#toadwrites

No one but you are allowed in this hall. In this room. No one could ever hope to understand what the purpose of this room was. It was safe from any of the other creatures that were made from the fall out.

You drift to the wall, your feet follow a path you've taken millions of times before. Your fingers find the switches, flipping them to turn the power on.

One, two, three. All the lights in the room come on. Respectfully, you take your shoes off at the door, setting them aside on the tray, after all you don't want to bring any of the outside filth into this room. Slipping on the inside shoes, you walk inside the room, following the path to the little station you made. It's not like you needed to eat with the others in the facility, everything you needed was right here without leaving the room.

You grab the coffee cup and a drink out of the mini, you tear the container open, and pour the contents into the cup, sliding it into the microwave. A few seconds would be all the drink needed, so you take the time to take in the familiar sounds and smells of the room.

The buzz of the florescent lights. The hum of the microwave. The breathing coming from the darkness behind the glass. The smell of iron from the microwave. The burning sulfur that you have long since become immune to. You built the foundation this building stands upon, of course you'd be immune to the odor.

The beeping draws you out of your thoughts, reminding you of the breakfast you left inside it. How long has it been beeping? That doesn't matter, as you curse at the noise and take the drink out. The breathing hitches, before starting again. Sipping the drink, you sigh at the warmth, and walk to your post.

Before you was a standard U-Shaped office desk, black in color. A computer with a login screen and an open notebook greets you on the desk, with the previous days notes front and center. The shelves, measuring roughly 36cm each, were jammed with different books you had hand annotated for the many years you've walked this earth. Some of which, were first editions, with hand notes from authors. There was an open book, annotated from the day before, speaking of blood magics and rituals. There was also a microphone, with the wire connecting high up in the ceiling, where it disappeared behind each speaker inside the room. A window was before your desk, spanning roughly 300cm in length, peering into a black room. The breathing slowed down.

You set your cup down, the viscous red contents threaten to slip over the lip of the cup with the force, and stretch out your back, getting ready for a long night of research. With a soft sigh, you press the button on the microphone.

"Good morning, I'm going to turn the lights on now," you warn the dark room, as your hand reaches down to the hidden light switch under the desk, turning some soft blue lights on. You couldn't use the same harsh florescents in the room, it could hurt his eyes too much.

"There we are," you speak softly, like talking to a nervous child, "how are you today? Feel like speaking?" The questions were pointless, you haven't heard his voice in nearly a decade. And sure enough, you only get that faint breathing and some rattling chains in return.

A sigh escapes your breathless lungs, what had you expected? This day was just like the others, filled with note taking, annotating, and trying to find anything that would fit your situation. Anything that would solve your situation. You occasionally glance up inside the room or head to get more food from the station... Sometimes speaking to him inside the room.

"How long has it been now?" You ask, giving your hands a break from writing, "two years? Ten years? Twenty years? Admittedly, I lost track of the time passage myself."

Perhaps it was you attempting to make yourself feel better about what had happened. Perhaps he actually heard you, but just couldn't answer back. Was he even still there?

Inside the room, he stood, chained and hanging from the center of the room. Blessed chains held his limbs in place, stretching his arms out on each side, his legs overlapping and held tight. His hair was frail, greasy, and grey; skin sagged and wrinkled; his ribs and spine shown; all clear signs of the parasite that was attached to him, feasting on him.

Vines, thick and thorned, cut through his skin as he breathed each ragged, unnecessary breath. They were attached to each vein, feeding and forcing the host to feed from it. An ouroboros of starvation.

The malnourishment of the host's body was not nearly enough to keep all the vines intact, as they continuously snapped and joined the rotten piles on the floor. More would take their place over time, but none of them lasted very long. The starvation both suffered would not be the end of either party, simply hindered by it.

You stare at what is left of the man you admired most, someone you had aided, someone you thought was stronger than any soldier you would ever meet. The man who you were blessed to call your father. After so long of serving as God's Chosen... He still suffered to keep humanity safe. He did so for his only son. For you. And now you devote your life to severing this bond between parasite and host. To save him from this painful cycle once and for all.

"Are you hungry," you ask, reaching down to press a button, "it has been a minute since your last feed."

There was a beep from the phone on the wall, before it rang properly. You reach over and answer it.

"This is Security Team member 2789," the voice sounded over the ringer, "what can we assist you with Dr. Belmont?"

"I am ready for the subject to be brought to the chamber," you answer.

There were only three security members who could answer your calls, and you made sure to change them out every couple of decades. You made your selections carefully, and only changed two at a time. There was always one with experience to train the others, and you only referred to them as numbers. You couldn't get attached to them again.

The sound of the chamber doors opening pulled you out of your memories, drawing your attention to the doors.

You ensured there were some ethics involved with feeding them. The offering had to be blindfolded, ear plugged, and kneeling before the beast.

Did it actually matter?

No.

But it made you and your guards feel better.

Once 2789 was out of the room, the offering started sputtering a slurred, shaken prayer to the beast it could not see or hear. It was essential to this part of the feeding ritual.

The beast waited. He waited. You waited.

But no one had to wait very long, as a tendril pierced the offering mid prayer, and drew it into itself, dissolving and digesting the offering, turning it into an odd red sludge. This sludge would then be forcefully fed to him, keeping the host fed, and make the parasite stronger. This was usually shown in the act of the tendrils shifting, making him moan in pain, only to have the feeding tendril shoved down his throat, as the sludge was forced into his veins.

