Worship
Beau Maibaum
Worship
By Beau Maibaum
3am is usually when Aubree posts about her husband. I’m not sure how many people have noticed this – I haven’t seen it in r/fundiesnarkuncensored, my favourite forum for hate-following fundamentalist evangelical influencers on Reddit, nor in r/heeleysnark, the more nice and much more dedicated base for the few of us who attached themselves to Aubree and Mark Heeley’s careers as peddlers of Christ. Sure, I could have posted it in one of these subs myself, but something has held me back so far. It would be an easy success, screen-shotting the story of her with night dead eyes, cradling the newest (and loudest) addition to her family in her arms, mumbling a prayer about trusting the lord and about living his design, even if it’s hard. Her caption reads: got the night shift haha hubby’s gotta sleep
I imagine Aubree setting up her phone camera, position a soft light on the nursery’s elegant night stand. She turns to the large, gold-set mirror and runs a brush through her chestnut hair. She was always self-conscious about not being a blonde. I’ve seen ancient pics of her with a horrible bleach job – she must have been seventeen or so. The baby screams with the shrill violence of a half slaughtered pig, but she knows it will continue to scream whether she takes a moment to apply chapstick or not. Aubree starts the recording, takes Frances Felicity out of her crib and turns towards the camera.
I pull my legs closer to my stomach in a feeble attempt to produce some more heat, tug in the various blankets and the opened sleeping bag around me. Everything is completely fine except my nose and my toes, which are so ice-cold that I am afraid they might become numb and fall off at any second. I will wake up in the morning as a sort of low-level monstrosity, stumbling around my mother’s basement nose-less and toe-less. I open and close the app again in an attempt to refresh it, even though I know that’s not really necessary, if anything new comes, it will be there whether I re-open the page or not. It’s an old reflex. Aubree rarely posts just one thing alone, without any advertisement for her home school course or an endorsement of her husband’s expensive program for men who are addicted to pornography.
At 4am, I check Instagram again. The story is gone.
I wake up in the late afternoon, unsure whether it is dark out, feeling my way to the light switch. My mother has sent me her usual Gone to work! Love you! text to which I react with my usual heart. Clothes are strewn around the room, and I’m too tired to find out which ones pass for clean, so I just sling a bathrobe around myself and work up the energy to go to the bathroom. While I sit on the edge of the stairs, I scroll through Aubree’s recent posts to find the picture of her with a toddler on her hip, another one clinging to her leg which is clothed in a white prairie dress, her hair covered in a red crocheted scarf. She is heavily pregnant and defiantly staring into the lens of some professional photographer who has placed her in a cornfield of all places. It is so cringe and so beautiful that my whole naked body tenses. I swipe again and the next picture is just her and Mark, in well-fitting jeans and a Carhartt jacket. His offensively white teeth glimmer in the late summer sun as I zoom in on them. I wonder if he has had work done. His hairline seems natural, which is a shame. I don’t believe in cosmic justice because a man whose career mostly revolves around committing acts of stochastic terrorism against trans people does not deserve to look that good. At least not to me. I should find him abhorrent, my flesh should want to reject the pure idea of ever being with him. The last image in the series is a candid shot of her in her own bed with that serene “tired but fulfilled” look on her face, the new baby on her chest and the hashtags homebirth and prolife.
An hour or so later, maybe 3pm, I manage to add cornflakes and milk into a bowl. I hate how it feels good to actually move around and eat something, and I know that the effect of a shower would add to this list of astounding successes, but I’m not sure if I have it in me today. While eating, I open JobSlop and click Apply on two-dozen-or-so new listings. Somewhere in the dark pool beneath the app’s shiny user interface, my CV is sent out. I imagine it flying across the world like an early-2000’s animation of a plane, and then I see little hands grabbing the plane out of the pixelated sky and skimming the rows for the few career buzzwords AI likes to hear. So far, my little plane has never made it through the automatic scan. My finished bowl lands in the dishwasher before I remember that the machine is broken, so I take it out again along with my mother’s breakfast knife and plate. Lukewarm water runs in the sink. I get six or seven rejection notifications before I half-haphazardly add some dish soap, which is already heavily diluted. I stare at the spoon, knife, bowl and plate, mixing with a little milk, green soap slime, rust particles and breadcrumbs and my vision blurs.
I lay on the couch when I hear my mom rummaging around in the entryway, taking off her hospital scrubs, throwing her purse in one corner and her shoes in the other. With a deep groan, she cuts through the living room, lifts up my legs, slouches down, and lets me plop my calves onto her lap. She taps them gently.
“My big girl.”
