My Day

Today is April 31st, 2032, my city outside my window had changed its skin like a snake.

Vengeance Day or what once was called May Day now is now euphemistically known as “My Day”

Mentioned so casually like it was some harmless holiday, like Sweetest Day or Arbor Day. It’s been six years since the laws were rewritten after the riots, the referendums, the endless debates about “Rights and Reparations” Once a year on this date, for twelve hours, every law and statute is suspended. No police, no courts, no consequences where anything goes, until the clock is rolled over.

A day of retribution, a day of vendetta, where anyone can seek out their own personal method of justice as they please. Whereas the previous justice system cared more about the rights of the perpetrator and less for the victim. This Holiday was supposed to turn that on its head and right that wrong. Society's laws were to be suspended, and sentences personally meted out and will therefore not be prosecuted.

Jealousies of the past between friends and neighbors could be dealt with, for one's own personal gain. Crimes of passion like rape of a neighbor's wife, theft of something owed like balancing a ledger for underpayment of labor or the murder of the old curmudgeon who yelled at little children for stepping on his lawn.

It forced people to arm themselves to protect not only their own property but their own loved ones.

The law being…there is no law.

All crimes are allowed. For 12 hours there is no law enforcement, no prosecution, no judgement. When time is up, a day later, after which the laws, values and mores all go back to a society’s norms and even any minor infractions like jaywalking or littering are prosecuted harshly under the full extent of the law.

People had been planning all year: grudges sharpened, weapons cleaned and oiled, picnics planned for May 2nd if you survived from the spoils of hatred, greed and jealousy.

I refused to fortify the church like the warrior Pope Julius II or others who now were done making gunports and ramparts to their homes in the neighborhood. At forty-three, I was slight of build and slightly balding. I’m the kind of man who still believed in mankind even if the weather of their hearts and souls have turned cold. I had just finished my morning prayers as I sat on the edge of my bed in the rectory, my crucifix hanging crooked above my door when I heard over the loudspeaker:

“FIVE MINUTES. UNTIL MY DAY”

I hadn’t boarded the windows but only locked the church doors. I had a 38-caliber revolver that had been my father’s, and I left it in the drawer of my locked desk in my bedroom. I wasn’t planning on using it.

I whispered the same thing I’d whispered every April 31st day since the first one: “Father, forgive them. They know exactly what they do. Help me choose love freely. Like You did and be an example.”

I pulled on my old college seminary hoodie, the one I’d wear when we’d play co-ed softball in the early spring in the church yard many years ago. Today was chilly and more appropriate for football.

On this day people simply avoided me, almost as much as they avoided Mass, the way one avoids an open grave.

Down the block, a man I didn’t recognize seemed to be protecting a woman while holding a baseball bat. He had just smashed the window and hood of a stranger’s car while another man filmed it on his phone. The man ran away into an alley as they all laughed. I walked past without looking back.

I knew these twelve city blocks in this neighborhood well. Known as Five-Points, it was once homes to Irish, Eastern European and Italian immigrants. Now home to the more recent arrivals from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa trying to live a better life.

I kept walking, handing out small wildflowers I’d gathered from sidewalk cracks to anyone who would take one. Some laughed. Some cursed. One man, took the flower, crushed it, then punched me hard enough to split my lip.

“You think this makes you better than us?” he snarled.

I tasted blood and smiled anyway. “No. Just forgiven. Already. Before you even swung.”

He hit me again, harder. I stayed on my feet. He walked away shaking his head, muttering that I was crazy.

It was 8 am and the nail shop and beauty salon across the street was already burning. But at the grocery store the plywood sign read “CLOSED” hanging somehow to the smashed glass door. Three men were wheeling out shopping carts full of cigarettes, beer and wine. One of them recognized me and I him, it was Tomas from the auto shop, a guy whose wife's confession I had heard.

“Jesus Christ, it’s the priest without the collar,” Tomas said, with a cigarette bouncing off his lower lip. “Looks like you already got popped. Are you here to turn the other cheek, Father? Or do you finally got a list?”

I kept my hands open at my sides. “Just checking on Mrs. Rosado”

“Oh I like her. Let’s go get her Tomas!”

