FALLING FROM THE FATHER - by Onlyreal

They taught Eli that God never dropped His children. He released them. That was the word Pastor Malachi loved—released—as if falling into darkness was a privilege granted only to those who disappointed Heaven deeply enough. Eli learned this lesson early, kneeling beside his father at the altar while candle wax dripped like melting teeth onto the floor. The church smelled of old wood, iron, and something faintly rotten beneath the incense. It was a place where prayers echoed too long, as if something else was repeating them back wrong. “Look up when you pray,” Malachi would command, fingers digging into Eli’s neck. “If you look down, you invite lower things to listen.” Eli always looked up. Even when his knees cracked.Even when blood soaked through his trousers.Even when his mother coughed herself hollow in the back room, her lungs tearing apart with wet, choking sounds that prayers could not stitch back together. She begged God softly. Malachi rebuked her loudly. “Faith does not whimper,” he told her as she vomited black into a basin. “If He wanted you healed, you would already be standing.” Eli watched her die on the floor, eyes wide, hands clawing the air like she was falling through something invisible. The last sound she made was not a prayer—it was a gasp so sharp it felt like it cut through Eli rather than his mother. That night, the church groaned. Not the wood.Not the pipes. The foundation. Eli lay awake in his childhood room behind the pulpit, listening as something beneath the building inhaled slowly, deeply, savoring the silence his mother left behind. Then it spoke. “She slipped.” Eli pressed his ear to the floor, heart hammering. “You watched.” The voice was not loud. It didn’t need to be. It crawled straight into him, coiling around his spine. “Do you know why He didn’t catch her?” it asked. Eli shook, whispering, “Stop.” “He only catches what He wants to keep.” The dreams came after that. Always the same. Eli stood at the edge of a bottomless pit carved into the shape of a cathedral. The walls were lined with faces—men, women, children—all frozen mid-fall, mouths stretched in eternal apology. Above him loomed a blinding light with no face, no arms. And behind him stood his father. Malachi never pushed. He only loosened his grip. “You’re slipping, Eli,” Malachi said in waking life too, his eyes hollowing day by day. “You don’t pray like you used to. You don’t bleed like you used to.” Something was wrong with the church now. The Bible on the altar began to swell, its pages sticking together like damp skin. Candles hissed when lit, dripping wax the color of bruises. Sometimes Eli swore the cross above the pulpit leaned toward him. The voice beneath the floor returned every night. “He is afraid,” it said of Malachi.“He knows.” Knocks began appearing on Eli’s bedroom door from the inside of the walls. Slow. Patient. Three at a time. When he screamed, Malachi accused him of inviting demons through doubt. So Malachi decided to fix his son. The ritual was older than scripture, copied from margins and burned sermons Malachi claimed were revelations. He carved symbols into the church floor himself, hands trembling, sweat dripping into the grooves like offerings. On the final night, Eli was dragged to the altar. Candles ringed him. The air thickened until breathing felt like swallowing oil. The Bible split open, its spine tearing with a sound like cartilage snapping. Words slithered off the pages and crawled along the floor, rearranging themselves into symbols that pulsed faintly, like veins. “This will hurt,” Malachi said, voice quaking with devotion. “But pain is proof He still sees you.” Eli looked up at his father—really looked. Malachi’s shadow stretched wrong behind him, too long, too bent, as if something else wore his outline poorly. “Which Father are you talking about?” Eli whispered. The candles went out all at once. Darkness fell like a body hitting water. The floor split open. Not cracking—opening—peeling back layers of stone and bone and old prayers packed together like corpses. From the wound rose something vast and heavy, dragging grief behind it like chains. It had a man’s shape once. Now it was a collection of endings. Its eyes were pits within pits, each one a different fall. Its mouth opened sideways, splitting its face, filled with hands instead of teeth—hands reaching, clutching, catching. “I gather what He discards,” it said, voice layered with thousands of whispers. “I keep what Heaven lets go.” Malachi screamed scripture until his tongue blackened, swelling until it burst between his teeth and slithered onto the altar, still twitching. The thing didn’t look at him. It knelt before Eli. “You were never His son,” it said gently. “You were leverage.” Eli felt something inside him finally give way. Not faith. Not fear. Hope. He stepped forward. The fall was not fast. It was intimate. Hands caught him, cradled him, pulled him apart piece by piece—not flesh, but memory, guilt, every moment he stood still while someone else suffered. Each fragment was swallowed lovingly. Above, Malachi collapsed into the chalk circle, eyes burned white, mouth opening and closing in soundless repentance. Below, Eli descended forever. Held. When morning came, the church stood quiet. The altar was cracked. The floor sealed itself shut. Inside the chalk circle knelt Pastor Malachi, rocking, whispering apologies to a ceiling that had turned its face away. And deep beneath the church, something breathed steadily. A son had fallen from the Father. And something far older had caught him.

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