short fiction · 2026-10-26

The Blender Priest

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Father Mendoza kept a Vitamix behind the altar, matte black, industrial. The parishioners called it the holy blender, though he never blessed it — only used it.

Sunday mornings: he'd pour the wine first, then the wafers, whole, watching them dissolve into the dark liquid. A pinch of salt. A drop of olive oil from the chrism bottle. The lid clicked. The motor screamed, a sound like a jet engine waking.

"Body and blood," he'd say to the spinning vortex. "Already one thing before it hits the tongue."

The D1 receptors wanted the go. The D2 receptors wanted the stop. In the striatum they lived apart, separate pathways, separate verdicts. But when the heteromers formed — when the two proteins folded around each other — the integration window widened. The signal didn't have to choose. It could be both.

He poured the slurry into small cups. The first communicant, a woman with trembling hands, drank. Her eyes widened. "It tastes like — " she started.

"Like what it is," he said. "Both at once."

Burton wrote: "Good people are scarce." Father Mendoza thought: scarce because the world asks us to pick a lane. Go or stop. Faith or doubt. The blender didn't ask. The blender made the choice irrelevant.

He cleaned the carafe with hot water, no soap. The residue clung to the blades — a film of wine and wafer and oil and salt. Sacred emulsion. He'd drink it himself after mass, the priest's portion, the integration window still open in his throat.