• "All rise," Father Leodegar Aeron says, and the flock rises from their perches to stand, sallow and gloomy; a small cacophony of groans and sniffles follows them. The congregation today is meek, a thin crowd compared to the weekly Sunday mass. The priest walks forward, arms outstretched to the skies, as he starts the group in prayer.

    They're pitiful—a sniveling mass of heathens and sinners, of people who, Father Aeron surmises, abhorred or mistreated the poor dead fool he speaks so gently of. They look on with red-rimmed eyes and painted grimaces, hypocrites and liars mourning over the unloved. The deceased is the picture of perfectly neglected youth embraced in satin and kissed by withering roses barely masking the scent of chemicals to keep that perfect face of innocence infinite.

    "The Lord has called you to His kingdom, and in His arms you will find eternal youth, eternal life," he says.

    The parents make a quaint picture, holding each other as the mother silently sobs into the father's black jacket. The father pats her absently, eyes on the son's peaceful, tranquil face. The scars on his wrists are hidden cleverly at his sides, but the father's eyes scan the expanse of the stiff arms anyway.

    "--where there is no pain, nor the anguish of humanity, and there will be choirs of angels singing to your ascent, dear son, for the Lord has called you home--"

    He sometimes wonders how people can just dawdle about through life without caring, hurting and getting hurt; he ponders how these people can stand to live in the flesh that houses such malice and deceit and hypocrisy. He continues his sermon, though, and doesn't waver in conviction or the softened timber of his voice.

    The ceremony finally ends, and as the congregation finally breaks from their stiff positions, the room fills with murmurs and sniffles. Weary, Father Aeron steps down from the platform and begins to make his way to the back of the church where, beyond the incline of the isles, his private quarters await. Along the way he is stopped by doe-eyed older women thanking him for his words, and beyond the "yes, dear lady, of course" and "poor young soul, taken much too soon", Father Aeron observes a sort of anomaly in the crowd.

    Nothing too extraordinary or bothersome, though. It’s just flashes of scarlet beyond the sea of black-clothed mourners. It startles him from the stream of empty condolences he's flowing with to get to his room, enough to make him pause mid-step. Father Aeron follows the path of the glimpses until he spots her: a magnificent woman dyed crimson standing out of place at the foyer of the church. She's an open wound of startling scarlet in the monochromatic sea, face gaunt and pale white. She halts in her retreat as Father Aeron's eyes trace the skeletal figure, the tight clench of the hauntingly familiar dress across bony hips, protruding ribs.

    The woman grins at Father Aeron, and in that moment she looks almost completely dead, eyes hollow and jaw bone bared.

    Father Aeron blinks.

    The woman is gone, leaving behind only the memory of a red stain in the church doorway, a nauseating migraine throbbing at the base of Father Aeron's skull up to cradle the back of his head, and a sense of nostalgia and loss that leaves Father Aeron breathless.

    He does not run away from the mourners, but his achy hobble is a close thing.

    …

    He's seventeen when they bury her, and even in death her beauty is almost ethereal. He doesn't want to approach the casket. He can’t.

    He’s a coward.

    Her hair is beautiful and golden, curling delicately over a soft milky shoulder, barely caressing the soft lace of the red dress. He doesn't need to look to see it in his mind; the gentle contour of her body, the soft and gentle curve of her lips, the curious splay of her eyelashes against her artificially-flushed cheeks--

    --and so he doesn't look at the body, and thus with a bowed head no one hears Leodegar Aeron whisper between his clenched hands in reverence and loss, like a prayer. Like an apology.

    "Please God, no, Bela.."

    …

    The storm that hits the city comes, as most things do, suddenly, unexpectedly, and with enough force to leave some destruction behind. The church is, blessedly, empty, and Father Aeron is thankful for the brief respite. There's a charge in the air that he can almost taste, like lightening and birth and death and a paradox all wrapped in a single sensation that raises his flesh in goose bumps and leaves the back of his neck tingling.

    He thinks quietly about the doctor's words, the testing of the day; he thinks solemnly of fear and death and the sort of uncertainty of darkness. He thinks of tomorrow's sermon, he thinks of the day's sins. He thinks of old bibles clutched in ignorant hands, and the flaked pages of God's words from the pen of simpler men.

    The church remains quiet. The sound of the rain starting to fall becomes a tittering symphony of cleansing outside of the building. The priest sighs, a low, tired thing, and allows the weariness of the week set into his flesh, saturate his bones until all he wants to do is lay and rest for a few hours. Sensing no visitors would weather the storm for the church, he clambers his way to the large double door entrance and clicks the lock.

