Holy Water

Mike McClelland

It was the first Tuesday of the new school year—August 14th, 1984—and it was hot early, the searing sun dappling fields and forests and parking lots and squeezing through the closed blinds of Shelly Clusone’s classroom and stabbing right into her hungover eyes. It was too much. Too much! In addition to her hangover and the heat, she had the class from H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks, she had a run in her pantyhose, and it was two hours until recess, when she’d finally be able to sneak around the dumpsters out back and smoke the cigarette she really, truly needed.

Shelly taught 2nd grade at Plateau Elementary, a public elementary school that sat right at the edge of Pithole, smack dab in the middle of a starkly divided neighborhood called The Plateau, which was nowhere near a plateau of any sort. Half of The Plateau was within Pithole city limits, and the other half was in the unincorporated Carp Creek Township. The Pithole side was filled with huge homes with giant and well-manicured lawns where pure-bred dogs bounded happily, rarely barked, and never seemed to shit. The Carp Creek side was working class, the lawns filled with secondhand toys and mutts who happily hunted for squirrel poop to roll in. 

Plateau Elementary only served families from the Pithole side of The Plateau. 

In other words, Shelly’s students were snots.

Shelly stood in front of the fan and flapped her arms back and forth, desperate to cool off, and in doing so sent a flurry of Wind Song dusting powder out over the heads of her 22 students. She could smell last night’s Chardonnay in her sweat, and the scent made her stomach roll. She walked over to the blackboard, put her head on it, and closed her eyes.

She tried to remember what she’d done the night before. She knew that she’d gone to the Nickel Bar with Bob the Janitor after school, but after that things were a bit hazy. She’d spent the entire summer telling herself that she wouldn’t even speak to Bob the Janitor when school was back in session and yet there she’d been, 9 hours into the school year, drinking vinegary wine with him in the corner booth of the grungiest bar in town. She could practically taste his pickley, smoky breath, and it made her want to barf.

Shelly was startled out of reminiscence when a little hand reached up and tugged on her skirt.

She didn’t budge.

“Can I get a drink from the fountain?” little Perry Horn asked. Even though she’d only met him the day before, she already knew his raspy little smartass voice.

She waved him towards the door with a sweep of her long, red fingernails. 

“Do some group work,” she commanded the class, her breath making a little circle of condensation on the blackboard as she spoke. Then she realized she’d yet to give them any assignments and that her students barely knew each other yet. 

“Review your math books,” she added, still speaking into the dusty black surface. “Try to find a mistake.”

The classroom descended into madness. The most popular kids—how could there already be popular kids?—made their own group in the center of the room and refused to let any of the other kids join. Some took offense and cried or sulked, while others took this as an invitation for terrorism and began launching everything from pencils to peanuts at the group of well-groomed brats in the center of the room.

“Missssssshhhh Clusone?” a voice called from the door.

“What?” she snapped. When no one answered, she pulled her head off the blackboard, leaving a wet, beige circle of Maybelline behind.

She fixed her eyes in her most punishing glare and turned to the door.

It was little Perry Horn. His pupils were huge, and his lips were dripping with a magenta-hued liquid.

“What’s on your face, Perry?” Shelly asked, the twisting fear in her stomach alleviating a smidge of her hangover.

“Therrrrrrre’s grape juice in the water fountain!” Perry said.

Then he fell flat on his face and stayed there.

Some of the children laughed (assholes!), a few screamed, and most of them stared at Shelly with wide, scared eyes. Shelly marched over to Perry and yanked him up by the armpits. She could immediately tell he wasn’t dead; he giggled a little as she moved him. 

She could also immediately tell that he was drunk.

The smell of wine wafted off little Perry, which made Shelly throw up in her mouth a little bit. She was in no state to smell booze, particularly booze mixed in with the scent of Fruity Pebbles and Bubbilicious.

“What in God’s name?” she asked no one in particular, and then God’s—or God Jr.’s—ghost walked past her classroom’s open door. 

Shelly dropped Perry to the ground, where he landed with a thud and a small squeak.

Forgetting her class, Shelly turned and followed ghost Jesus down the hallway. 

