Content warnings

Religion. Cancer. Death of a parent. Grief.

They are in the middle of saying grace when Emily turns into smoke.

She doesn’t mean to. She tries to hold on as a courtesy to her in-laws. Stanley and Linda are Midwesterners, and Missouri Synod Lutherans to boot. They don’t hold with that sort of nonsense. Besides, she was looking forward to the caramel Bundt cake she brought for dessert.

Still, she can’t help it. As they recite the table prayer, hands clasped and heads bowed, Emily’s thoughts drift. “Komm, Herr Jesu, sei unser Gast,” they say together in the original German. Yes, German. More prayers ought to be said in German. They sound so decisive, so insistent that way. It’s no wonder so many influential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century were German. Only a people who have known suffering and privation and then turned around to enact devastating atrocities on multiple continents, and who have reckoned with that much evil in themselves, can speak of God with such authority. They have things to say, too, about the non-existence of God, which Emily has lately considered, and poof—that’s when she evaporates and floats away over the ground beef casserole.

“Oh, my!” says Linda and claps a hand to her mouth.

Stanley just stares at her, dumbfounded. Emily’s father-in-law doesn’t often engage in self-reflection or theology. He is an elder at their church and not much given to the open expression of uncertainty.

“Emily?” says Corey, her husband. He is the least surprised of everyone, for she’s come close to turning into smoke twice before. It first happened in the fall, after her father died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was only fifty-seven. “Don’t most people survive that?” people often say upon learning this, which does nothing to help. Emily has stopped telling people what sort of cancer her father had, unless they really want to know. Anyway, even though Corey was present with Emily during her father’s final days, carrying Jim back to bed when he fell on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night and could not recover on his own, Corey himself doesn’t turn into smoke. He teaches high school physics and rarely, if ever, spends time on metaphor.

“I’m sorry,” Emily whispers to Corey as she rises into the air. She hates to make a scene in front of Stanley and Linda, and she hates that Corey became entangled on her behalf in the crude and leaking mess that is end-of-life caretaking. Of course, it is inevitable that he should have this experience eventually, because anyone who lives long enough and loves another person will eventually keep vigil and clean piss from the carpets. That’s just generational mathematics, and math is a part of physics.

Now Emily is wafting farther from the dinner table and approaching her in-laws’ new induction stove top. “Quick, turn on the vents!” says Stanley, rising from his chair. He prefers action to contemplation.

“No, Dad!” says Corey. “Don’t do that!”

“We have to do something!”

“Stanley, sit down,” says Linda.

Emily, meanwhile, is thinking about the problem of misfortune. Not the problem of evil, the study of which has a very nice name (theodicy, something the Germans really made a name for themselves with), but the other sort of bad thing, the kind with no deliberate, human cause. Call it bad luck instead of evil. “Evil” encompasses so much, but are tornadoes evil? What about cancer? It has no intention or free will, and if one doesn’t quite accept the notion of Satan or some other supremely malevolent being planting cancer cells indiscriminately in the bodies of unsuspecting organisms, then it’s also suddenly difficult to put faith in the existence of a supremely loving deity, isn’t it? The binary no longer holds.

Emily loses further cohesion as she drifts past the microwave and dangerously close to the screen door that leads to the back porch as she contemplates a world in which only scientific, empirical truths are possible. IE, no God. Most people in her urban, liberal enclave arrived at this conclusion long ago. Untroubled, most of them will declare as much with a glint of pride, even—as in, “See how I gaze upon the face of the deep without resorting to prayer! The sheer strength of my intellect leaves me untethered and free!” Well, maybe. Emily finds pure secular humanism troubling, precisely because of that same problem of suffering. To believe in human potential so optimistically seems to overlook the obvious. Just look at people! We’re so dumb! We’re destroying our own planet, and our own bodies can kill us off without our permission through faulty cell division, and the humanists put their faith in limitless power of human potential?

“Pickles, no!” Linda says to the cat, which has hopped up onto the counters to investigate. Pickles is not allowed on the counters. The smoke makes it sneeze twice. This only serves to further atomize Emily’s essence, and her reasoning continues to spread.

The most unsettling explanation that she has encountered for why bad things happen is from, among others, the Jewish theologians, many of whom say that God is in fact responsible for evil. That the supremely loving deity of this existence is also the creator of suffering, one who turns the divine face away from suffering out of respect for humanity’s free will. Such a thought is overwhelming to the point that it brings about a dissipation of self, which Emily actually finds comforting in her grief. It’s a confusion that, she feels, gives her a more objective vantage point from which to view the human condition, like the cloud that she has so recently become.

Ultimately, Emily’s thoughts have seeped into that corner of German theology which declares that faith must begin with the bleakness and power which is suffering and abandonment, because faith born of nothingness cannot be made less. She is not convinced, mind you. Having felt her world fall apart once before with her father’s suffering and death, she is not sure she will ever again achieve certainty of anything, even gravity or the states of matter. She is also aware that far greater tragedies than what she has experienced lurk in all corners of life. Having made grief’s formal acquaintance upon her father’s passing, Emily understands that she has entered a peculiar fellowship, one in which she knows loss, yet also knows that sadness and suffering reach depths far beyond where she herself has journeyed thus far. What vast distances stretch between the cold, hard reality of grief and the details of ordinary, daily life—paying the water bill, composing a resume, grading a science quiz. It is her realization of this distance that turns her to smoke.

Corey observes her drifting, and briefly he considers letting her simply blow through the screen door. She could escape out of doors and disperse to the winds. After all, isn’t that what she wants? To turn from the world and absent herself from the human experience? It’s been hard for him, too. Falling in love and getting married and buying a house are what he looked forward to when he stood with Emily at the altar. He wasn’t thinking about sitting at his father-in-law’s bedside while Jim experienced his final hours in a morphine-induced hallucinatory haze, and “in sickness and in health” covers it but does anyone really grasp the extent at the time?

Ultimately, Corey turns to what he knows best. Physics has rules that cannot, will not, must not be broken. Emily can turn to smoke if she needs to, and his parents can rush to cover up the potato salad so the flies don’t get to it while Emily’s threatening to vanish forever, but he, Corey, knows two fundamental principles that currently apply.

First, a gaseous substance can be captured and returned to a solid state.

He shuts the door and turns the thermostat as low as it will go. Then he uses a dish towel to fan Emily toward the refrigerator.

“Will it be enough?” she asks.

“I hope so,” he says. “You tell me.”

So really, despite the laws of physics, it’s up to her.

Emily considers the limitless sky outside. She observes the flawed but persistent love among the humans before her, bounded by mortality: O thou stubborn, intractable love.

It takes some time, but eventually there is condensation. Emily chooses to gather her tears and mold them back into a person. Even though she won’t be quite the same shape that she was when they married, it’s currently the best option on offer.

This happens because of the second principle, which is that love between humans makes us solid.

In time, Emily and Corey return to the table. They complete the prayer, accepting doubt as a reasonable partner to the daily navigation of this mortal life. Stanley and Linda say nothing about it, and as a family they share the dinner and the caramel Bundt cake. And eventually, one at a time, each of them shall leave this table satisfied.

END

Author's note

The phrase "faith must begin with the bleakness and power" is drawn, with edits, from the writings of H. J. Iwand, as quoted in Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss. Thanks to Rina Sadun for her thoughts and for directing me to resources on Jewish ideas around theodicy.

Elizabeth Cobbe

Elizabeth Cobbe's short fiction has appeared in Fireside, Cossmass Infinities, and Kaleidotrope. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise, and she currently has a novel out on sub.