did not move. She lay down again. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.