After just a few strides, she walked straight into Lorna Morris, who taught a class of 3rd graders next door to Shelly’s room. Lorna was a busty fifty-something who shoved her “toucans” (Lorna’s term, which made Shelly shudder) into a brassiere that was several sizes too small and thus always looked as if she were hiding two loaves of sandwich bread in her blouse. Lorna had her glasses—the lenses of which were shaded dusky blue on top and blush pink at the bottom—down at the tip of her nose as she peered through them into the mysterious pages of a waxy Women’s Wear Daily. Lorna’s students were lined up at the watering fountain, each having a long sip before turning and walking obediently back into the classroom. 

When Lorna looked up, irritated at the interruption, all Shelly could do was point at the ghost of Jesus, who had stopped on the other side of the water fountain to smile gracefully at the children as they drank.

Lorna’s mouth fell open.

“Is that Mr. Omar Sharif?” Lorna asked, clutching Shelly’s wrist.

“Lorna, that is Jesus Christ!”

Lorna fainted dead away, but her class didn’t seem to notice. Lorna had them so well trained (in just one damned day!) that they just slurped their drinks and marched back into the class. None of the children let their attention wander far enough for them to even spot Jesus.

While Jesus’s ghostly 12-foot-frame was a lot to take in, Shelly’s eyes fixed on something closer to her. As a little red-haired girl in a hideous green dress sipped at the water fountain, Shelly saw that the girl wasn’t sipping water.

She was drinking wine.

At first, Shelly was too stunned to do anything. By the time she ran to stop the kids from drinking from the fountain, there were only two of Lorna’s students left to take a drink.

Shelly looked up at the giant ghost of Jesus, who was watching the kids stagger back into Lorna’s classroom with a look of benevolent grace upon his face.

“Jesus! You can’t give wine to kids!” she screeched.

Jesus looked down at her and furrowed his massive black eyebrows.

Another kid hopped up to the fountain and took a drink. Shelly moved to stop him, but the scent of wine hit her once again and her stomach churned in disgust. Of all the days to have a hangover!

(Shelly always had a hangover).

Shelly supposed that the kiddos back in Jesus’s day might have had wine. But that had been because the water wasn’t safe to drink. And they didn’t know better. Everyone knew better now!

“Where have you been for the last two thousand years?” Shelly asked Jesus, incredulous. “Have you been living under a rock?” 

Jesus nodded at her.

Shelly rolled her eyes. 

“Why all the wine, dude?” she asked.

Jesus mouthed a word. 

John.

Then he held up two fingers.

“Two Johns?” Shelly asked, and her cheeks went red. Surely Jesus hadn’t been there that one night when…

“Oh, John! Chapter 2!”

Jesus nodded, then held up a single finger.

“Verse 1?” Shelly asked.

Jesus nodded again; his deep brown eyes were cheerful. Then he held up 10 fingers, frowned, and quickly grew an 11th finger beneath his right pinkie.

“Ew,” Shelly said. “Verses 1-11?”

Jesus continued his chipper, vigorous nodding.

“Oh, is that the part of the Bible where you turn water into wine? That’s not really an explanation, bucko.”

Jesus winked.

She was about to give him a piece of her mind when she heard a scream behind her.

Shelly turned around and looked down to the next water fountain, where Berna Wallace, one of the kindergarten teachers, stood in the center of a circle of puking students.

Further down, she saw a couple of fifth or sixth grade boys giggling as they filled giant water bottles with wine from another of the water fountains. 

The school was basically three giant squares stacked atop one another, and each long hallway had six water fountains. That made for 24 water fountains per floor, and 72 total. 72 wine spigots for 450 students. Basically, a barrel or more of wine for every six students.

As Shelly stood there, frozen in nauseous shock, Jesus turned and continued down the hallway, stopping every now and then to gently brush the hair out of a puking 5th grader’s face or to benevolently wipe the snot from the nose of a 3rd grader experiencing her first case of drunken tears.

The scent of wine was thick in the hallway, so much so that the fluorescent lights seemed to shine spikes of sharp, purple merlot straight into Shelly’s brain. 

And Jesus continued down the hallway. 

Shelly cringed as more students flocked to the water fountains as their teachers did everything from scream to faint to cry. But no one seemed to know how to get past their shock and do something about it.

Shelly’d had her first drink in the 5th grade. She could still vividly remember that first drink. She could still, years later, remember that sense of calm, of steadiness, that relaxation that she had never experienced before. 

Since then, though, drinking had mostly ruined Shelly’s life. Even if the wine was holy, Shelly didn’t want the little assholes at Plateau Elementary to start drinking as early as she had. She didn’t want any of them to ever have a drink, though that was unlikely.

