Kate Busatto

Normies

E & I work in the columbarium. She catalogues the vacancies. The niches which are occupied, I check that they’re paid for in full. Often, they are not. The church does not charge interest on columbarium payments. This means I spend much of my day on the phone with bereaved family members, nickle and diming them for cremains’ rent. E does the advertisements in the church bulletins so that we can fill up the vacancies with more ash that does not pay.

I get cold so often in the columbarium that E brings me an extra sweatshirt every shift. The sweatshirt today says Mamacita Needs a Margarita. We laugh about wearing stupid sweatshirts with our clerical collars someday so that we might just offend everyone in the world, two girl priests who Need a Margarita.

*

E & I met in the summer after our first year of seminary. We were practicum training at the hospital as little chaplains. I liked E because when we first met she launched into gossip. She told me that two of our fellow seminarians had been having a love affair. She wouldn’t name names, she said, but it should be obvious to me; they’re the best of friends. One of the women was on the path to engagement with a law student, probably going to be a state senator or something, but left him for her best seminary friend. How wild is that? she said. Gonna be dirt poor, the two of them. Wild, said I, totally wild. I liked that E would disclose secrets to me; I liked that she thought I was trustworthy.

E & I were unprepared for our work as little chaplains in the hospital. We were still stuck in this first-year seminarian rut of trying to figure out why Thomas Aquinas is so damn important, and if he is, why doesn’t he ring a bell to the Normies when I mention his name. This distinction is one we make quickly, that everyone outside of seminary is a Normie and better off for it. We harken back to Vocation when doubt creeps in, just hammer the word Vocation over and over again.  

But we went into the hospital unprepared and woefully undaunted. The Supervisor was a tall woman who wore wraparound goggles and a priest’s collar. To this day, I do not know what the goggles were for. Poised, perched on the edge of her neatnik desk, she instructed E & I to imagine a cathedral every time we entered the hospital. A cathedral with stained glass holy as Notre Dame, she said. Or a forest of redwoods. Someplace divine. Can you smell the redwoods?

*

E gets a call from the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut. That sounds made up, but it is real, Normies! The Bishop will not be advancing her in the priesthood process. He feels that she has not displayed adequate commitment to the process, was obstinate in participating in group retreats, and lives with her fiancé out of wedlock. She screams into the phone, I didn’t know you were such a Puritan.

I hold her when she cries and tells me that she has wasted the last five years of her life.

I ask if this is just an obstacle, if she’ll have righteous grit to carry her through. She tells me probably not. Maybe she’ll become a consultant or something. Maybe she’ll work in sales and have weekends. Maybe she’ll go to conferences in Arizona. Have I ever been to Arizona?      

I have not, I say, but it sounds nicer than the columbarium. How is it that the two of us are always so close to death?

It would be good to have a job that forgets mortality, she says, a job that supposes we’ll all live forever.

*

On nightshifts, E worked the cancer floors. You should call them oncology floors not cancer floors, the Supervisor would chide. But me, I call ‘em like I see ‘em. E sat with the cancer patients who couldn’t sleep and talk or pray or just be. E had a Favorite Patient. The Favorite Patient brought her own soft pink pajamas from home for softness. She read Nora Roberts novels. She told E that she hoped to start a support group for young single mothers. The Favorite Patient had not gone through that hardship. She just thought it would be a nice thing to do. The Favorite Patient would be dying soon of cancer. E found out from her file. What the two of us realized that summer: there is little Good News in the world. E told me that she sang her Favorite Patient to sleep when the chemo nausea caused insomnia, sang to her for over an hour, just quiet songs she knew from childhood. I said to E, I didn’t know you could sing. When the Favorite Patient died just before summer broke fall, E sent flowers to the funeral home.

I worked the emergency department. The emergency department overnight was like this: I could not conjure redwoods. I could not see it for anything but what it was, linoleum and drywall and metal grates you can pull down to stop patients from killing themselves with the medical equipment and Styrofoam cups for water. Everyone was just dead-eyed, chewing on Styrofoam. You would not believe how instinctive it is, that when given a Styrofoam cup, most every person will take a bite out of it.

Midsummer, E messaged me during our shift that she saw fireworks from the cancer floor window. I had forgotten it was Fourth of July because there are no windows in the emergency department. She sent me a blurry picture. I could not see the fireworks, but her reflection in the glass was clear.

*

I get moved along the priesthood process. They call me a deacon. That is a designation I feel much too young to have. I cannot quit my columbarium duties at the church. In fact, I am asked to spend more hours here, which is good since I need to satisfy both E’s and my duties now. I am not as talented at designing the bulletin advertisements for niches as E, but I do my best. Saying the right thing is difficult without her.

What I still believe: E is a priest. No institution could ordain her priestliness, there is no manmade validation which edifies or clarifies someone to be like E. So I have this radical belief: priests are born. Very few people can both reveal and channel God. Most just do one or the other. If E told me to drop everything and follow her, I would, I’d do it.

When we go out to Irish coffee to catch up, she says she’s going to get the hell out of seminary. I ask if she means actual Hell, if that’s where she’ll be going. We both laugh because neither of us really believe in Hell. But I’ll still graduate one spring from now, and that’s fine, we’ll still be friends.

*   

I liked the drama of the trauma rooms. Lots of motorcycle accidents, lots of guys on PCP. Junkies were easy to talk to. I calmed patients down by holding their shoulders and whispering in their ears. The doctors and nurses could treat wounds unabetted with the patient under my spell. It was often life or death in the trauma rooms. When it was death, I said the Pause; it’s like a prayer to honor the life of the deceased and the valiant efforts of the medical team. It gave me time to collect myself before I had to comfort the family. Watching people die every shift, it wasn’t as hard as it seemed; E & I agree that the hardest part was dealing with the living.

Once, I touched a patient’s face in a trauma room. He was on stroke alert. Meaning that he probably had one stroke and might be on his way to a second. He said his daughter had married a very rich man, gave her a beautiful life with three sets of china and a house with tall hedges and Persian rugs. But the rich man did not take time for the patient’s daughter, no affection. He said he hated his son-in-law and missed his daughter. I miss being one of the normal people, I said and surprised us both.

*

The columbarium is cold. There are fewer vacancies than there used to be. Today, it’s nice to work in the quiet.

I’ll get my collar soon. I think of E singing lullabies, and I lose my faith a little more.

Kate Busatto is 25 years old and separates her laundry. She holds a BFA in Drama from Carnegie Mellon and a Master of Divinity from Yale. Her work has been featured in Five Dials, The Moth, Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, and Tampa Review. Kate joined the SF Writers Grotto in 2023. She is currently at work on her first novel. She has a website: katebusatto.com.

Kate wrote the following about her story:

‘Normies’ was inspired by my relationship with my friend Emily. We met through a chaplaincy training program. Although the story itself is fiction, E is very much real. E, or Emily, is a person I deeply admire: her sense of self, her humility, her silliness. And so I wrote this for her, and I'm grateful that the editors at The Interpreter's House have allowed me to give a little piece of my friend to the readers. I wish for everyone to meet a friend like her in their lifetimes.