The Atheist s Prayer

Версия на русском языке доступна по ссылке: http://proza.ru/2025/09/30/1690

The meeting lasted an eternity.
And eternity smelled like stale air-conditioning, smoked blinds, and human bodies sealed inside expensive suits. Those suits cost more than a downtown apartment, yet they hung on their owners like cheap plastic wrap—damp, sticky, the linings soaked through. It felt as if the bodies inside were desperate to escape.

In the corner, the projector hummed. The light cut across the room, carving faces into masks—too white, too still, with smiles that looked like cracks in porcelain. Graphs and arrows flickered on the screen as if someone were drawing a map to salvation. Everything climbed upward. Always up. Never down.

The air was thick, a spoiled soup of coffee, toner, and mint gum. Papers clung together the way sweaty skin does. People scratched under their arms, loosened their ties, pretending the fate of the world depended on their decisions—that they were part of something noble. As if this PowerPoint could stop hunger, chaos, floods—
or Mark’s unzipped fly in the third row.

The slides kept changing: smiling orphans, sullen car owners promised compensation after the latest flood. Those faces looked back at the room like ghosts forgotten by their priests. The orphans smiled too widely, as if someone had paid them with lunch and a new T-shirt. The drivers glared, forced to pose beside their drowned cars, not even allowed to wipe the water from their faces.

Conversations jumped and skidded, never staying long on anything. The secretary’s skirt, which had become the main presentation by accident. The next storm that would catch workers unprepared. Asphalt already dying before the first frost. Every word carried another one behind it—something no one dared to say aloud.

The word “strategy” came up more often than “and.”
Every “mission” and “goal” cracked the air like dry bone—fragile, but still breaking.
A theater for swollen stomachs and eyes that didn’t crave truth, only the glow of the projector.

And none of this would’ve ever happened if one man in the room hadn’t been a coffee fanatic.
An atheist — someone who believed neither in God nor in the company’s “mission,” but firmly believed that the fifth cup could easily be followed by a sixth.

Espresso.
Frappe.
Flat white.
Macchiato.
And two mugs of Americano.

There was a whole cathedral of caffeine swirling inside him. Coffee was his religion. A black mass for the internal organs.

Coffee gives you energy.
Coffee lowers your risk of melanoma.
Coffee burns fat.
Coffee protects memory.
Coffee cleans the gut better than any dietitian.
Coffee turns your heart into a marathon runner—then into a gravedigger.
Coffee is a free antidepressant with the aftertaste of hot batteries.
Coffee is a guardian angel that smells of burnt beans and tastes like ash.
Plus.
Plus.
Plus.

But today, coffee had turned into a demon.

Espresso pounded his ribs like a prisoner banging a spoon on the bars.
Frappe tugged at his spine as if it wanted to rip it open from the base upward with an icy hook.
Macchiato drummed against his sphincter like a school marching band ordered to play until death.
Americano rumbled in a deep bass: “Let us out. Let us out. Now.”
Flat white tickled his bladder from the inside like a sadist whispering about new tortures.

The problem wasn’t his heart.
Wasn’t insomnia.
Wasn’t the liver quietly writing his name on a blacklist.
The problem was that his bladder had swollen into something like the Holy Grail — only instead of wine, it was filled with a caffeinated hell.

He sat in his chair, straight as a martyr. A true martyr of etiquette. Every second on that seat was another drop of molten wax on his skin. He knew that interrupting the speaker for a bathroom break would be like spitting in the Pope’s face during communion.

And the speaker went on. Slides flickered.
Orphans smiled.
Drivers scowled.
Asphalt died and resurrected again.
On the screen, arrows climbed upward like saved souls, then plunged down like sinners into flame.
Red diagonals — hell.
Green lines — heaven.
An economic apocalypse in PowerPoint form.

Inside him, the same thing was happening: a wave surging upward like a growth chart, then crashing down like a quarterly report of failure. Each twitch in his gut was a new presentation, a new graph, a new catastrophe.

