Are You Saved Yet?

By Gina Hillier

Gina Hillier is an English major in her junior year on VWU. Born and bred in Virginia Beach, Gina writes creative fiction, including short stories, monologues, poems, and a lot of Dungeons and Dragons prep. She takes a great interest in oracular practices, such as tarot and scrying, as well as pagan mythologies and absurdist horror.

I was driving on the dark, slick roads of the city of my childhood. I’d lived here for my entire twenty years, all on the dull and dystopian side of a coastal tourist town. The summers were exhausting and bright, and the winters were sharp, dark, and slick, like a snake's fang. My car couldn’t make cold air, not since the invisible leak of liquid-cold wheezed between the cogs and coils of the engine that made my life—and it was my life; I delivered pizzas. I’m assigned an order, I pull up the directions, I drive to someone’s house, and I knock on someone’s door. I remember most people I deliver to, most regulars anyhow, and I’d lived in this town my whole life. This gave me a sense of fulfillment, I think. It felt fulfilling to know the faces behind the houses that shaped the architecture of my upbringing. The pay ain't half bad either.

The company I worked for was faceless, and at times, grotesque with its rife advertisements. I wondered if the algorithms had mistaken my employment for interest, or hunger. There came a point where I couldn’t escape their terrible jingles and puffy voices telling me to “mix’n’match” and “save big.” The best part of the job was leaving the building and driving in my own car. Sweet petrichor still permeated the air I walked through, persistent still against asphalt and streetlamps. I was to take a double delivery in the neighborhood I had lived in as a baby. In fact, a serendipitous gasp escaped my mouth when I saw the first address: 1245 Gardenia Crescent. It was a wonderful name, eliciting images of the moon and the earth. The numbers were so powerful, stalwart—perfect and rigid like a parking garage or a courthouse. I had no memories of this home. The joy I felt came from my father, who had told me about this place.

“Your mom had a big garden in the back,” he recalled, “and the deck was a piece of shit. The one out front? It was a rectangle shape, but it barely left any room to put a chair or something out there. I had to take it all down—got my little tow truck and that tall crane truck I let you go in—when you were about five? You know, you were up high, kind of near a telephone pole? Your mom was pissed, and you had this dumb smile on your face. I used that truck to fix the deck. Now it’s like half of an oval—you see how it curves out? Allows you to actually put a chair or a table out there or something. Redid the railing, redid the paint.” 

When he gave this speech, we were in his dated, beige Toyota Corolla, looking out under moonlight to the repainted white sheen of the half-oval balcony. To be plain, we were parked in front of a stranger’s house, pointing at their deck from behind our tinted windows. It had been a few months since then, but some part of me recognized the address and its perfect name, even printed on a flimsy sheet of receipt paper.

The neighborhood itself, Red Grove, had an impregnable circle shape. The branches of the neighborhood extended out in curved limbs that all ended in a cul-de-sac, all connected to central roads that acted as a traversable radius from the main road to the inner, complete circle. In the center eye of the inner circle stood Red Grove Elementary School, which was the first thing I saw when I turned down Red Grove’s radius. Its silhouette was gleaming with the lunar shine of the playground’s mediocre height. Red Grove was shadowed by the smoothest of trees overlooking half-manicured lawns, though now the grass was a lame tan, muted by the uncharacteristically harsh winter. The road I drove down was wide enough to harbor a median with smooth trees, most reaching upwards with their barren twigs. The houses down each side were modest, almost quiet. The porch lights were warm, and the houses ranged from wide, shaded bungalows to typically panelled two story homes. Every house had a garage and a front yard. Some auspicious homes had a small courtyard of Tuscan archways that formed a passageway to a side yard.

