The church made of ice did not melt despite the air so hot it smelled like breath exhaled from a mouth full of never-brushed teeth.  Children loosed in the park to traumatize one another on the monkey bars and cargo nets were the first to see it, eyes glazing down the long hill as they kicked high on the swings whose rubber seats burned the undersides of their thighs.  They stared and pointed, then screeched for their harried caregivers, who allowed themselves to be yanked down the path that drizzled into the valley marking the middle of the park, where a pair of tattered and abused baseball fields sprouted weeds along the baselines.  The dugouts were home to tetanus, used condoms, empty beer cans.

     When the first mother saw what her son was gawking at, yanking her arm so hard she thought her shoulder would pop out of its socket, she felt the blood leave her head, the perspiration caked at her hairline evaporating like a fine mist.  The church was nothing like the Sistine Chapel or St. Peters Basilica, wide and squat instead, but it was a gorgeous blue like the untrammeled waters of the Indian Ocean.  Every surface was glistening and cold, puffs of air turning to clouded condensation as the ice steamed.  The columns of the narrow atrium, the apse, the visible arch of the bema, the balustrades and chancel all sparkled and gleamed and were cut as if chiseled from marble by the finest rasps and rifflers held in the steady hand of Michelangelo himself.  The points were sharp as teeth, etched edges vibrant, every pock and pimple detailed and defined.

     Mothers and fathers gathered with their children, staring.  One man, wearing a pair of green mesh shorts that licked past his knees, his cotton t-shirt blanched with sweat even though all he’d been doing was pushing his adopted son on the swings, was the first to shove out of the crowd and approach the church.  His name was Paul, a freelance writer who spent his hot mornings dragging his boy to the park while his husband Andrew, a tax attorney, commuted an hour to a sterile downtown office building with humming fluorescent lights and acidic pink hand soap.  He wrote in the evenings, hidden away in an office in his attic.  Paul felt the cool blast of the church’s façade from thirty feet away, as if a commercial air duct honking out freezing air was pointed directly at his face.  He felt his stubble stand at attention; a tremor rippled his shoulders.  He twisted his head and looked back at the assembled crowd, which included a trio of mothers who spent their park forays batting eyes at him and flicking their fingers toward his well-formed biceps while they laughed at his bad puns.  They urged him forward with a flutter of hands and insensate murmuring.

     Paul was not religious, not since seventh grade when the nun who taught theology proclaimed that homosexuality would get you sent straight to hell.  He’d found dogma and ritual ashy and gruesome, the pompous proclamations of the saved and self-righteous stinky and ruinous, echoing with a kind of emptiness he associated with vampirism.  As he approached the church he wasn’t sure what he expected.  Perhaps that when he stepped onto the sleek hockey rink of ice that made up the atrium floor his flip flops would freeze, all their temperature sucked out so his toes felt the spiky beginnings of frostbite.  But when his plastic thongs kissed the ice nothing happened.  He simply placed one foot, then the other, onto the ice, and stood still.  The cold made him shiver, and he felt the sheen of sweat drizzled over his forearms begin evaporate, taking a part of him in the process.

      When he tried to open his mouth to speak, Paul found he’d lost the words.  Along with the heat leaving his body, language had flown the coop, and although his lips moved, sucking and puckering and gnawing like dying vermin, he couldn’t turn the words he could see in his mind into sound.  He let out a small groan, something akin to a sex noise, which felt right, because even though his capacity to speak had poofed away, he was filled with a warm pleasure that sucked at his gut as if Andrew was running his tongue along the crease where Paul’s hip met his inner thigh.  He felt fifteen pounds lighter, and stronger, and fulfilled.

     “What is it?” someone from the crowd yelled.

     But sound was fading fast as Paul stepped closer to the doors of the church, heavy and wooden (but still blue) like they were built of oak or fir, aged and weather-beaten and covered by ice shaped like pointed ironwork, the ancient, rusted sort that seethes and moans when wrenched open.  With each step his sense of ecstasy increased, but so did a tilting drizzling away: first his hearing, the din of the park and the nearby residential street with its horn-bleats and tire thumps and whirring garage doors all dialing down as if he was plugging his ears.  Then his vision, first fading to blurry then foggy and finally black.  A tingle ran up and down his arms, a numbness crawling along his flesh as his fingers stopped sensing the cold.  His legs kept moving but his entire body felt like a shadow.  When he opened the church door—it groaned, clanking and cantankerous, but Paul couldn’t hear it—he didn’t pause once, didn’t look back for even a second, before disappearing inside, letting the iced hinge suck shut behind him.  His son, stranded at the cusp of the gawking crowd, cried out a gunky, nasally sob.