And he sat there, holding back the ocean that wanted to break free right there, in a conference room carpeted the color of dried blood.
A room where every number on a slide sounded like the countdown to his own private flood.

He endured.
Endured the way he endured his wife.

They’d lived together for ten years.
Ten years that could be stacked neatly like meeting minutes—gray, identical, and not open to revision.

She smiled rarely, and every smile looked like a crack running through a wall.

He knew about her affair long before he found the messages.
He’d seen how her gaze lingered on her phone a little too long.
How her fingers trembled over the screen.
How her breathing faltered after one short text.

A waiter.
A boy with a face molded out of sugar and hands trained to draw little hearts in milk foam.
He drew hearts for their daughter.
He drew hearts for his wife.

He hated that smell of cinnamon—the sticky whisper of sweetness in every cup.

He could’ve started a scene.
Could’ve slammed his hand on the table, ripped the mask off her face.
But he stayed silent.
He endured.

He endured the nights when she fell asleep beside him, turning her back, leaving an ocean of emptiness between them.
He endured when her body went cold, corpse-cold, and her breath sounded foreign—like the elevator moving behind the wall.

He would lie there, staring at the ceiling, and in his head something throbbed—the same pulse that now beat inside his bladder:
Get up. Go. Do something.

But he didn’t get up.
Didn’t go.
Didn’t do.

He was a martyr of his own choices, shackled by his own restraint.
His own private Christ—with no faith in resurrection.

Patience had become his only religion.

And that was why he sat in the conference room, torn apart by coffee, yet too proud to stand.
To stand up would mean admitting defeat.
Saying out loud: I couldn’t take it anymore.

And he preferred to break slowly, from the inside.

Now that patience had started fermenting in his bladder.
Every cup of coffee inside him sang its own liturgy.

Frappe whispered,
“Hail Mary…”

Espresso answered,
“…the Lord is with thee…”

Americano rumbled in a bass voice, like a church organ:
“End the presentation. End it.”

Macchiato beat a rhythm like a boys’ choir denied water.
Flat white stretched its words into a long, unbroken “Amen.”

Inside him, a mass was being sung.
Outside, the same one.
The speaker droned like a priest reading scripture no one understood.
Slides turned like pages of the Bible—up meant salvation, down meant hell.
People nodded along, parishioners worn thin by the service yet too afraid to leave before the benediction.

He felt his own body turning into a cathedral.
A dome of skin.
Walls of bone.
An altar where no grace gathered—only pressure.

And all he could do now was pray.
Not to God.
Not to his wife.
Not even to himself.
He prayed for the speaker to finally say those sacred words:
“Thank you for your attention.”

He whispered softly, almost to himself:
“Our Father… hallowed be Thy name…”

He remembered his mother.
Her thin hands, ruined by chemo.
Skin stretched over bone like a bedsheet on a hospital cot.
She was dying slowly, like a candle someone didn’t blow out—just kept breathing on, again and again.

Every night she whispered her prayers—quietly, as if afraid to wake death already sitting by the bed.
“Lord, help me… Lord, save me…”
Lips dry and cracked.
Tongue heavy, barely moving.

He sat beside her and listened.
And hated.
Hated that whisper.
Hated the weakness in her voice.
Hated the God who didn’t exist, but to whom she kept speaking—like an addict talking to an empty needle.

He watched her claw at the air and realized: prayer was nothing but chemistry.
Neurons firing out of fear.
No more.
No less.

Now, sitting in the conference room, he caught himself doing the same thing.
Moving his lips like his mother once did.
Whispering:
“Our Father… hallowed be Thy name…”

The words stuck to his teeth, his palate, his throat.
And with every passing minute, the pain turned sacred.
Each spasm burned in his lower back like a hot nail.
Each breath reminded him that the body is a fragile chemical system—ready to betray you at any moment.

