The Healing Wave

by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 Fiction contributor David Partington

My story "The Healing WAVE" is a coming together of two separate threads. I'd been reading a lot of Saki, the Edwardian short story writer, since the start of the pandemic, and found more than ten instances where he had built a plot around someone telling elaborate lies--often a teen lying to an adult. I wanted to try something similar, but fact checking has become so easy in the internet age that such a plot would hardly be tenable. For this reason I decided to make my protagonist a Luddite around 1999.

The other thread arose from my interest in relics of Catholic saints. Relics taken from the body of a saint (usually hair or a bone) are considered first-degree relics. Something that had belonged to, or was worn by a saint is a second-degree relic, whereas third-degree relics are objects that have been in contact with first- or second-degree relics. 

I love the idea of trickle-down holiness, and thought it would be funny to transfer it to a secular context. Britney Spears was one of the biggest celebrities in 1999, so she became my saint, and a boy who touched her pants thereby became a third-degree relic with healing powers.

The line, "I've seen people wearing the letter 't' on a chain around their necks, but those were never authorized," was problematic for the Bacopa editors, because normally one would have written "the letter T," capitalized without quotation marks. I'm grateful that they retained the lower-case because the letter T needs to look like a crucifix for the joke to work.

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David Partington is a newly retired zookeeper who has taken up short story writing as a pandemic pastime.