There was always a temptation to give more offerings, each guard had up to nine at a time for emergencies. But you were stronger than those temptations. And it's not like it would bring him back anyways.

Either way, it was important for you to watch the feeding sessions, as there could be some changes, and if there ever were, they needed to be recorded. But this one was just like so many others once this system was formed, so you allowed your mind to wonder.

How much longer could you justify this? Would your father even think of you as his son any further once he's freed? Would your father even remember who and what he is..... Would he even be alive? Mentally, emotionally, physically.... Would it be worth it to keep this going? There were no guarantees that anything he's currently doing is helping him, but it wasn't necessarily harming him either.

A buzz from your desk startled you out of your thoughts, as you jerked your eyes over, and the pager you forgot buzzed on the desk. You sigh and answer it, listening to the message sent by Patrick, your assistant.

"Dr. Belmont, Arikado Genya and his team are here for your 3 o'clock."

.... Was it already close to three? You kept forgetting to add a clock inside this room.

Sending your message back, telling him to send them to room seven, and you'll meet them there, you stand up from the chair and stretch out.

"Ok father, I have to leave for a little while," you say, knowing he wouldn't acknowledge you, "I'm turning off the lights ok?" Why did you still ask, he doesn't hear you.

You shut the light in the room off and clean your mess up, taking the cup back to the station to be cleaned later. Shutting the lights off in your office, you slip off your indoor shoes, before slipping in your work shoes, stepping back out into the flickering, sterile, metal hallways.

With your footsteps as your sole companion, you travel back to the main facility, to a meeting that would change your entire focus of the task before you. Fate may have determined her hand for him, you were more determined to alter it. Even if that meant cutting them off.

Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

Father John Price had turned up one day like he’d been planted with the catclaws — him and his trio of mutts. 

Those adopted strays like the sickly, ribbed things that hounded the streets for scraps. Just on the edge of domesticated. Those violent dogs kept collared with promises that they could eat, soon. Given a name and gunpowder and nudged toward the ‘worse.’ That savagery wrapped in just enough humanity to pass a threshold. God fearin’ soldiers of the Almighty, they were. 

The biggest one must’ve weighed twenty stone — but they were all big. Slabbed and chucked like the longhorn bulls you remembered seeing as a child. They were greasy, yellow-bellied, but they were hair-raising all the same. Knock-down-and-drag-out, too, for you could still recall the day they yawned in with the sunset: Kicking dust up beneath their tattered boot heels, stomping tremors into the red dirt. Could still see, bright as a sun-dog burned into your eyes, Father John leading his pack into the steepled church like it was communion time. Bringing the priest in there out by the scruff of his neck — the poor man hollering, kicking, spitting like a drowning cat — and tossing him to the street. 

The strange Father had addressed the gathered and skittering crowd in a low, clear voice. Told you all that he was Father John and to fear no longer; he was here to protect you now. That this man — this Pharisaic — had never known the Lord, and so the Lord did not know him. Said the priest bubbling blood at his feet scarcely even knew how to read. Father John waved his threadbare bible like it was a pistol and all flinched.

The big one then brandished his steel and punched one lead ball into the old priest's skull. Bone, meat, bone, dirt. 

The townsfolk had tittered but did not turn away. Death was no stranger in that desert, and Hell wasn’t full by half. Laid deep in the folk was a twisted sort of curiosity that comes with the familiarity of cruel things. Curiosity wrapped in apathy, in false condemnation. That didn’t mean Mama was partial to you seeing such things, however. She had grabbed you round the nape and steered you back into the taproom. Set you at a table by the window and wandered away to scrub at the bar top. 

And Mama had clicked her tongue. “Liked that priest,” she had said with a pity akin to someone who had just chipped a clay plate. “Cryin’ shame he were a fraud.” 

Then she shook her head and let the notion slip off into the dusty air. Just like that, the priest's life polished away between one swipe of a grimy cloth to the next. Through the mucked window pane, you could just shape the form of the priest, stealing your glances between the tattered curtain when Mama wasn’t looking. Blood pooled like sticky tar around the crown of the priest’s head, all cracked open now — thoughts scattered in a halo like a handful of tossed pebbles. You’d wondered which stone of flesh held the hymns and which the prayers. Wondered if it even mattered then. 

One of the strange men then nudged the priest with a boot, and the big one cuffed him upside the head. Pawed his shoulder and shoved him hard and set to rummaging the pockets of the dead man’s spoiled trousers. 

Clear as the dawn, you remembered how Father John had stood there: him heaving atop the body, some salt effigy that wore the white collar and yet housed something else entirely. Something that did not blink, something that needed to be witness. And then his dark head had snapped your way, bristled chin hidden behind the thick cut of his black-clad shoulder, and there his eyes were. Piercing and knowing like an owl’s eyes, finding you hidden behind the pane of glass. Looked right at you as if he had felt your breath on his neck. 

You had dropped the curtain and retreated further into the taproom. 

As if the stuffy air, the long shadows and the quiet, absentminded humming of your mother could shield you from what was to come.

It wasn’t two days after that that you came down into the taproom one morning and found visitors.