Especially now.

But her hangover had her reeling. What could she do?

She knew that there was only one way to find out.

Shelly stumbled over to the fountain, shoved a dizzy 4th grader off it, held her mouth above the nozzle, and pushed the button. A spray of red wine shot up into her mouth. 

Though the wine was delicious—perfect, really—holy, even—her first bodily reaction was a gag, followed by a visceral shudder. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. 

Shelly needed the hair of the dog, and she needed it now. 

Shelly drank until the feeling of nausea in her belly turned to one of pure joy. She kept gulping, letting the wine run over her chin, down her neck. She drank and she drank and she drank. Some of her hair came free from its clip and flopped forward into the fountain, where the bleached blonde strands of it absorbed the red wine.

When she’d slurped enough for her hangover to diminish, for her mind to clear, she stood up. She trotted back to her room, where most of her students were still thankfully planted in their seats. She grabbed her purse from the drawer of her desk, then ran back out the door, using her room key to lock the door behind her. 

Shelly trotted down the hall and unlocked the door that read “Boiler Room.” Bob the Janitor had given her a key so that they could meet inconspicuously, and the reminder of him made her groan. She pushed through the door and leapt down the stairs, landing perfectly in her beige pumps like a gentle doe lands upon its dainty hooves. 

Shelly was really good at being drunk.

She reached in her purse and pulled out her Virginia Slims and a lighter, then paused to light one of the cigarettes. She took a deep puff before she continued onwards. The nicotine hit the Jesus wine in her belly and it was as if the Holy Spirit itself had come alive within her. 

She smoked as she ran down another flight of stairs. When she reached the bottom, she turned right and made a full “U,” making for the space along the wall directly under the stairs. And there it was: the water main.

Just seeing all of the little switches that allowed water to spread through the building lifted some invisible weight from her shoulders. If she hadn’t screwed Bob the Janitor in the Boiler Room, she would have never been able to find the water main.

Had her gross sex with Bob the Janitor been capital D Destiny? Had it been God’s Plan?

She sent a silent thank you to Jesus. Or his ghost. Or whatever. This, it turns out, had been exactly what she needed.

Then she felt something behind her—it felt like warm sun soaking through her shirt—and she turned quickly, the ash of her cigarette floating to the cement floor and swirling around there.

And, there, of course, was Jesus. 

“Well, I guess I can just thank you in person,” she said. 

But how do you thank Jesus?

She held her cigarette between her lips, grabbed either side of her skirt with her thumbs and forefingers, and curtsied. 

Jesus smiled shyly and shook his head.

Then she watched Jesus’s baseball-sized ghost eyes flicker to her mouth. To her cigarette. She dropped the hem of her skirt and took a long drag.

“Do you want one?”

Jesus smiled again, and then held out his hand, which was the size of a baseball glove. 

Shelly wondered where all the baseball metaphors were coming from.

She handed ghost Jesus a cigarette and then flicked on her lighter as he bent, bent, bent down towards her. How was Jesus so tall? How was Jesus so brown? 

“Those fuckers at Saint Agnieszka’s are going to die when they find out that you don’t look like Mia Farrow,” Shelly told Jesus.

She lit the good Lord’s cigarette then turned back to the water main. Instead of turning off the water to the whole building, she efficiently flicked 29 of the 30 individual switches. 

Then, confident that the children couldn’t get any more wine out of the water fountains, she turned back to Jesus, who was watching the smoke float down his throat and into his lungs.

Shelly smiled.

“Here’s a thought, Jesus. Why don’t we go have a party in the Teacher’s Lounge?” Shelly said. Then she held up the box of cigarettes.

“I’ll bring the smokes,” she said.

Jesus licked his lips.

“You bring the wine.”

Like Sharon Stone and the zipper, Dr. Mike McClelland is originally from Meadville, Pennsylvania. He has lived on five different continents but now resides in Illinois with his husband, two sons, and a menagerie of ancient rescue dogs. He is the author of the short fiction collection Gay Zoo Day and teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University, where he won the 2024 Distinguished Faculty Award and serves as the Fiction Editor of the literary magazine Bluestem. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Guardian, Rolling Stone,The New York Times, WIRED, Boston Review, Vox, The Baffler, Fairy Tale Review, Ecotone, and a number of literary magazines and anthologies. Find him online at magicmikewrites.com.