    …

    Seven, thirteen, seventeen—Aeron’s always too young, thinking too old; too mature for his age and too naïve. There’s a story behind the fluttering of his hands, the dark cynicism flowing through his veins, the haunted look of his aged face. At four his baby brother is gone, breath stolen from his underdeveloped lungs; his father is always haggard, his mother is lusterless. The exuberance that burned through her and gave her a graceful glow is extinguished. Then, she leaves, escaping from this broken family when she cannot bear her only son and the man that simply can’t understand her pain.

    Seven, and Aeron is somewhere in the foster system, healing from the scars racing across his back; when they heal, and he’s been promised that they will, they’ll be a bright pink of new flesh, and will fade with time. Fade away, they say, as if scars are only skin-deep. As if it’s that easy. Leodgar Aeron is barely seven, and he knows he hates these people instantly.

    Thirteen and he gets adopted along with Bela Rhamiel Milton, a girl he had spoken to only through tears on his first day of his encampment. She looks at him, blue eyes hopeful, and holds his smaller hand in her soft grasp, and whispers that their prayers have finally been heard.

    He can’t tell her he had long ago quit. It was hard to feel bitter about unanswered prayers when you no longer prayed. How can one lose hope if they have none to begin with? He smiles, though, just to see keep her happy.

    She is hopeful and he will not take that from her. A year into their living quarters and things are crumbling around them. He watches as their Adoptive Mother falls into a depressed stupor, refusing to leave her bed. The Mother’s companion, a Tennessee-Whiskey bathed man, grins at Leodgar as he enters Bela’s room, and his mere presence makes the young man’s throat cease with sheer anger and disgust and hopelessness. Bela will smile weakly at Leodgar every night, though, and whisper that their prayers will surely be answered soon.

    At seventeen, Leodgar is kneeling at the feet of the Virgin Mary, and his shoulders quake with barely restrained sobs; there’s a hand on his shoulder he doesn’t register, and he knows then that he can’t continue on.

    At eighteen, he’s rushed to the hospital with deep gouges to his wrists, his arms. He thinks of the kind nurse that bandaged him years ago, how those scars have probably faded by now. He wonders how long these will take to heal, too. When he looks down deliriously at his own wrists while being wheeled down a bright tunnel into a darkened room of his own, it’s not his wrists he sees. They’re bloody but thinner, bonnier; he’s seeing Bela Rhamiel Milton’s wrists, and it’s her voice in his ear whispering, “our prayers have been heard, Leo!”

    At age twenty three, Leodgar finishes religious school and receives word of his future. He is sent to the parish of Saint Fillan.

    Forty years later, in a disgustingly bright white room doused with the smell of antiseptics and cleaning solution that burns his lungs, Leodegar Aeron is told of a slight probability that something is amiss in his brain, and will need to return in three days for more extensive testing.

    He thinks of bleeding red across the church, thinks of scars and prayers. There is a hollow numbness in every crevice of his being. At the low undercurrent of phantom pain at the base of his skull, Father Aeron feels an intense fear he has not felt since his father pressed both hands against his young chest and pushed; unaware or uncaring of his mother’s favorite glass coffee table. The priest picks up his satchel, thanks the doctor, and leaves without another word.

    …

    Mind blank, heart racing, blood thundering against deaf ears, he runs down the grayed scarlet aisle into the darkened valley of pews. He runs from—a woman; the Woman, with Her clicking heels, Her fiery hair, skin-tight dress, tongue sharper than the devil’s; eyes dull and dead

    He runs from Her.

    A crash of thunder outside the glass stained windows throws Father Leodgar into a panicked frenzy once more. He stumbles, wrinkled hands seeking pilgrimage on creaking maple, never finding purchase. He falls for a second, a minute, an eternity. The light from the street shines through the mosaic glasses, casts shadows of the rain—a facsimile of tears—onto the stoic marble saints and angels.

    The slow clap-clap-clap of heels follows the priest’s frantic and vain getaway until She stops before Father Leodgar. He dares not look up, body quivering, almost convulsing, on the grimy ceramic tiles. Behind him, Michael is weeping, feathered wings snapped wide and arched at the ready, the serpent-Lucifer under his feet.

    “What a beauty,” the Woman begins, her words dropping like thick sludge, “a thing of art; how someone so beautiful to his brethren can be filled with such rancor.” She licks Her lips, leaving behind wisps of darkness that curl up like faint groveling arms and then vanish into the brisk air. Her voice fluctuates. She speaks in a thousand tongues and a thousand voices all at once in the same breadth. When Father Leodgar looks at Her he sees the stretching of muscles and the faint glow of her jaw bone, the flash of the zygomatic. He sees the ever shifting swirl of darkness in her sockets and the pleas of the deceased in each careless wave and flutter of her ever-eternal, fatal hands.

    “But even the greatest are tainted; eventually we are all gone to waste. The word of God written in papyrus rots and turns to dust. From the clay you were made, you will be laid to rot once more. The blood in your veins,” she continues, stooping down to run an icy finger along the clergyman’s chin, “will be drunk by the earth, and it will cry to the heavens your name.”