Dawn’s newborn light mourned through the windows and half-door, but as wolves were wont to do, Father John and his pack had sought out the only darkness that slept in the silent room. You’d not have caught them if it weren’t for the rhythmic, lazy smoulders of ash lighting up the inked air like fireflies above a distant creek. The tobacco burned, and they existed — harsh planes of weathered skin and the rims of tired hats — and then the fires would quell and they were shadow once more.

You hesitated on the stairs, one shaking hand picking up splinters on the bannister. Mama didn’t like you being in rooms alone with men. In a thin voice, you apologized to the Father. Said that your Mama wasn’t awake and that you weren’t quite open yet. For a long while, the only answer was the roll of the burning end of a cigar and the exhaled smoke dancing through the shafts of daybreak light between you and them. 

Then the Father spoke. “Only hopin’ for a whiskey.”

“You can pour, can’t you, darling?” a new voice asked. “We don’t mind serving ourselves either, just wouldn’t be polite without asking first, is all.” It came from the man with darker skin than the others, but he was different in a lot of ways. Lean and elegant, with an air of grace that often suffocated in the liquor-drenched heat of a taproom. Spoke good too, kind-like and soft.

“You’ll have to take your hats off,” you said. One of Mama’s rules. No hats, no fighting, no taking the Lord’s name in vain. 

Father John leaned forward into a shaft of light and grinned wide and dark around his cigar. “Quite right. Boys.”

At once, all of them, including the Father, wrestled their salt-stained brims from their heads and rested them on their knees. Your nerves rested. At least then, if Mama came down, no rules would be broken. You descended the stairs and disappeared behind the bar, keeping the pack of men in the corner of your vision. Four warm whiskeys were poured — ice had to be shipped in from the north and was saved for high-paying regulars — and you toted them over on a small tray. It was cool in their corner, just a few shades colder than the rest of the room.

You set the whiskeys down in front of the men in turn, the Father first, as was proper, then to his right. The glasses clinked against the rickety wood, and it was the only sound other than mannerful thank-you’s from the men. 

Until the last of the pack. 

No, he didn’t want his glass on the table; he wanted it in his hand. Held out his dirty palm, mud caked in the folding lines, and waited. And stared. Stared. Wound himself up slow like a rope around a neck, fibers crackling with the strain, blue eyes so bright and breathing so heavy you thought he’d run out of air soon. Smiling right back to his molars. Like some creature had donned the skin of a man and pushed against the seams. Like there was a sand-snake coiled up in there somewhere, rattling its death-song.

But the man’s clawed hand still was outstretched, and all you had to do to gain your leave was place the glass in it. So you met him where he waited — 

and felt the rough drag of his fingers circle your wrist. 

Fast, so fast you couldn’t track it, the big one whipped an arm out and fastened his paw around the blue-eyed one's nape. Forced his body forward toward the table like he was scolding a street mutt. The glass tipped to the floor and shattered into a dozen dazzling pieces, and all you could do was fall — as if putting the jags back together quickly enough would make them stick. 

Mama would be frothing mad. Glassware wasn’t cheap, and you’d been punished for less. 

The legs of one chair scraped along the floor, and then Father John was there on his knees next to you, batting your hands away. His crooked, half-healed nose sat proud on his face like a mountain, the bird-feet lines beside his pale eyes like river gulches. Time and weather rested in his features, a calmness sleeping on calamity like a reigned-in thing. Made you feel small and young, as if you were sitting at the knees of a weeping, old tree. 

“I'm sorry,” you choked, panic simmering like a high noon summer-puddle. “Sorry, Father.”

“S’alright. Not your fault, honey. Johnny gets excited, is all.” His voice was pity thunder. The Father gently plucked the shards from the floor and placed them on the tray, presenting you with the thick but greying hair atop his crown. “We all stumble, don’t we?”

“Yes, Father.”

Father John rose to his feet when his work was finished, dragging you up with him by your waist. He was humid and damp along the thick line of his body, reeking of cheap tobacco been left out in the rain. The mold and salt of washing forgotten on the line. “There we are,” the Father cooed, dragging a bent knuckle along your cheekbone. The man with blue eyes, Johnny, tracked the movement like a hound, focused on the dewy drop of your tear there and swallowing thickly. Father John’s other hand rested heavy in the well of your waist.

But that was alright, wasn’t it? This was a man of the Lord. A fatherly touch, it must have been. Like how Daddy used to pet your hair from your face.

Father John held his hand out, then. Palm up, like he was waiting for The Body. You placed your hand in his without thinking — and you ain’t never saw a smile like that before. It was a mean one, you think. A cruel, excited one. The Father held you for a just moment before turning your hand over and dropping four calid coins in it. “Go on, now,” he instructed, and you snatched the tray of broken glass from the wood and scurried away.

Slipped out through the back door into the boggy morning and wiped the sweat from your brow, thinking. There was a knotty and neglected shed at the back of Mama’s property next to the distillery filled with all sorts of curios: a blue and gold comb, saddlebags, chalk, canvas dusters, a single, water-stained tinder box. It was behind it that you started your digging. 

Brittle fingers against the cool, red earth. Soil beneath your fingernails. It was feverish under the already short-tempered sun, but you dug and dug until your cheeks felt rummy. Dug until there was a plate-sized hole in the ground, big enough to hide your misdeed. You buried the sad shards of glass at the bottom and scooped the dirt over top like a grave, like when Daddy went to God and Mama tilled all night just to rest him at daybreak. 

He was back there somewhere, too. 