Betwixt houses like any other, I found my estranged childhood home. That night’s moon did not shed an exuberant amount of details on the house, but I could faintly see the big picture. Its two stories were capped with a comically triagonal roof, which was adorned in a white trim. The mailbox was a classic picket rod holding up a black, ovular tin. And there was the balcony, of course, which jutted forward from the second-story windows without any support beams beneath it. Even in the dark, I could make out the exposed wooden construction on its underside. The ovular shape, however, was made invisible by light of night; any passerby may not be graced with this detail, but I knew it was there, keeping watch over the concrete driveway that poured out from under the closed garage door just beneath it. Walking past the pastel blue sportscar in the driveway, I turned and stepped towards the entrance. A plain, white door was affixed to a smaller chunk of the house. This entrance was pushed a bit further back, accessible by the concrete side path connected to the driveway. This little chunk of the house was only one story and seemed only large enough to encompass a cozy living room. I knocked, and didn’t wait long before a short, tattooed man answered in expecting delight.

“Hey, what’s happenin’?” His face was like a glyph, doused with strange lines and symbols that seemed to form a nexus of religious imagery that reached down his arms and knuckles. I recognized a couple: a pentacle, the horned god, and an orthodox cross.

“Hey, it’s goin’ alright.” I began to open the insulated delivery bag, and feeling quite spirited,  added, “This is actually the home I lived in as a baby.”

He stood silent until the pizzas were in his hand, “It’s a small world, yeah? I don’t live here, I’m just visiting a friend.” His teeth, as he was now smiling, were wet and golden, adorned with many crowns.

“Oh, word,” I closed the delivery bag and slung it around my shoulder, “but, thank you! Have a good night!”

He wished me well and shut the door. As I walked under the gibbous moon, I felt some semblance of faith stir within me. I had lived here without memory, as though in secret. Now, another person lives here, a person with strange friends with glyphs on their face, who would buy them pizza on wet nights. As the night’s breeze swiveled in the air, I knew that my secret childhood home would know community again, and that was enough to send me skipping to my car. I slotted the insulated bag into the space behind my seat, and sunk behind the steering wheel, marking this order as complete, thus receiving my healthy tip.

The next delivery was in the same neighborhood, 1118 Lilypad Crescent, which I thought to be a cute and fractured sort of name. I drove around the wet inner circle, the whole neighborhood turning like a keyhole under my wheels. I rolled up to the house, parked by their curb, and put on the hazard lights before opening my door.

The driveway held no vehicles. The lawn was torn up and utterly destroyed; brown rubble and dirt lay bare in place of grass. A few bags of fertilizer or soil hid amongst the perimeter of my path, pressed up against the gray brick lining of an empty flowerbed. The lawn and flowerbed were synonymous in their uprooted appearance, for neither territory held any sort of flora. I saw, too, that the house, a one-story bungalow, had a patio under a generous awning. Two wooden support beams, waxy with globby white paint, stood besides the path to the front door. The house was painted with a green tint, though the exact shade was impossible to determine under the cloudy whims of night.

“Hi! You are being recorded!” Rapturous, white light beamed from above the garage. A robotic voice, which belonged to a motion-activated sensor, piercingly chimed from the sterile mote of light. The entire driveway, down to the curb, was made plain and available to all who would look upon it. Squinting, I walked the delivery bag to the gray door with a square window at eye level. A doorbell with an embedded camera shed a dim, teal halo around its button, which sat just beneath its opaque, glassy lens. I had my reservations about these pervasive doorbells, especially since this job had affirmed their popularity, but I had been trained to always ring the doorbell if the customer has one, and only if they had no doorbell may I knock. Besides, my vision was still burnt from the garage’s glowing, which weaved a shrapnel of light through the two, waxy pillars beside me. I rang the doorbell and took a step back so that the door could open. The patio was entirely bare, which left me with very little to idle over, thus leading my eyes to the doormat.