    “P-please, I beg of you--” Father Leodgar stutters, breath lost when the Woman’s hand moves to hold his jaw in a harsh grip. “I can’t, my time I haven’t—this is a mistake, please…”

    The woman grins, her lips translucent for a second, and her teeth glimmer with the thunder outside the church walls.

    “You know who I am, then. You know that no begging can sway me. Your skin is already chilled, your blood all but mine. Your eyes are losing focus, old one.” Her grin fades, smoky maroon lips slumping into a grimace. “There is nothing left for you here; do not deny me.”

    But the fear of absoluteness, the relative nothing that comes with Her arrival is staggering. The darkness that creeps up with the icy numbness is horrific; Father Leodgar’s arms tingle with it, shake with holding his upper body up. His legs are heavy and ill-equipped to aid his escape. There is no pain throbbing at the base of his skull here, but a sort of dull ache that threatens to incapacitate him in a nauseating stasis.

    …

    Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name—

    The priest at the altar is ancient, his shaking hand rising to have his flock rise with it. Aeron Leodgar stands, sits, and follows the mindless motions. He ignores the shivering hand as it rests on his shoulder, a simple gesture from the woman that took him and his Bela in; the woman that tainted the sanctity of mother. Your fault, all your fault, he thinks to himself. His eyes remain stubbornly attached to the frail old man serenading the dozen people in the church with lies about salvation, lies about a paradise, when the truth is that everyone ends up here, here, here, embraced by satin and smothered in dying roses, as if the suffocating stench of formaldehyde and body-preservatives isn’t lurking like a snake in the garden beneath the falsely flowery scent.

    Hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done….


    They’ll all end up here—

    …

    Here is not tonight.

    Here is not pressed against the cold, dirty tiles. Here is not with Death’s hand on his chin; here is not the monochromatic storm or the chiaroscuro of the church.

    “Please, I’ll do anything,” Father Leodgar gasps, looking at the twisting red lips and thinking of a similar shade, a similar woman, but she’s gone gone gone—

    “Anything,” The Woman whispers, boney hand rubbing the rotting flesh of her cheek, considering. “You have nothing to offer. Nothing to live for. What can you barter to me?”

    “Please, just,” he thinks of his life, of the empty prayers of the living, and thinks of the irony of immorality being a human invention. He thinks of the people coming to him with their repulsive sins, their false begging of forgiveness, and knows in a second that he would give them all up for another day, just a little more time. Just to see if the scars are really gone. “I’ll give you more, others. People,” Father Aeron clarifies.

    “You would get me others?” The woman sounds amused as she rises suddenly, walking towards an intricate candelabrum before the large recreation of Jesus on the cross, looking down upon them with weary eyes and sunken skin. “I see into your soul, Father, and I confess I see nothing but darkness,” The woman hisses, turning suddenly. Father Leodgar Areon whimpers, bowing his head and curling further into himself.

    “Sickening,” The Woman growls, her heels nearing the man. “And I see your fear, and I see all you are and all you have been; I see the scars crossed over your flesh, and I see the want; I see the anger; I see the fear; I see the disgust; I see the hopelessness; I see all that you are, and you are a coward.” She pauses, and Father Leodgar Aeron moves at last, uncurls from his defensive position and shuffles onto his knees. His face is tear stained, eyes red-rimmed. His lips tremble, pursed and bruised.

    “There, there, Father,” the woman coos, stroking the side of Father Aeron’s face with a dry, bony hand. “I’ll give you something better than eternal rest, since you so altruistically offered others for your own diminished existence.” She nears her lips to his ear, his head trapped by her skeletal hand on his cheek. "I give you your greatest fear. I give you darkness in the day and night. I gift you eternal life. I gift you a life east of Eden; that is your mark; that is your punishment. May you wander the lands of Nod with the sinners you belong to, and may your final prayer be for death. I have marked you, and those who try to kill you will be punished seven times over.”

    “No.” Father Aeron whispers, blinking through a haze of tears. “No, please!” He sobs, lurching forward. The tears stream faster down his wrinkled cheeks, falling to the tiles. The light red-orange hue they take is diluted at first, but the tears slowly thicken into a rich scarlet that burns Father Aeron’s eyes with each blink.

    “When you pray for death,” the woman whispers, rising to her feet,“ when you pray for an end, I will return each time and remind you of your own malice. May you rest eternally, Father.”

    Father Leodgar Aeron raises his bloody face and stares after Death herself, the red of her dress causing his pain to worsen, his stomach to lurch, and then the world slips into darkness.

    He sobs into the open air, thinking of the monochromatic hell he lived in; thinking of the mark he bears; thinking of angels and humans. He thinks the statue of Jesus on the Cross watching from above, pained expression pinched towards emptiness, arms raised, shouting “my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

    Outside, the storm rages on.