A shadow fell over you, then, and your heart dropped right to the depths. Thought it was Mama come with a belt in hand and a disappointed look on her face. But you turned, and it was only the elegant gentleman with the kind voice. “I’m not sure that will grow into anything,” he mused.

You swallowed, words tied up in a knot in your stomach despite the humor tip-toeing across his face.

“But with sunlight and some water, who knows?” The man laughed and leaned against the shed. You noticed then that of the four newcomers, he was the only one with clean clothing. “I didn’t introduce myself earlier. I’m Mister Garrick, miss. You can call me Kyle, if you like.”

You, in the sweat-mud, told him your name, and he nodded in response. “Your mother is awake,” Mister Garrick continued. “I told her I would come find you.”

You were filthy, floured and fired in dirt with no explanation that wouldn’t dump you into trouble. Mama slept in on every day but the Lord’s. Her rising then felt a cruel trick. “Would you … would you tell her I went to the store?” you pleaded. 

Mister Garrick dipped his chin like there was water on his hat-brim. Looked at you from beneath his brow as a parent admonishing a child. “Now that would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”

Shame, hot shame, clawed a steady ascent up the column of your throat. Of course, of course, it would be a lie — and lying lips were an abomination to the Lord. Mister Garrick offered a charming arm as he marched you back to the taproom. By the time you got to Mama, your shoulders were next to your ears. She was draped decoratively against the bartop, sipping wandering gazes like sweet lemonade.  

“What were you doing back there?” Mama asked in a whisper, eyes darting to the Father and his men a few paces away. Wary of the impression you were imposing on the important Father, wary of every dose of attention pulled from her. 

Before you could own up to the grievance of your fumbling hand, Mister Garrick spoke for you. 

“Planting, ma’am,” he said. Smiled that saccharine grin of his. 

Mama frowned. “Plantin’? Plantin’ what?”

Mister Garrick looked to you, and you could feel all the eyes in the room on your throat. “Nothing that will grow,” you told her. “It was silliness. I’m sorry, Mama.” You left Mister Garrick’s arm to grasp hers, slinking to her side and patting some dust from his thick shoulder. 

Mama was always more amenable when you were placed beneath her boot heel. 

Father John tilted his head from where he was waiting at the entrance, as if he only needed a new angle from which to see the fib waving behind your eyes. You tried to tuck it away, so desperate were you suddenly that he never be allowed to know. 

“Thank you for stopping by, Father,” Mama said as Mister Garrick joined his pack. “I am looking real forward to Mass tomorrow. Please know you’re more than welcome for dinner anytime.” 

Mama’s grin was nailed to the corners of her mouth, tacks in a pine box, and her grip on your hand was blistering.

Father John grunted, and with a tip of their hats in turn, the four men left. 

That night, you dreamt of glass. Dreamt of plucking delicate daggers of crystal from your fingerprints only to realize that it was bone, white bone as sharp as a sunrise. Dreamt of shards coming up from the dirt like bones unearthed in a flood. Dreamt of a shadow man playing cards in a corner, but the cards in his hands were on fire. 

Dreamt of the small and floppy-eared kit you saved one summer, mother maggoty and picked-at, and how you cried and cried when you awoke one dawn to it dead and cold beside you in sleep — wondering if it sought out your warmth in the dark, wondering if you had crushed it. 

Dreamt of fault and guilt sucking at your skin like fat ticks, of punishment for heinous acts even unknown, and if the known were better or worse. 

When you woke, you woke in a stinking cold sweat and with the taste of foul tobacco on your tongue.

Townsfolk had always flocked to church in hordes — the masses to Mass. A chirping mob like the crickets at bedtime, sawing their legs in a buzzing din. 

When the old priest held the parish, the congregation would stop at the threshold of the tilting building to be greeted. Waiting patiently under the tangerine morning for their turn to shake God’s sweaty, meaty hand. Kitted in their Sunday best. The children were stuffed into hand-me-downs that draped over their shoulders like the limp and wet wings of a moth. The men slipped tired muscles into cotton rags; the women carried hand fans to fight the flies. You used to have a beautiful dress. It was laced and clean and it had been Mama’s when she was your age. It had made her mad when you put it on one day and it fit, but you were young and didn’t know why. You treasured the dress like the precious thing it was, and one day, it had disappeared like campfire smoke.

The morning of Father John’s first sermon, Mama woke before you. Shoved you awake to stuff her in her corset and cotton petticoat. She pinched her cheeks and fixed her hair and waved her fan at you waiting by the door. 

“Move, move! We’re fixin’ to miss Mass. I ain’t lettin’ the new Father down, girl. Told him we’d be there.”

The sun poked one eye over the distant mountains as you and Mama walked. Painted up the whole sky purple and orange like a nasty hurt. Sometimes, you would sneak out into the quietness of the dawn to stroll the streets, and it would be the best part of your day. The time when no one was awake other than the ranchhands in the far fields, and you could be the only person in the wide world. Places change with people in them, you knew. Without the bodies breathing life into them, you could see them for the dead things they were. 

Could see the leprosy below the walls. 