Beneath my feet and illuminated by only a sharp corner of artificial white light, I saw Jesus on the cross, weeping red, red blood. A smoggy crown of thorns sunk into the thin layer of flesh hugging his skull, which also bled down onto his dirty body, adorned with rags. An arid wasteland weeped behind him, draped in incongruent twilight. The garage’s light shed acutely on his left hand, and I could see some smudged nail tear through his palm, pinning him in place to the symbol that he would make into that of salvation. I noticed then, that something was off with the composition of the picture itself: the crown of thorns was made abstract, sometimes blending into Jesus’ brown hair. I could scarcely relay the sharpness of the thorns laid upon his martyred head, and the nails embedded in his hands were abstracted and flat. By all means, my initial glance over this doormat was uncanny, for whether it be darkness or otherwise, the fine details remained elusive. For a moment, I considered the nails to be long, iron stakes, given their warped form and sharpened appearance. Perhaps the obscurity was caused by the pool of darkness about the night and this patio? Was it the selective sliver of light that scrutinized his left hand and shrouded all else? Yes, I thought at once that it was just the dark obscuring the minute details of art. But I saw it then: the image was AI generated. It was plain at my feet: an AI-generated image of Jesus weeping blood on his cross, red ichor trickling down from his head, all while an angry unseen dusk bore down on his miserable body. I then identified a piss-yellow hue to the entire mat, a dead giveaway to its genesis.

Waiting at the very bottom of the scratchy doormat were the words “ARE YOU SAVED YET?” in an ambivalent, pissy white. The word “you” had some manner of topographical error; whatever generated this image had confused the layer on which the text stood, thus making the subject of this sentence slide into the image itself, primarily affecting the “Y.” Just as a children's slide flows downward, the branches of this letter slid backwards, away from the viewer. It was like the text had been melted into the pigment of the picture behind it, as though it were roadkill.

The door opened swiftly. A man with the posture of a question mark now stood, bent down on me as I flinched myself into eye contact with him.

“Hello,” my voice cracked, “looks like your total is going to be $23.21.”

“Hey,” he said. His voice was wet, almost sick, like his throat was overflowing with mucus. I could see that he wore something like a hoodie, stained with white, abstract streaks near the bottom. He had a tattoo of some tailed creature on his neck that warbled as he jerked his hand into his jeans’ pocket. I stood before him for a most uncomfortable period of time as he sifted through his wallet. He almost gave me exact change: one twenty, three dollar bills, and a quarter. I took note of the crisp bills he had given me, for I swear that they were still warm in my palm as I crinkled them. I handed him his pizza silently.

“Were you looking at the mat?” His tone was faithless and unreadable. Very few customers had bothered to speak to me outside of the expected script, and I guess I had hoped that he’d be no different. 

“Huh? Oh—yeah, yeah the mat is—yeah.”

“It’s my moms. I’ll tell her you like it. Have a good night.”

“You too.”

The door shut behind him.

I was supposed to leave now, leave with the perfect twenty dollar bill and the crisp, crisp singles. I was supposed to leave, so I left. I left the barren, concrete floor of their patio, careful not to tread on their lawn because it was impolite, even if it was just ruined brown dirt. I opened my back door, put the delivery bag where it belonged, closed my door, got in the car, and turned the key in the ignition.

I saw their savior's blood in the sheen of the wet asphalt that crunched under my wheel.. Who had generated such a volatile image? The horrid invention of AI-generated images of that caliber had not been around for more than a year, and these people already had a doormat with the most sacrilegious incarnation of imagery I had ever seen, and surely, they had purchased this doormat—who had sold it? I don’t imagine that they had purchased it from just any store, nor did the mat seem homemade, but regardless of its acquisition, was there no lapse in judgement in the bringing of that doormat to that door? Did the person who conceived of the idea, to prompt a picture of Jesus on the cross and to place it on a doormat, harbor a strong value of truth in its creation? Were they Christian? Did the doormat save them?

It came upon me then, that the world was not a place, the world was something being done. The answers seemed so plain. Someone generated that image. Someone made the water-burning software to generate images. Someone had built every single one of these houses I drove by. My father built that deck, that glyph-guy ordered a pizza, and I delivered it. Yet the wheels beneath me turned and toiled on the wet, black road. The moon fell behind the rumbling of wispy clouds. No more light trickled down that evening, the wheels beneath me carried on, and I returned to the fold of the evening rush.