I mumble a non-committal affirmative, then ask how the day was. My mom momentarily interrupts her tapping.
“Somehow not as shit as yesterday. Have you eaten anything? Want me to make something?”
“No, I’m okay.”
She spies over to the sparsely illuminated kitchenette. “Did the dishes. Big day.”
“I might even go out later.”
She nods, pats my legs one last time before standing up again.
“I’ll believe that when I see it. Love you, champ. I’m hitting the hay.”
A kiss on my forehead, the familiar sound of her aching feet making their way upstairs, the smell of disinfectant and cigarette smoke lingering in the air she left behind. I roll to my side, unclench my jaw, remember that I’m still naked under the robe.
At 1am, I sit on the porch in the dark with one of Mark’s recent sermons playing through my shitty headphones. There’s delight in the occasional mistakes slipping through the cracks of the oh-so-professional sound recording – the one cough they did not edit out, the subtle microphone feedback, how the mic picks up next to nothing from the crowd. While he clearly addresses an audience in the thousands, it sounds like he is lecturing an empty room, using his big boy voice. Aubree must hear him practice through the walls of the nursery while she bathes and changes Frances, while she arranges John Henry’s artisanal toy cars and reads a bed-time story to Willow Grace. On her Insta, she always links to the various AI-written-and-illustrated children’s books in her online store, like Terry Wants To Be A Fox (a little boy thinks he is a fox and learns that he can’t be one) or Amber Goes To The Market (where a local farmer’s market is destroyed by evil urban activists).
I wonder if Aubree finds her husband’s voice as comforting as I do. There’s a strange vocal fry to it that does not fit the clean-cut mega church aesthetic, that adds an ounce of edge which Mark knows how to utilize. Right now, he is talking about one of his favourite topics: obedience. He calls it “the gift of obedience”, and he speaks with such gentleness about letting yourself fall into obedience to God, letting him take your hand and leading you to where you need to be. He speaks of how he will be with you even through the hard moments that such a path inevitably brings, even if it feels like the whole world is against you.
But you can do hard things, he says. And be assured that if you are struggling, I want you here. I want you here so much and God wants you here as well. You can do hard things with God’s help, and yes, it is hard to raise a family today. It is hard to be a parent, right? (Something from the crowd here – reacting to his charm, a shudder on the audio layer) If you send your children to school, and you know how I feel about school – they bring all of these ideas home that you need to combat, and your loving home is turned into a battlefield.
I skip back fifteen seconds to him saying you can do hard things and I skip back another fifteen to hear about the beauty of obedience again, the warmth and love of it, how he can bring himself close to the cusp of tears, as close as it is permissible for the kind of man he is. I can already imagine the Reddit comments about Mark’s sermon: saying the quiet part out loud. bro thinks he’s goebbels. looks like they need donations again.
But I don’t read them this time.
To fall asleep, I watch Aubree’s recent get ready with me for church as a pastor’s wife video and google the beef tallow body cream she presents to the lens. A part of me wonders why she deleted that story yesterday night. It seemed pretty innocent, but Aubree has always been concerned with not stepping over some unclear line, not pushing too hard, not exiting the space of delusional marital euphoria that all of her posts are based in. Maybe she re-watched it once, twice, three times like I did and figured the circles under her eyes were concernedly dark, the light a little too harsh, her arms in the white night gown ghostly, the screaming child off-putting. The beef tallow body cream costs forty dollars. They offer a payment plan, five dollars a month. For a moment the thought of ordering it actually appears in my mind, and I imagine myself in the bathroom, slathering the thick fatty stuff all over my unshaven legs as a sort of ironic performance produced to make myself laugh, but I am still paying off the take-out I got for my mom three weeks ago. Aubree’s video does not manage to make me forget how cold and moist the basement is, and I close Instagram for one last time tonight and replace it with my favourite old-school gay porn. For a very short moment, everything in me dissolves into luscious glittering slime, happy, happy, happy slime.
At 5am I let hot water boil my feet until they are raw and red like lobster’s claws while my eyes fixate on the black mould creeping along the shower’s tiling. It’s been six years since Aubree’s wedding where she twirled in her grandmother’s lacy dress underneath dolphin ice sculptures, something that will forever stay burned into my retina since I saw it on Facebook and later again on Instagram. Her Facebook was small back then, quotidian, very millennial coded, with only her family, acquaintances, friends and people from school following her. The wedding announcement was definitely where her social media output started to turn into a different beast, but by that point I had momentarily, blissfully lost track of her, had started to build a career, moved away from that town. I consider trying to sleep again, but instead turn the heating on in the living room and put on headphones so as to not wake my mom. I scroll through the latest gossip on r/fundiesnarkuncensored, which involves a stay-at-home mother of eight preparing bone broth hot chocolate served inside sourdough bread bowls and being accused of stealing the recipe from another creator. Someone else has shared the late night story of Aubree to the expected number of upvotes. Her eyes are so dead it’s insane how is she 24, the poster added. I’m lowkey worried for her, someone else adds, like how sure are we she’s really down with this Christian stuff? I type out an answer: get the being worried part, but she is 100% down. I’ve talked to someone who knew her in school and she had this whole conversion as a teenager though at least back then she managed to shut up about it. I hit delete.