But that morning was bustling. The sheep filed into the church one by one, ears twitching for the new Father’s words. What manner of man was he? What would he preach? For there were many kinds of priests — soft ones, frothing ones, old, mean ones with wandering eyes and broken teeth. Lonesome priests. Angry priests. Redeemers. Swords and crooks and counterfeits. Father John, it seemed, was not a priest to wait at the entrance to greet his flock. Instead, it was Mister Garrick standing tall at the door, shaking hands and clapping shoulders. A charmer, he was, as sure as eggs is eggs — handing out smiles like daisies, melting folk into his marigold palms. 

When it was your and Mama’s turn, Mister Garrick received you like old friends. “Saved you a couple seats, ma’am. Right up front there, next to Simon.” Sent the two of you off with a dip of his chin. “Big fella. Can’t miss him.”

Mama puffed up like a cattail in late fall. Hooked your arm in hers and stomped proudly down the aisle to the top of the room. It stoked her vanity right hot, having a place in front of the rest — just pleased as punch to squeeze into the pew beside Mister Riley. 

And what a frightening bull, that Mister Riley. 

More scar than man. White as milk and colored sickly like straw. Stacked up tall and strong like a stone tower, clefted upper lip pulled into a constant, mean snarl. Didn’t help that he was unfriendly, either. No manners about him, scowling like he did. He had his arm slung over the empty side of the pew and one behemoth thigh brought up below his bent knee, and he did not seem a man to move for politeness nor request.

There were two places instead reserved on the other side of his bulk, and when you sat down mashed between Mama and the armrest he did not speak and he did not look at you.

“Where’s the blue-eyed one?” you asked Mama in a whisper. 

Mama told you to be quiet and fixed her skirts right. 

Father John detained a stoic court behind the dias, regarding his meandering flock with a level and beady eye. His thin black shirt clung to his skin in the places it lay high on his torso — his thickset chest and overgrown shoulders — and salt lines sat around his neck and underarms where the sweat had wetted and dried and wetted again. The same sweat which clung to his dark hairline then and dripped down in rivulets into the many gulches and valleys carved beside his eyes. Age and hardship buried beneath scruff and soil, clawing at the coffin of his flesh to be freed. 

There were people in the world who were handsome or beautiful because the world had loved them all their lives. The priest wore the years of the world's abhorrence for him on his face like smudged tar. 

When all had sat and the Father had pushed a great breath from his lungs, a nervous silence hushed over the room. Father John began, and it was not with a morning salutation. Instead, he seemed to drop right into a conversation which had been happening all alone in his clammy head. “We kneel for the soft shepherd, but not pain’s firstborn.” 

It was spoken in the low and secret tones of a man’s solitary reflection and yet it carried through the moistened church like the rumble of a faraway rockfall. The sudden intimacy was suffocating as the heat, as if with a few words, Father John had opened the book of his soul and laid bare the pages for all to see. 

One felt almost an intruder on that moment of cloistered thought - at once trespassing and honored. 

He told the crowd, muzzled in their awe, of his prayers the night previous. How a story had been plaguing him even into the dawn, and if the crowd would allow him the grace to expunge it from his mind, he would tell it. When the laity agreed, the good Father spoke of the story of Cain and Abel. Everyone knew this story — how Cain had killed his brother in anger when God favored Abel’s offering over his, and the punishment that had followed — and the Father needed not to have expanded upon it so. But it seemed almost a blood-letting, banishing that parable from behind his teeth like hot sick. Seemed he felt better the more he spoke, every word more powerful than the last. 

Father John came around the dias then, looking ever larger for the loss of the white wood that hid his strong legs. “Cain offered what he’d sown. Tilled the soil, turned dirt into food. And yet, the Lord did not look upon him with favor. Why? Was there not honor in his toil?”

He was asking it truly, expectant of an answer, and so a brave soul spoke up from the pews: “Cain’s heart weren’t in it. Abel gave his best.”

“Where’s it say that?” Father John asked. Flapped his grimcrack bible in the air like a bird frightened to flight. “In the good book, where’s it say that? I’ll tell you why our Lord did not regard Cain. What did Abel offer?”

“A lamb,” another voice called. 

“Flesh.” Father John spat the word out. “You think the King of Kings wants ground fruit? He has always required blood — it cries out to Him from the soil, said it Himself! So Cain gave it to him! Stood in mighty wrath and cut his brother down.”

Energy spread through the congregation like the pox, spirits spurred on by Father John and his fevered ardor. At this sermon spoken not at them, but with them. 

Mama sat so forward in her seat you were sure she’d tip right out of it at the Father’s feet. 

“Yes — yes.” Father John barreled forward, swinging his arms about, thwacking the book on his thigh. “This first murder. Yet God did not smite him where he stood. I ask again: why! Why was he instead cursed from the very soil that was his dominion? ‘You will be a restless wanderer on the earth. Anyone who kills Cain will be punished seven times over.’”

He paced the raised platform like an animal cornered, like the coyotes that’d sing in the dead of night, proclaiming for all to hear the kill they’d wrangled in the dark. 

“No man can kill him, as no man can kill sin. Only God can purify, and He let it walk away! Walk that endless road of the unwanted sons. Is it not, then, your obligation to be consumed? Sin is crouching at your door — and it longs to have you.” The Father looked at you, then. Settled his heavy gaze upon your skin so when he spoke next, you knew in your heart that he was speaking only to you. 

“What does a shepherd do when there is sickness in his flock?” he asked. Voice coaxing like the call of a campfire - like the promise of cooked flesh, but before, a pleasant sensation only of warmth. 

“He culls it,” you answered. 

