Ray Nickel Character Analysis

The only thing I needed to know was that we were all going to live forever, together, happily, in heaven and with God, and without pain and sadness and sin. And in my town that is the deal. It’s taken for granted. We’ve been hand-picked. We’re on a fast track, singled out, and saved.

I turned the paper over and studied a chart titled “Satan Cast Down.” There were different categories linked together with arrows and verses. Rapture, saved dead, unsaved dead, millennium, bottomless pit, lake of fire, beast and false prophet, new heaven, new earth. I tried to follow the complicated system of arrows and timelines.

I asked him why he was getting rid of the furniture and he said he liked empty spaces because you could imagine what might go in them someday.

We were quiet for a long, long time. Then I told him I wasn’t going anywhere. That I’d never leave him.

I’m pretty sure she left town for his sake. It would have killed him to choose between her or the church. The only decision he’d ever made without her help was to wear a suit and tie every day of his life. How could he stand up and publicly denounce a woman he loved more than anything in the world. And how could he turn away from the church that could, someday, forgive his wife and secure their future together in paradise, for all time.

And we counted cars with American plates­—twenty-seven. On their way to watch The Mouth read Revelations by candlelight in the fake church while the people of the real town sat in a field of dirt cheering on collisions.

Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was little kid and loved to fall asleep in my bed […] listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.

The only thing I needed to know was that we were all going to live forever, together, happily, in heaven and with God, and without pain and sadness and sin. And in my town that is the deal. It’s taken for granted. We’ve been hand-picked. We’re on a fast track, singled out, and saved.

I turned the paper over and studied a chart titled “Satan Cast Down.” There were different categories linked together with arrows and verses. Rapture, saved dead, unsaved dead, millennium, bottomless pit, lake of fire, beast and false prophet, new heaven, new earth. I tried to follow the complicated system of arrows and timelines.

I asked him why he was getting rid of the furniture and he said he liked empty spaces because you could imagine what might go in them someday.

We were quiet for a long, long time. Then I told him I wasn’t going anywhere. That I’d never leave him.

I’m pretty sure she left town for his sake. It would have killed him to choose between her or the church. The only decision he’d ever made without her help was to wear a suit and tie every day of his life. How could he stand up and publicly denounce a woman he loved more than anything in the world. And how could he turn away from the church that could, someday, forgive his wife and secure their future together in paradise, for all time.

And we counted cars with American plates­—twenty-seven. On their way to watch The Mouth read Revelations by candlelight in the fake church while the people of the real town sat in a field of dirt cheering on collisions.

Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was little kid and loved to fall asleep in my bed […] listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.