*

     Paul did not come out.  His trio of fangirl mothers pattered on the edge of the baseball fields and cawed about what should be done.  Should someone call 911?  The news?  Follow him in?  A bottle-blond named Andi whose body kept its shape from Pilates and Zumba four days a week to offset the cheap Riesling she drank by the bottle at her monthly book club led the charge, stomping toward the church and experiencing the same euphoric loss of sense.  As her mommy friends watched, she tumbled into the church after Paul and didn’t emerge.  Over the coming days, more and more would enter and not come back.

     The police were called, and the news vans followed shortly, nudging themselves behind a cavalry of cop cars and ambulances and fire trucks blinkering their lights in the cutting, warm sun.  A man from the Parks and Recreation department whose eyes remained permanently googly and confused as to the reason for his presence appeared as well, his green uniform eking out sweat at the armpits.  He stood around, watching firefighters and police officers scratch at their chins and bellies as they wondered what ought to be done.  Unlike the police chief and fire captain, no one asked him for an interview, and none of the bewildered, excited children pointed and giggled at him or approached him shyly for a hug or autograph.

     So he took the initiative and walked up to the church, not from the front but the side where there was no door.  He felt the same insensate drainage, so he couldn’t communicate to those who ignored him ignoring the caution tape the cops had strung up around the perimeter.  He placed one hand along the exterior wall, a stained glass rendition of one of the stations of the cross, capturing the moment of Christ’s death.  Icy droplets of blood spun out of the tiny Jesus figure’s hands, winking in the sun; a gash cut into his lean trunk.  When the officer pressed his fingertips to the bumped, cold surface he felt an intense warmth coursing through him, as if he was absorbing the purest rays of the sun.

     He was found hours later, wandering in the woods behind the church.  By then, the caution tape had been torn away, belligerent onlookers demanding the right to see and touch the venerable church; evangelical preachers had already published blog posts and YouTube videos and streaming sermons about the Rapture, the end of days, the return of Christ.  A dozen of the faithful pushed their way into the church, vanishing in the same blind euphoria as Paul and Andi.  The Parks and Rec officer, agog and delirious, was scooped up by a pair of beat cops assigned to patrol the park’s perimeter.  He was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with severe dehydration, as if he’d been wandering a desert.  Doctors shined pen lights into his unresponsive pupils, pushed otoscopes toward his ear canals, knocked his knees with rubber mallets.  His legs sprung up and down but the rest of his body was a calm lake’s surface, ignoring the clamor of his heart monitor or the doctor’s frustrated calls for blood tests and an MRI.

     CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and Fox News hosted coverage as local feeds linked to their national syndicates.  TV screens were smattered with images of the church as it glistened in the afternoon sun, spangling as if covered in glitter.  Guffawing news anchors lilted their voices with surprise and awe, videos ran of random bodies sliding through the church doors.  Interviews were played on loop, loved ones stunned and speechless, their voices trailing off, sentences broken like hunks of concrete.  Their eyes glanced toward the closed doors of the church while fanatics stood in the background, heads bowed, arms raised, bodies swaying to some unsung hymn.  One commentator raised an eyebrow, mouth curled and creasing his pancake makeup, stating that the small Missouri town was expected to see massive swaths of the faithful swarming in; he would later be berated on Twitter for calling the phenomenon “a fool’s trek to a yokel Mecca.”

     Crowds came in cranky buses, sleek vans, barrages of sedans and pickup trucks.  They flooded the Holiday and Red Roof Inns, backed up the drive-thru lines at McDonalds and Raising Cane’s, clogged the self-checkout at Schnucks.  People of all stripes: a choir decked in their Sunday regalia, purple robes dampened by perspiration; women in bonnets and men in skinny black ties and too-large white shirts bulging over beer bellies that sagged across beaten leather belts; chorales of blue-haired women with tattered bibles in hand, eyes narrowed and fingers curled in prayer.  The police were abused by mammoth when they tried  to impede access to the church. 

     “You cannot stand between the faithful and their God!” one white-bearded man with a bullhorn shrieked into a stoic officer’s face.  Spittle rattled through his gummy lips.  The officer blinked and adjusted his weight, feet scuffling in the hot dirt.  People snuck past, and when they stepped onto the ice the police had no choice but to let them disappear, eyesight draining away, hearing going daffy, language evaporating like the cold steam billowing from the church’s roof.  No one expected law enforcement to make such sacrifices; if the ignoble sheep wanted to throw themselves at the mercy of the church, one talking head said on HLN, who are we to stop them?

