Short Story: 'Host'

Written by: Michael Shawn Milazzo


My bell used to ring, a divine melodic clang from the heavens above. My body was a built erect like a fortress with light brown and red bricks. My architecture was absolutely magnificent as if angels themselves constructed me. My eyes were gigantic stained glass windows of the Father and his family. Inside the people used to pray to the Father, The focal point of the house internally suspended Jesus Christ on the crucifix. Inside me rows of pews used to provide a place for the masses to sit, kneel or to pray.
Many warm days of happiness I have witnessed, hundreds of successful weddings, extreme emotions that intensify every second before and after the ceremonial kiss of forever and eternal love. My vast body provided safety, comfort, hope and forgiveness to a world surrounded by sin.


Many have celebrated one’s life in this house of sanction as well, Funerals of never forgotten people. The days that the last exhort of air of man leaves and his eyes slowly close for eternal sleep. Tears of the beloved and cherished memories of that feeling that overwhelm the body with the smallest to the greatest tinge of symbolic electricity. The days where Gods children will rest forever and be embraced farther into the ascent of the creators caring arms.

The church bells rang to tell the world what time it was. I was built in New Orleans surrounded by jazz, beat and music of man who explored art to the finest degree. Traffic and civilization moved through the world alive on the grey concrete that gave walkway. The green grass carried the word of God pushing all the way to the highest tree top that danced a shadow to the ground for the people to huddle under if they were exhausted or hot. Cooling down the human’s body’s and birds that sang for peace. Cars honking and motors humming to the tune of this musical city. The sun always illuminating high above giving sanction to the people always in my home.
My house has been tainted.
The desecration occurred after the most destructive hurricane in the United States since Okeechobe in 1928. Man calls it, Katrina.
Now, my body has been destroyed, Ceiling torn and wrecked from the horrible winds that blew upon me. The land flooded to look like a mucky sea. My eyes were shattered from the intense explosion and debris that perforated. The church pews thrown around like beach balls now, in a chaotic cluster. Hundreds of shattered and cracked candles that lit the follower’s prayers and dreams scattered in a damaging way inside this home.


No longer are the trees breathing oxygen to the land around me. They have been decimated and plucked from the soil. Boats drift inhibited and bounce off my skin.
The booming sounds of gunshots, rioting and helicopters souring high above. The mute sounds of life from the animals that once flourished. I cry for what sin I host, a surviving violent scavenger who uses my home as a shelter of evil.
The man is wearing worn out ripped clothing, his hygiene and sanitation is nonexistent. A hooded man who pulls another victim to his sadistic, grotesque, masochistic, murder and torture to the altar of Christ. He limps with injury and hunger while he drags the woman’s body from her hair, the scalp cracking with pain and their clothing soaked from the water splashing for freedom.

The bruised woman, finally awakening conscious after severe head trauma done with his bludgeoned weapon, a table leg taken from my home of love. Her blood staining the white, dirty, near virgin carpet. There’s nothing I can do but watch. He tears her chest open with a metallic, cold steel hunting knife. She screams, He loves it when they scream. He pulls out her intestines as quickly as he can while she’s still alive. The screams echo throughout the building, her life flashed before her and my eyes ---was once baptized here as a child and now gone.
He begins to eat.
The man has gone mad and I guess I cannot blame him. My deepest sorrow calls out for him and the survivors who were stranded, never found or rescued. Maybe one day I will be physically reconstructed, just maybe one day, this life will end.

No part of this work may be reproduced or republished by any means without the prior written permission of the author.