TILTED HOUSE
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Nonfiction

[ N O N F I C T I O N ]

 
 
 
 

Stories of Padre Pio

 





Padre Pio lived in a monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy for most of his life. Right now, his body, uncorrupted, lies in a glass casket there for pilgrims to come and see. I have seen it. 

When I was twenty-one years old, my mother, who was psychotically in love with the agony of Jesus, promised she’d take me to Italy and France if I’d agree to visit churches and shrines with her while we were there. She had a special devotion to Padre Pio and a taste for blood, stigmata specifically. A wild surge of religious fervor a few years earlier had made her a stranger to us, but she was softer in a way. We were convinced that she was going to become a lay Carmelite nun or join a Marian cult, which would have been a relief. She’d covered every wall and surface of the home she shared with my stepfather with statues of different iterations of the Virgin Mary and big, livid crucifixes. A picture of Jesus with long blonde hair pointing at his gruesome, flaming heart now hung in the kitchen and made me lose my appetite when I was home for the weekend from the state school I was barely attending two hours away. 

I said yes to the trip. I knew that it was an attempt to expose me to some heavy Catholicism and make me see the light about getting married and having as many babies as G_d saw fit to give me, but I was in love with the idea of France. I mean: La vie! L’amour! Right? Still desperately pretending at bisexuality, I reasoned that I could fall in love with a French guy, maybe, and get her off my case. She would be far away from my new French life, at least. 

I packed every wrong thing for a religious trip. Diet pills, cutoffs, Doc Martens, and a bunch of get-it-girl tops that laced up in the front or barely grazed my waistline. Some Neil Gaiman books and my Walkman and some tapes. Extra packs of Marlboro Lights. Gum. A big can of mixed nuts that I could eat, one at a time, if the food was too rich and dangerous. I was starving myself and mortifying my body. 

I don’t remember his body. I remember being told to come back wearing a dress that covered my shoulders and knees. I remember feeling fascinated and repulsed by the relics encased in gold and glass: Shards of bone. Shredded cloth. A cabinet with a single blood-encrusted woolen glove resting on a pedestal draped in blue velvet. I tried to lift the lid. Locked. A woman who worked in the gift shop saw and shooed me away. 

 
 



Stories of Padre Pio (+ The Bangles) 

Padre Pio grew up in rural Italy. Exceptionally devout all his life, he spent most of his time in prayer, starving himself, and mortifying his body. Psychotically in love with the agony of Jesus, with a special devotion to the Virgin Mary, he first experienced the intimate secret of Christ’s agony—invisible stigmata—in his family’s home. 

When I think of that now: A trance. Blood pooling and stilling. Blood that can never, never touch the ground. The romance of a dangerous confidence. Wanting everyone and no one to know. The dread of everyone knowing. Of no one knowing.

Close your eyes. Give me your hand, darling.

When I thought of it then: This is a thing that can happen to a person. I’m leaving out a detail about my own wild surges of religion. When I was twelve years old, I took a class to prepare for Confirmation and found a special devotion to the Virgin Mary. I began to see her as my advocate and started praying the rosary every day. I kept this a secret. It soothed me and put me in a trance. A couple of years later, I found out that cigarettes could soothe me and put me in a trance. Drinking could soothe me and put me in a trance. Drugs. By the time I was twenty-one years old, attempting to touch a bloody relic made perfect sense. I didn’t think about it. I was in a trance. 

Now: The abstract words of religion—ecstasy, pain, transcendence.

Do you feel my heart beating? Do you understand? 

Then: The abstract words of addiction—ecstasy, pain, transcendence. 

Now: I imagine he believed he’d starved and beaten holy blood into his torn palms, his broken feet, his tender side. Imagined blood.

I don’t want to lose this feeling.

Then: I don’t want to lose this feeling.

 
 



Stories of (the) Padre Pio (gift shop) 

I still have two of the things my mother bought for me at the Padre Pio gift shop. One is the book STORIES OF PADRE PIO. The stories are about conversions and problems that Padre Pio solved for people whose psychotic love for and special devotion to his ministry led them to San Giovanni Rotondo during his lifetime. Answered prayers. There are only three or four pages of vague biographical details. I look at the pictures in it sometimes. I can’t let it go. When I cull books for a move or just because, it always makes the cut. 

Of course, she gave me a rosary. 

I wish I still had the t-shirt she bought for me there. I think about it often. Yes, I said a t-shirt. A t-shirt from a gift shop at the monastery of a priest who experienced the wounds of Christ. 