     The summer softball league was cancelled; too many tents, filled with migrant worshippers too cheap to pay for the Super 8, had clogged the outfields.  The smell of urine and fecal matter and unwashed skin pinched the hot sky, baking the park with olfactory displeasure.  Children from day camps frowned and crowed about the stench and the strangers, scowling down the roll of the hill from the playground where they continued to swing and slide despite the throng.  Frizzied camp counselors in t-shirts with rolled sleeves kept careful watch after one boy reported that a grizzled man tried to coax him away from the wood-chipped playground.  The story spread, and parents demanded the camps move their programming indoors, to the local elementary school gym, where prying sickos couldn’t prey on their offspring.  The counselors assented, giving thanks for air conditioning and the water fountain.

     And then, six weeks after the church appeared, one youthful onlooker, bussed in all the way from Virginia with his youth group, frowned and pointed toward the edge of the church corbel, which ran along the roof like a thick stony gutter.  The corner closest to the road looked—well, was it—was that—it couldn’t be melting, could it?

     A puddle, small and indistinct on the glassy surface that surrounded the church, had, in fact, formed, and when onlookers squinted they could make out the minute dribble of water as it slipped from the icy edge.

     “How can this be?”

     “What does it mean?”

     “What do we do?”

     Waves of panic slipped and slid through the crowd like a sickness.  Preachers started prayer chants, eyes rolled back and hands splayed palm-up toward the sky, invoking the Holy Spirit.  Bodies swayed, beating back the tremble of tears with their solemn humming and song.

     But the church continued to drip.

     The news vans wrestled for prime real estate near the church, cameras wedged between bodies, reporters half-shouting into their microphones while the church wept behind them.  More interviews, battering preachers and laypeople with questions like, “What do you think will happen if the church melts?” and “What kind of sign is this?” and “What will you do when the church is gone?”  Pulpit masters and congregants alike squirmed and smiled and tried to keep their cool as the frosty house of worship started to go lumpy, a sad, hopeless snowman barely clinging to its shape during the first heavy thaw.

      The loved ones of those who had vanished inside the church returned to the scene, fresh from mourning their losses.  They clasped hands in their shared grief, blinking through Ray-bans at the church, eyes squinted as if they could force its melting to speed up.  Fifty-odd spouses, significant others, siblings, children, and parents had formed a support group via Facebook and text message, gathering by the dozen in one another’s homes and dilapidated apartments, sharing casseroles and no-bake pies and lamenting their loved ones.  Andrew and Andi’s husband had grown close because their lovers were the first to disappear; one night they met at a bar inside a nearby Howard Johnson and split three scorpion bowls and Andrew vomited electric blue muck all over his bathroom and then cried some more because Paul was the tidier of the two and Andrew had no idea where to find a bottle of spray cleaner in the cabinetry beneath the sink.

     They watched and waited, willing their spouses to appear.  The church drooped and finally a large cry rang out, pain from the believers and hope from the mourners: the ceiling of the entryway collapsed, the door shattering outward with a loud crack.  People began screaming but pandemonium was stanched by their awe at the glimmering destruction; the white-bearded preacher, who had grown lank and tan from his time in the sun and lack of proper nutrition, cowed into his bull horn that the Rapture had arrived.  He spread his hands toward the heavens, expecting dark clouds and perhaps a rain of blood, or for the bodies of the saved to begin their ascent.  But the pure sheet of sky remained unbroken except for the white pearl of the sun.

     The church fell quickly, and hope turned to horror for the mourners; instead of a slow drip, a rain of melt that would reveal the stumped bodies of their loved ones, the church disintegrated in slicing sheets like a building imploded by a wrecking ball.  The nave collapsed like it was being slurped down a toilet; had the flat ceiling been pinched up into a transept, its point would have speared into the ground like a falling missile.  The apse fell in on itself; balustrades crumbled in hearty chunks.  Andrew felt spikes of queasy fear rushing through him like snakes snarling along his digestive track, tongues flicking at his intestinal walls.

     Soon all that was left was a steaming, melting heap of jagged ice like the sluiced off edges of the McBride Glacier.

     No one moved; who knew if the power of the church remained?  The Parks and Recreation officer was still blind and deaf; his Go Fund Me account had exceeded its goal.  No officers wished to risk contact with the melty swamp of the decimated church and none of the faithful threw themselves toward the destruction; the preachers were silent.  Mike and Andrew and the other loved ones stared, breathless.

     They remained that way, in cold silence, until the church had gone to soup.  A clutch in every stomach, a wondering whether the lost would become found.  As the ice melted away, suffusing through the grass and dripping toward the baseball infields to turn the dirt to muddy cakes, the crowd stared in unison, unblinking and short of breath, turning into a scene of stone, waiting for the next miracle.

– Joe Baumann

Author’s Note: This story came out of a writing prompt I gave to a creative writing class, to imagine the strangest thing they might see at a public park.