But he endured.
He endured as if endurance itself were the last instrument of control—the only one he had left.
He clenched his teeth, his fists, his whole body, as if tightening it could somehow hold the entire world in place.
He endured every minute, every heartbeat, every pulse of coffee tearing him apart from the inside.

And with every new circle of endurance, he felt a strange kind of power.
Not the strength of the body, not the strength of will, but the strength of habit—the quiet force that keeps a man in his chair even when every cell in him is screaming to run.

Finally, the presentation ended.
Applause struck his ears like a blow to the solar plexus—as if the air itself had decided to fight back.

Somewhere behind him, someone choked on their own enthusiasm, and he felt his heart leap in his chest like a puma released from its cage.
It was a celebration of nothing.
The room roared with “Great job!” while meaning dissolved in the sound—like sugar in hot coffee.

He shot up from his chair, walking as fast as his suit and what was left of his dignity would allow.
Each step landed like an explosion—against the carpet, against the suffocating air of meetings, against his own frayed nerves.
Every movement felt like a rehearsal for the apocalypse no one noticed but him.

All the while, he kept whispering his prayer.
At first, the familiar one: “Our Father… hallowed be Thy name…”
But the words began to shift, melting into something else—something both familiar and foreign, the echo of what he’d heard at his mother’s bedside:
“Lord, help me… Lord, save me…”

His lips repeated the whisper, trembling and freezing, like a crack forming across glass.
With every step, the prayer grew louder inside him.

People around him kept smiling, exchanging glances, discussing slides.
He walked through their cheerful noise like through a legion of silent ghosts—each one a piece of the same great illusion of importance.

In the bathroom, before the dull mirror and a dripping faucet, he finally exhaled.
The stream hit the bowl with the force of a dam bursting. The vibration climbed up his spine, and his whole body began to sing in unison—like a church organ with every register pulled open.

Every drop rang like a chord.
Every hiss of foam became a boys’ choir in white cassocks.
The hum in his ears joined the melody, and for a moment he felt as though he stood in the center of a cathedral—arches soaring toward heaven, and the stream itself a hymn written by the Creator.

Tears welled up—not from emotion, but from pressure, from pure physiology.
But maybe that’s how faith is born: out of spasms, out of nerve signals, out of the pressure on receptors no scripture ever mentions.
Orgasm and confession, mass and defecation—all fused into one golden bliss that no saint or martyr had ever dreamed of.

For that moment, he almost believed.
Almost saw God inside his own body.
Almost.

Then it was over.
The stream faded.
The choir fell silent.
The organ stopped.

He stood there in the stall, heart pounding, breath finding its rhythm again.
His face reflected in the glossy door—foreign, unfamiliar: gray cheeks, swollen eyelids, veins along his temples like roads on a dying city’s map.
The smile—stiff, lifeless, like a funeral mask someone forgot to take off.

He stepped out of the stall as if through fog.
His body felt empty, unplugged—like a mannequin pulled from the socket.
Each step was heavy, though he moved quickly—step after step, without strength, without energy, without anything that could be called life.

Behind him, the liturgy still gurgled in the toilet.
The last of the stream trickled away, and suddenly he felt relief—sharp, unexpected, almost divine.
Not just the release of the body, but something deeper: the sense that the one he’d been praying to, the one whose words he’d whispered, had finally dissolved—along with the coffee, along with the ocean that had raged inside him.
The sound that had once been a chorus of rusted pipes and clogged drains now turned light, almost joyful.

He wiped his hands. The gray paper towels stuck to his skin like damp bandages on a corpse.
He looked up into the mirror—and saw his mother. The hospital pallor. The veins. The lips that once whispered prayers.
Then his wife—her cold, empty stare cutting through him like glass.
And the waiter—the smiling boy whose face could appear even in the foam of a cappuccino.

They were all there in the reflection.
He was the only one missing.

And in that moment, for the first time, he felt it:
The emptiness inside no longer pressed.
The God he had begged for was gone.
The liturgy had ended.
All that remained was a body, a reflection—
and the quiet, strange feeling that at last,
he could breathe.