Doughnuts After the Sermon
After Vision After the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) by Paul Gauguin (1888)
Our great aunt was a nun, but she never told us this story. Gauguin lays it out best, the angel’s hair yellow like belts we earned in YMCA basement karate. The biblical figure nudges Jacob into the red earth, the two fighters flanked by dozens of devoted French women, heads bowed in prayer. Jacob asks the angel for his name and receives no answer, but he refuses to break kayfabe in front of the crowd. The fight goes on. At dawn, the angel begs: Release me, for it is breakfast time. Yet Jacob insists: I will not go until you bless me. I am not afraid of you and I will beat your ass. The angel hip-checks Jacob, and he eats shit, but he’s fine. This conflict is only vision, a product of the crowd’s shared hallucination — the priest droned on from Genesis in his sermon and now the women too are starving, like when my brother and I sparred in the church gymnasium after Sunday service with powdered hands. After calling timeout, we’d pop doughnuts into our mouths and toss aside paper plates, then take turns locking each other’s heads under our arms until we gave up our names.
Zachary Kocanda’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Oyez Review, and Another Chicago Magazine, among others. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. More at zacharykocanda.com.