Father John nodded with the congregation, with Mama and Mister Riley beside him. “He culls it, for surely it will spread. One infected lamb can doom the entire herd. Whose duty is it, then, to rid us of this illness? Isaiah six-eight says, ‘Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ I say, ‘Here am I! Send me!’ I say I am my brother’s keeper. I say if it dirties my hands, let me then be marked alongside Cain in this good service of The Great Redeemer.”

The Father was frothing, foaming like the hounds who wandered into the caves of the mountains and came back rabid and changed. You did not know when he began bellowing, only that it set you cold and shivering when he stopped. With all the quiet menace of a bitter winter, the kind that burned crops with frost and took newborns in the long night, Father John made his final vow: 

“I will expunge this town of all rot. I will cauterize every scab, every small and bright spot so that on the seventh day all will be cleansed and pure, and only the Lord will remain— ”

The Father then raised a shaking, tipless finger to the raftered roof of the church, strung up high above his head like an old marionette, or a hanged man. “This is the law of the leper.” he proclaimed. 

The people of the pews rose, swept themselves onto their feet and cried out. A waft of stink rose with them — that settled, pungent cloud kicked up with the sudden movement of the bodies it was borne from. Cracked lips pulled back over decayed and fetid teeth, tobacco black and stained yellow like a bruise, as they cheered. Cheered for their own selective slaughter, assured of their own souls' purity in the eyes of the Lord, tossing sins on their neighbors like puffing sacks of flour. 

The Father’s eyes landed on you, still seated in your pew. Bent his stormy gaze, lit up like a lightning dance, upon you and sliced right through your chest until it met your thumping heart. When you rose, tugged to your unsteady feet by some meathook over your collarbone, Father John smiled. Nodded. As if you had done something good, and that it had pleased him.

You didn't feel good.

No, as Father John stalked through the aisles to shake hands — to memorize faces and scents, the plush give of flesh and the pulses staggering beneath — you felt only hunted.

Father John was invited for dinner that evening.

As all the Father’s men would be joining you, Mama had you set the table real nice for seven. She hollered for the labels to be brought up from the bar, insistent that the Father not be fed the rotgut distilled out back. Strychnine and coffee, temple-sweat and dirt.

“This ain’t no free lunch,” she also admonished when she saw you bringing out the oysters and pickled eggs. Dogs and men ate meat—needed to be filled. So it was salt pork and navy beans, and the rabbits Mister Riley had dumped off that afternoon already skinned, dressed, and butchered. He had dropped the warm and slimy game directly into your hands when you met him at the batwing doors. Made you walk back past all the patrons of the taproom dripping blood down your elbows.

The smell of raw meat had stuck under your nailbeds like deer ticks well into the evening.

Mama was in such a blushing fuss, blustery as a dust-devil right until the men arrived. Everything had to be perfect, presentable. Oil lamps hunted the shadows that slept between the floorboards, wicks sucking up whale oil like a man come in from the desert. Yours and Mama’s apartment above the taproom wasn’t a spacious thing—it was low-ceilinged and thin-walled—but it would fit seven, surely. However, to your surprise and relief, it wasn’t the whole pack that turned up at the door. Father John apologized for Mister Riley’s and Mister MacTavish’s absence—citing a game camp-out as an excuse—but that was just fine with you. Something in the two men’s eyes set your hackles raising.

Mister Garrick was much more agreeable. Mannerly and courteous, like he’d jumped out of a storybook. Mama met them at the top of the stairs that led to your apartment, and the two men passed the threshold with a rummy bottle of wine and a crop of picked wildflowers in hand. They were Desert Lilies, Flame Mariposas. Mister Garrick held them in his hand like a bushel of fire, burning bright red in the dimness. They set his handsome, angled face aglow.

Mama waved the men forward and lowered her eyelashes just so. “Come in, come in! Oh! These are just beautiful, Father. Thank you.” Then: “Girl, come get these into somethin’.”

So, you left to retrieve a vase for the bouquet.

You’d seen the flowers before; the old priest kept a wilting garden of them behind the church, and, oh, how you coveted them. But the priest had been miserly, reticent to give up a single bud. He’d kept a ledger of the blooms on his desk in the rectory, and you knew this because once, you had picked one. The color was just too beautiful, too tempting, to let it rot all alone behind the church. And that old priest had hauled you in by your ear and jammed a gnarled finger to the ink on the ledger page. One flower missin’, girl. Our Lord don’t like thieves.

How he knew it was you, you did not know. But there they were, then, a whole bouquet of them limp and still damp in your hand. In your home, on your table. Set into a tall, yellowed vase, looking like a burning wheel.

When you returned, all were already seated at the small table; Father John at the head, Mama to his right, and an empty seat to his left. You expected Mister Garrick to take his place beside the Father, but no—he was next to Mama, making her sweat right through her rouge. So, you poured the whiskey and the wine and took your seat.

You found you couldn’t look the Father in the face, sitting so close to him in the darkness of the room. Something told you to keep your eyes down, some discernment in your belly certain it would be a misstep. As Mama layered compliments on Father John, laquering his service that morning like she was spreading varnish, you never let your gaze wander above his strong shoulders.