Ok: technically, there was a lot wrong with it. It was tiny and loose at the same time, meant for an adult but ridiculously short, with an image of Padre Pio printed above the left breast. In it, he’s raising a gloved hand to bless an invisible crowd, just out of frame. 

Can I tell you that this little t-shirt got me laid? It quickly earned a place in the get-it-girl top hall of fame for the way it looked absolutely perfect with a miniskirt or cutoffs or a pair of baggy overalls, hugging my ribs and exposing my tender side. Women wanted to know who the man on my shirt was, and when I explained, I always emphasized the mystical aspect. I had developed a special devotion to Padre Pio and a taste for blood, stigmata specifically. 

A couple of years later, I gave the t-shirt to a friend who I knew would do right by it and leave it wadded up on bedroom floors all over town. I was in a relationship and told myself I needed to settle down and quit getting blackout every week. I needed to hang up my jersey. It makes me laugh now because I had a few years of treating my body like a chemistry set and making other dangerous choices ahead of me. Oh, well.

 
 



(More) Stories of (the) Padre Pio (gift shop) 

I use the rosary my mother bought for me at the Padre Pio gift shop every day. I’ve been given at least a dozen since my first Holy Communion, but this one has been my main man for about twenty years. 

The beads are white plastic, and the words PRAY, HOPE, AND DON’T WORRY are spelled out with the black and white beads used to make baby bracelets, one word for each decade. This was Padre Pio’s answer to basically any problem or question: PRAY, HOPE, AND DON’T WORRY, which, imho is v v v AA. 

The beads were originally connected with silky navy thread, but I twisted them in prayer so much for so long that the thread broke in a couple of places. I lost the A in PRAY about 15 years ago this way. 

I took it to a shop in New Iberia, Louisiana called Rosary House to get it mended. This place is bananas. I love it.  Their website is broken, but here is a picture: 



The lady who helped me said right away that she couldn’t put it back together with thread, just regular stainless links. And no new A—they didn’t have that. I said okay. She called me a week later to say that it was ready, and I think I paid ten dollars for the repair. The stainless links between the second and third decades broke a few years later and there’s a safety pin there now, holding it together. The silver coating on most of the big Our Father beads (that’s not what they’re called but you know what I mean) has worn away. It’s in rough shape. 

I pray for the people in my life. My mother, who is basically the same, but has hardened some. She doesn’t try to do religion to me anymore, but she does try to do Fox News to me, behavior that makes her seem like even more of a stranger than her stigmata hounding back in the nineties. It’s what she wants. I don’t know.

I pray for my friends and the people I work with. I make myself pray for people who get on my nerves. I used to pray that G_d would give them a reason to immediately pack up and move away from Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I live, but now I just ask for the grace to deal with their fuckery (which is usually just a reaction to some part of myself I can’t accept). I pray for the woman I am crushed-out on to have everything, everything, everything she wants in life. For her to be happy. 

I do pray for myself. Sometimes I ask for a thing that I want and sometimes I get it. Sometimes that works the way I want it to, but usually it is different. I ask G_d to help me mind my own business and guard my mouth. To put me where I am needed.

I’m not done with my fascination with the mystical and the esoteric. A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to join the liberal Episcopal church in town, like really join and get the box of envelopes and everything. I took a class about Episcopal history to prepare, and I learned from the young and very patient priest that he thought that Transubstantiation could be real if I wanted it to be, and that the reason the bell on the altar is rung during the Communion blessing was to let people in the Middle Ages (I think) standing in the town square know that it was time for Communion, not to summon the Holy Spirit. “Y’all are really ruining this for me,” I told him. I still go a lot, or I did before the pandemic. 

I’m not super out about praying the rosary. It seems to make people think I am religious and uptight, and I’m not. It’s not about religion. It’s a way I can safely go into a trance every day and not be in this wondrous and terrifying-ass world for twenty minutes. I swear it does something to my brain waves. I have to believe in a Higher Power so that I don’t die of alcoholism, and this is one of the ways I act out my believing. I leave all of my problems on those beads. I try.





 
 
 

Jane V. Blunschi holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Arkansas. Her collection of stories, Understand Me, Sugar, was published in 2017 by Yellow Flag Press, and her work has appeared in Paper Darts, SmokeLong Quarterly, MUTHA Magazine, and Foglifter. Originally from Lafayette, Louisiana, Jane lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

 
Jane V. Blunschi