The whole “friend of a friend of a friend” never plays well. I once started drafting an “ask me anything”-type post about how I knew her in school, but I’ve never gone through with it even though it would pull record numbers on the forum. Maybe I don’t want to put it out there because people would engage instantly. How was she??? And do I say she was wonderful? I can scarcely do that. She was really bright, you see it still in her videos sometimes, in such a weirdly life-affirming way, like she managed to be interested in anything and anyone, there was this period where she was super invested in bugs and made me buy a beetle breeding set with my mom’s credit card. Or that time she drove us to this incredibly niche animal rights protest at an octopus farm, it was like a five hour drive, I thought it was insane and also kind of cute. She wanted an octopus tattoo so bad when she was 16 but her parents were these ultra-religious types who didn’t sign the paper-slip. People would know about this story, maybe; I think she mentioned it in a video somewhere that she did together with her mother about how moms are supposed to protect their children from bad decisions.
Okay so she wasn’t always a fundie? Like I thought her parents got her into it really young? I would type no, she had a bunch of fights with them about it, pretty much fighting constantly. She was basically an atheist, I mean she went to church for them but it’s nothing like it is now. I forget that they are people who only started reading up on her last year when her follower count cracked one million. What happened??? they would ask, and again, do I say I happened? Do I say I waited for her after PE and we slipped out through the bushes behind the gym and sat on the running track and she made me a friendship bracelet with my initials and her initials and she wrapped it around my wrist and pulled my sleeve over it? We scarcely spoke of it I swear we never really touched we never even fucking kissed we just drove around and listened to Katy Perry and Limp Bizkit without understanding how insane our shared taste in music was and once we stayed out too late and instead of going home she fell asleep next to me on the couch just sorta leaning against my shoulder and she snored like a drunk sailor and I was sooo unable to sleep not from her snoring but just from being happy?
My imaginary audience holds their collective breath as my teeth grind against each other and I see the words materializing on the white screen. I feel insane about this even after six years we went like that since we were 13 or so until that night she stayed at my place and yeah she just texted her mom but she was supposed to call her dad. But when she called him he always said no so I guess that night she just didn’t do it, maybe because it was so close to the end of term and everyone sort of became looser in summer… and then we just went to school just the next day and she didn’t show up. I asked around but she didn’t have many friends and our principal was all dodgy about it, almost as if something embarrassing had happened, she told me just to let Aubree enjoy her early summer holiday and relax and have a good time. That was what everyone agreed on, that I just needed to chill, but my mom felt like something was off too, so we straight up drove to her parent’s place (McMansion, for anyone wondering) and rung the bell and her mom immediately opened and basically told us to get the hell out of there. She said that Aubree had gone to a “wilderness education camp” for the summer and that she would be there for two months “until she was better” and she looked at me pretty pointedly. Luckily my own mom told her to fuck off before I could and that was the extent to our interaction with her family. Ofc we couldn’t afford any vacation back then so I just spent a summer driving around trying to find that fucking camp but it must have been out of the county or even out of the state. Aubree changed high schools after that summer and the next thing I hear is that she’s engaged.
Maybe then someone would pull up a post from three years ago where on the last slide a younger Aubree is picture-framed in a white polo shirt with a name tag and a giant smile on her face. Another one of those where my heavenly father helped me up after slipping, the caption reads, and I impulsively scroll all the way down to find that post, fully aware of how insane, how obsessive, how stalker-y, how unemployed I am behaving, scrolling and scrolling through hundreds of videos of her in front of her AGA stove, her perfect backyard, her awkward line-dancing with Mark, hunting for that old post where when you zoomed in you could make out the red rims around her eyes, or could you? Or did I want red rims to be there? Did I want to think that her smile was a little too big, her pose a little too practiced? I want her to be secretly unhappy, I want her to be miserable, I want her misery to become a knife with which she carves herself out of that wretched cocoon, but she will never do it. She loves the cocoon. She’s happy, I think, she’s happy, she’s so happy, and the old post is gone.