“Yeah, I always wanted that woman. She’s hot”

“Where is your wife?” I asked knowing that she had not been spared the rod from his violent temper in the past.

“I locked her up for the night. She’s safe. Why do you care?”

“Tomas, I bet that Rosado broad is in the walk-in cooler locked in with the meats, cold cuts and the all the money. The rules say I can do whatever the hell I want. After we pay her a visit, I want to go kill that guy who fired me last June. I want revenge. Take a lighter or take a woman. Anything goes, man. Free will, right?”

He turned and glared at me straight in my eye, “Are you here to settle something, Priest? If you want revenge, take a carton of eggs and throw them at whoever you like. Rules say anything goes.” The looters laughed, a hollow, ugly sound like he told the best joke of the day.

I stepped around them and yelled out to Mrs. Rosado through the cooler door for her to keep it locked and to wait it out the next 10 hours. She was 39, thin and pretty. Her husband had died from cancer just a year before and her 10-year-old daughter and the grocery store and were all that she had left. She’d never hurt anyone except by charging twenty-five cents extra for plastic bags. The shelves were almost empty with not even a loaf of bread remained, just bottled water.

I left the grocery store to the sound of fury and the burning smell of retribution. Almost immediately I saw a kid, maybe fifteen or sixteen, carrying his little sister out of a crossfire between two families who’d waited a whole year to settle a parking space argument. The girl’s arm was shattered. The kid kept crying, “She didn’t even do anything.” I used my belt and two pieces of a broken fence to splint it, then pointed him toward a patch of trees near the railroad tracks where the shooting sounded lighter. “Take care of her” I told him. “Tomorrow, that’ll be the hard part.”

I blessed her and laid one of the wildflowers I’d picked on the way, across her folded hands and walked back out into the smoke from the fires.

He looked at me, like I was from another planet. “Why are you even doing this? You could be out there getting even.”

“Because someone has to remember what love looks like when it’s hard,” I said. “When it costs something. When one has a choice.”

By nine in the morning, I heard more screams. A man they called Mr. Ayush had dragged a teenage boy who had keyed his car into the middle of the avenue and beat him with a baseball bat until the boy almost stopped moving. His wife filmed it on her phone, cheering each time the thud registered against bone. She watched from the porch as her heart hardened but did not look away. When the boy was finally able to look up and saw her, he raised one hand, not in a threat, only recognition of a plea. She stopped filming and said softly, “Enough, Let the boy live.”

Ayush spat, wiped blood from his cheek, and walked away without answering my call for compassion. The boy lay breathing in the shallow ditch as I came to pray over him. Ayush then turned back and carried the kid inside his apartment, cleaned the wounds with antiseptic, and left a note pinned to the boy’s shirt: Remember this tomorrow.

By 10 am the drones were already overhead, on the loudspeakers placed every 2-blocks blasted the countdown: 8 HOURS REMAINING UNTIL RESTORATION. I passed a woman I recognized from church and the laundromat - her husband had cheated on her for years. She was standing over him in their driveway with a kitchen knife while he begged on his knees. She looked at me, eyes wild, and for a moment I thought she might swing at me instead.

“You gonna preach, Father?” she asked, her voice straining with madness. “Tell me to forgive this bastard who gave me this black eye for my birthday present?”

“No preaching. Just… you get to choose Maria. Even today. Love isn’t love unless it’s free will. That’s what HE said. That’s what makes it real.”

She stared at me with hollow eyes like I was speaking another language. Then she dropped the knife, sank to the curb, and started crying. I sat beside her until the shaking stopped. I didn’t say anything more, I didn’t want to take anything more from her today than which had already been taken. As the loud music with bass shaking the ground, car horns and screaming played in the background, a kind of movie soundtrack, she stood up and I walked her and her husband inside and left.

By noon the speakers blared broadcasting the official countdown now sounding somehow more cheerful: 6 HOURS REMAINING UNTIL RESTORATION. It was like halftime at a bowl game. People had learned to make the most of the hours. On the elevated city park that used to be a freeway overpass, two former best friends dueled with antique carbon-steel blades while a crowd placed bets.

