Old Father Lewis

2 years ago this week I started a blog of short stories inspired by Rory's Story Cubes. As time went by the stories didn’t need the cubes. But the cubes will forever be part of the blog. To celebrate my blog’s second birthday I’ve returned to the cubes the week. 5 stories inspired by those 9 cubes. The blog has asked me to ask you not for presents to celebrate its birthday but for comments, shares, likes etc. Let’s get this thing going viral :-) 

Today something special, The first ever set of cubes I used were these

so for this story I used the same cubes but a different story.

Old Father Lewis never went anywhere without the good book in his hand. None of us ever saw him open it or read from it. But he always held it in his long bony fingers as if just by holding he would absolved of all sins, and his way to heaven would be lit like my trusty old torch lit the way to our outside loo on cold winter nights. It seemed like his job was less priest and more Sergeant Major Scaremonger, employed by our parents and teachers to keep us on the straight and narrow and out of mischief. Through his strict, humour free lessons he made sure we were in no doubt that the good lord was the all seeing eye, and we young whippersnappers needed to live a wholesome life if we were to enjoy the flowers of heaven not the horrors of hell.

‘God sees everything you do and hears everything you say.’ He proclaimed, his stern face looked like it'd never cracked a smile in his 107 years on this earth.

‘The devil is pure evil, crackling with evil like lightning cackles with electricity.’ He’d remind us week after week in Sunday school and school assembly.

He spoke of the horrors the devil would inflict on us, if after our deaths we were sent to the other place.

But his version of events left more question marks in my mind than answers. I might have been only a Sunday school student, still wearing my L-plates when it came to life, but even to my juvenile mind I could tell Father Lewis was talking nonsense.

If the devil was so wicked and celebrated evil, why was he so cruel to those who did his work on earth? Why when you were naughty did you get sent to hell to be punished? When in effect you’d been doing the work of the very being who was now punishing you. Surely this being that was dripping evil from every pore would want to reward those sent to him not burn them in his fires. So surely the devil should be someone who despised all forms of evil, not who was evil incarnate. But old Lewis had a hard shell, and he batted back questions like that with his standard ‘don’t be insolent boy. Woe betide you,’ he warned, ‘ if you ever think about making a deal with Beelzebub.’  .

But when they prised that book out of Lewis’s cold, dead hands we were surprised to see it wasn’t the bible at all. Instead it was a diary revealing the sexist, racist, homophobic thoughts of our good minister and proving what I’d always thought, that Lewis had been in cahoots with the devil for as long as anyone could remember.

See the original story with these cubes here