But it wandered just about everywhere else:

The dark cropping of hair that started at his wrist bones and disappeared past the cuffs of his black shirt; the rhythmic rise and fall of his great chest; the way his mass settled into the rickety chair like molasses in a basket; the peculiar tip of his pointer finger on his right hand, peculiar only for the fact that it was not there. And his voice—the tempered, rumbling baritone so at odds with the thunder he wielded during Mass that morning. It resonated off the walls as if they were fifteen feet tall. If you had tapped a crystal glass as he spoke, you were sure it would have shattered.

Mister Garrick offered to say grace before the eating began, and around the table, all grasped hands.

Again, Father John offered you his palm. You took it and shut your eyes tight. As Mister Garrick poured the familiar words from his polished tongue, you tried to focus on them instead of the warm clamminess of the Father's skin against yours.

But then his thumb started moving.

Bumping along your knuckles over and over. The calloused pad ran over the ridges before dipping against the sensitive seam between your pinky and ring finger—thumbnail catching the delicate flesh there as the digits were spread apart. You swallowed, thick and dry, and suddenly your hand was being lifted through the air, muscles in your shoulder stretching as you tried to keep in your seat.

Then, then, a puff of hot breath fanning over your skin. Moist lung-air, the distant scratch of whiskers. You couldn’t hear the prayer over the rushing of blood in your ears; you only knew it ended when Mister Garrick’s grip slipped from your own across the table.

You pulled your hand back into your lap, and when you opened your eyes, Father John was looking dead at you.

As the guests dug into their food, Mama spoke, tone high and simpering. “We are just so grateful to have you here, Father. ‘Bout time someone took this town over their knee.”

“No sheriff around?” the Father asked.

Only when his scraped knuckle tapped on the wood next to your plate did you realize he was addressing you. You caught his grey eyes for a moment as you replied, manners battling instinct. You told him no, then went back to pushing navy beans around your plate.

“Not since old Bass was shot!” Mama interjected. “Over a year ago now, poor man. His son, though, he’s comin’. On his way from San Francisco. Should be here by next month.” Fork tines scraped against cheap porcelain. She repeated the name of the city with the cadence of a carnival caller, sing-song and wondrous. “San Francisco! You ever been, Father?”

Father John huffed, and the chair beneath him creaked as he shifted. “Have you?”

“Goodness, no. I would love to, but the road’s no place for a woman alone. And I have the taproom to look after—my late husband asked me to on his deathbed, you see.” Mama tucked a hand behind her nape and swirled the wine in her glass. Extended her pinky out to bore between your brow. “And I have my daughter, of course.”

Mister Garrick finished chewing and swallowed the rabbit in his mouth before replying. You watched the lump travel down his slender throat. “It must be hard, ma’am, raising a young woman all by yourself.”

“I try my best, but after her Daddy passed … I won’t lie, we’ve had our difficulties. This one needs a strong hand. That old priest was soft on her. Needs to be set straight, I say; she’s old enough. Should’ve been married years ago, but she …” Mama brought her hand up to the crown of her head and fluttered it away, twisting it in the damp air like a bluebird. “Wanders.”

She murmured every sentence as if she were in a confessional, as if she spoke low enough, you wouldn’t hear, and it wouldn’t be cruel. The men didn’t know that Mama’s words had to be taken with a palmful of salt; that she could spin a yarn as tall as the sky. You swallowed down your frustration alongside a sip of water.

Mama continued: “I’m hopin’ that new sheriff takes her off my hands when he finally rolls in, given he don’t know her. He’s been sendin’ letters.”

Father John rested his wrist on the table and tilted his head.

She seemed only then to realize what she had just said, and instantly retraced her steps with a wet pout. “Not that I’m pullin’ any wool over his eyes, mind you. A husband’ll settle her, is all.”

Mister Garrick gave her a gracious smile. He looked at Father John for just a moment, but a conversation played through the air. “Well, ma’am, until then, we could use some help at the church,” he said. “It could give the young miss something to focus on—you know what’s said about idle minds.”

Mama went white. Addressed Father John, even though he was not the man who offered. “Oh, I—I couldn’t possibly burden you, Father—”

“No burden,” Father John said, and the conversation was over.

The rest of the meal went by slow and smooth. You were not asked any more questions, and so you did not speak again. You kept your eyes on your plate and, occasionally, on the bottles and glasses as you refilled drinks. One time, when you had risen and leaned over the table to drip whiskey into Mister Garrick's tumbler, the Father’s hand notched into the small of your back. To steady you, surely. Just a kindness.

At the door, as the two men donned their hats and gun belts, Mister Garrick turned to ask one final question. “What did you say the last sheriff’s name was again?”

“Bass,” Mama told him, twinkling teeth. “Bass Graves.”

Mister Garrick licked his lips and hummed, turning a look on the Father that you could not read. You could only name the shine in his eye: some cocktail of amusement and excitement. “Bass Graves,” he repeated. Then, with a quick and deep breath, he bid you good evening. “Thank you again for the meal, ma’am, miss.”

Then the two men tipped their hats and stomped heavy boots down the stairwell, spurs scratching witness marks into the steps as they went.

“Go, girl—catch him, quick!”

Mama’s tone was as sharp and sour as vinegar as she shoved the dish into your hands—her look frantic, her apron stained with the fervor she had wielded shoving leftovers in the heavy dinnerware.

“Mama—”

“Now! I ain't tellin’ you again, and I ain’t runnin’ after him like some schoolgirl. Go!”