2 o’clock brought real madness. The shopping district with its jewelry store was a broken-glass carnival. Men and women in military tactical vests were smashing display cases while laughing like kids on Christmas. A mob had already rolled a few cars off the dealership lot, and the owner and sales manager were on the roof, screaming and shooting a rifle at the looters like at ducks at a penny arcade.

Old grudges waited like loaded guns. Some people stared at me as if I were a ghost from a gentler century. One woman, a junkie whose boyfriend had beaten her for years took my flower, crushed it in her fist, shaking saying “You’re going to die today. They’re coming for the ones who won’t play.”

I was getting angry at their blindness and insolence and prayed to God for them to trust my smile. “Die forgiven.”

5 pm. The fourth announcement wailed, 1 HOUR REMAINING UNTIL RESTORATION. The streets turned feral. People who’d saved their worst for the last hour and came out like wolves. I was one block from home when three men stepped out of the alley behind an abandoned house. They looked familiar, I thought I knew them. Yes, the brothers of the kid I’d helped that morning. The oldest one had a length of cut rebar in his hand.

“You think hiding behind God makes you special, Father?” he said. His eyes were bright with the hatred that fed his appetite. “Tomorrow, they’ll call us murderers. But tonight they’ll call us heroes for shutting up that freak forever who molested that little girl that the courts let free”

I didn’t run. I didn’t raise my hands. I just looked at each of them and said, “I forgive you. Already. Before you were born” That’s the whole point of why HE died for us” Love isn’t love unless you can choose it even when they’re beating you for it.

“Who are you to forgive us? Maybe you’re a molester too!”

The oldest swung.

The rebar caught me across the temple. I dropped to my knees on the pavement. The second kicked me in the ribs. The third watched, breathing hard, like he was waiting for something inside himself to snap. I tasted metal and kept my stubborn smile that had kept me alive this long.

“Am I still forgiven, Father?” He yelled when the second kick landed.

They beat me until the church bell began its final chime, ten minutes to six. The oldest brother finally stepped back, chest heaving, rebar dangling loose. The wild light in their eyes flickered, uncertain now.

The bells rang out again.

“FIVE MINUTES,” a loudspeaker boomed. “PREPARE FOR RESTORATION OF ORDER.”

One of the brothers muttered, “He’s just one crazy bastard. Let the cleanup crews find him.”

They ran off.

I lay on my back beneath the church steeple, ribs cracked, one eye swelling shut. My whole head pounding. The countdown hit thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten. I could hear distant screams being cut short, engines shutting off, imagining shotguns and rifles being lowered. The city held its breath like it always did at the end.

The streetlights turned back on to their normal pink-white glare. A patrol drone flickered to life overhead and began its first sweep of this new lamentable April Fool’s Day. A calm, bureaucratic voice drifted across the rooftops: “VENGEANCE DAY - MY DAY IS CONCLUDED, all citizens will now comply with pre-existing statutes. Any violation, however minor, will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”

I tried to stand and couldn’t. I managed to prop myself up against the church steps instead. Blood ran down the side of my face and into the collar of my hoodie as I looked at the street with participants scurrying like roaches. The first emergency lights and sirens are already moving toward the worst of it.

This time I cried, not from my physical pain but for the souls that were real and broken.

Footsteps approached from the end of the block, maybe paramedics, maybe someone who’d decided my refusal to hate was itself a crime worth finishing after the deadline. I couldn’t tell.

The drone spotlight found me. It hovered, above me scanning. No weapon in my hands. No aggression. Just a man bleeding on holy ground.

“Citizen, do you require assistance?” its speaker asked.

In the middle of this storm of fear. A stubborn small defiant smile appeared. I closed my eyes and the answer I gave was so quiet only God and I heard it.

“Pray for us sinners, it is our Choice to love a person who is about to let us down, who is hard to love”

As I applied ice to my wounds in the rectory, I heard a knock at the door, “C’mon in”

“Hello Father, my name is Lucy, I thought you may need cheering up as you have been ministering so hard for The My Day holiday”. I made some chocolate chip cookies with my mother and have been giving them out today to anyone who was angry, so they didn’t have to steal. I had some leftover and I thought you may want them and some flowers to brighten your day”

At that moment of tenderness, spoken by a child, I was given hope as the youngest of the young exposed to the brutality that is man, gave me hope in the future of mankind.