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The bunions on Ronald's feet were a pair of loud red roosters, crowing cock-a-doodle-doo in the language of pain. The flaring of his bunions forced him awake that cold winter morning. His shoes were donations that were one size too small, and when he once tried to sleep with them off, strange bugs nibbled at his raw feet. Not like he could get any good sleep -- the cars vrooming up and down I-5 made that impossible. It seemed like every shelter, stoop and doorway in Seattle was guarded or taken by another person on the streets. So, his place of rest was a camp of heroin addicts next to I-5. (The camp on the other side of the bridge was where the methheads lived.) He hadn't felt the prick, the warmth, the ecstasy of the drug in ages. Thus, his bunions, the giant swelling above both his big toes, in the joint where foot and toe meet, awakened him with pain so intense that he considered, briefly, asking his big toes for a divorce from the rest of his body. The pain of separation would be brief, but his shoes would fit better afterward.
Why stop there, he mused? Had he no ears, he could stop hearing the cars on I-5 zooming by. Removing his nose could stop the constant dripping from the colds he caught every other day in the camp. His eyes were no good without his glasses, so why not blind himself to the world's pain? When he didn't have his drugs, the world and all which inhabited it seemed without purpose.
It was only Ronald's faith in God which filled his hands with fear and trembling and robbed him of his will to actuate these self-destructive thoughts. On the one hand. Ronald knew it to be true that Jesus said: if one's eyes or hands cause a person to sin, that the person would be better off without them. So that was an argument in favor of severing that which pained him, and one from the Big Man Upstairs at that. On the other hand, Ronald remembered a divine truth transmitted to him by way of his Sunday School teacher. God once smited a man for spilling his seed. And if He would do it for something like that, how much worse would the punishment be for severing toes or ears?
He thought of how much Jesus had suffered on and off the cross. The betrayal by Judas, sealed with a kiss and done for mere earthly wealth. The unfair trial, where murderers were set free yet the Son of God was sent to death. The denials of Peter. Compared with those things, Ronald's cycle of pain and addiction was nothing.
But, what was it for? Jesus died for a reason. For Humanity's salvation. Ronald's pain had no reason, only a cause.
In Ronald's waking nightmares, when he couldn't find any drugs or booze, a terrible image haunted him. Next to Jesus' left and right, on the other two crosses at Golgotha, Ronald's wife Nancy and their daughter Hillary also suffered. Those places belonged to criminals, but his mind put the two people he loved most upon those crosses. Nancy and Hillary's faces, eyes too dry for tears but faces stained with burgundy dried blood. Wounds all over. When he saw them in his mind, Ronald's eyes forced him back into the world of the waking and the living. Jesus' suffering was something Ronald was raised on. The nightmarish image of the suffering of his wife and child was something no holy book or Sunday School had ever prepared him for.
September 11th, 2001. Ronald couldn't remember what day of the week it was today, nor the month or year. But that day was etched into his mind, for he lost everything then. When Nancy and Hillary weren't at Golgotha, Ronald's imagination, when not dulled by drugs or alcohol, imagined them caught under the wreckage of the Twin Towers, trying not to choke on the black dust as their life faded away with each breath. Did they pray to God, or curse him? Years ago, Ronald imagined them dying with a feeling of comfort, ascending to Heaven and waiting there for Ronald to join them. But, now -- whenever "now" was -- he could see only darkness and hear whispers of damnation.
If this camp next to I-5 was Hell, then the Devil was missing his front teeth, and was paying Ronald a visit. Leo had arrived.