You were shoved out the door and down the stairs without ceremony. As if you were some stray snuck in with the draft, sniffing for scraps. Tossed by your scruff to catch yourself on the steps. You took them two at a time, careening forward and over the taproom floor until you were met with the cool night air.

“Father John!” you called, desperate as the batwing doors swung behind you.

You spotted him halfway down the street astride a horse, Mister Garrick atop his own beside him. They waited as you stumbled through the dust, far more patient than the horses rearing their necks beneath them. The mounts huffed like dragons, puffs of hot air steaming from their noses when you approached. You came up, eyes level with the Father’s knee, and when you spoke, it was weak with breathlessness.

“My Mama wanted you to have this. Said she didn’t want you going hungry later.” You extended the dish with both hands upward to him, feeling supplicant and silly. Trying in vain to calm your running lungs.

Mister Garrick, behind you, scoffed. “What’s the real reason?”

You hesitated. Wary both because of the incredulous tone you hadn’t thought him capable of, and because you were not behind the privacy of a door. But the street was dark, then. Near silent. Seldom did souls kick about in the distance; some ranch hands singing lullaby tunes for the sows, campfires dotting the horizon, sending smoke-wishes to the inky and wide heaven above. Maybe one of them belonged to the Misters Riley and MacTavish. Maybe they were out there, sleeping under the stars. How cool, how calm, it might’ve been.

Father John tilted his head. “Go on.”

Tattling made you itch, always had, but the Father’s encouragement brooked no argument. “I think she wanted to give you something to return.”

Father John smiled. Dipped his hat brim in a nod. Then he asked, “Where do you wander?”

Now that you had looked at his face, you found you could not stop. For the same reason that had stayed your hand before: anything else would be a mistake. In the mouth of the celestial yawn, moonlight casting a pale glow over his brutal features, he looked a lot like the gaps in the sky. Only special for the absence of stars. Powerful, how a storm is powerful—but you’d known that the moment you saw him.

A williwaw had blown into town the day he’d arrived, and not a one was boarding their windows.

“My mind runs off sometimes, that’s all,” you told him.

Your arms were still outstretched, still hoisting the heavy dish. Your muscles shook, elbows begging for mercy, but Father John just looked at you for a long while. Finally, the moment before you were sure to drop, Father John took your burden; placed it in front of him in the saddle and reached back down to gently palm your crown. His hand was heavy and warm atop your head, and it lingered there so long your eyes shut.

“We’ll fix that,” the Father promised. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

You stood out in the chilled street for a while after they had left. Thinking that maybe, just maybe, if you wished hard enough, you too would float upwards into the endless night. Drift along the breeze with the smoke and the bugs. Maybe you’d land somewhere far away: a snow-covered mountain, a churning, grey ocean. You’d never seen the sea. Maybe you’d roam above forever, look down at all the people like little ants. Watch the lamps turn on in their windows at dusk.

If only you could jump. But you were too heavy.

You went back inside.

You’re sure days without Johnny existed, you just don’t remember any of them.

Childhood was a gooey mess—a twinkling, dissonant carousel of memories wrapped in gauze. Sounds muffled, like the drone of a television in the next room. But it was all him. To separate him from the moments would be like pulling a tooth - leave you running your tongue over the empty socket, just gum and iron and absence.

All your memories were his, too.

The earliest ones were caramelized, reduced down in the melting pot of youth until they were only feelings and blurry images. When you tried to grasp them, substantiate them, they tumbled through your fingers like oil. Like trying to bottle the light after a camera flash.

Some clawed through the haze, though:

Make-believe on the matted, yellow carpet. Plastic figurines in the hallway. Crumbs on his chin. His little hand in yours, nails small and delicate, tugging you across the summer pavement.

When you were old enough to wonder after his near-constant presence in your home, you were still too young to understand. You weren’t related, and your mother didn’t seem to like his very much. He used to take your toys and pinch your side as you smiled next to him in polaroids. He spoke too loudly and too quickly. Would never sit still. Misbehaving came to him like breathing, and came to you like jumping from a tall, tall building.

But weekends, birthdays, holidays, summers - there he’d be. Scribbling under your kitchen table, nabbing the baking that was still cooling on the counter. He was a weed in the backyard dirt, always pulling you into trouble. You hated him the way kids could.

Your first solid memory comes from when you were six and a storm came knocking on your roof. Sheets of pelting rain bombarded the windows alongside the howling wind. Lightning flashed and thunder roared. It sounded like a monster - a great big mud-monster come to take the walls down with its heavy, sticky fists. You remember trembling under the covers in the dark, wincing at every booming clap from the angry sky, but also that Johnny wasn’t frightened. He was angry.

You remember him leaving the safety of your blanket cocoon to peek under the bed. Search the closets and cabinets, lift the lids from copper pots. Swing open the back door to level the garden with one beady, accusatory eye.

He was hunting for the thunder. Stalking its path through the house to tell it to stop.

To tell it that it was scaring you, and that it wasn’t allowed to scare you. He would have fought it with his hands if he could’ve found it.

And so, you were nine the first time you two came home with blood in your mouths and welts on your knuckles. You won them in a playground fight - a thing that always seemed to find Johnny wherever he stepped. Meat-handed bullies didn’t like Johnny, and he didn’t like them. You were a little way away, swinging on the monkey bars, when you had heard the chanting.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

The bullies started it. Your mother didn’t seem to care, though.

What is wrong with you? How could you? I raised you better than this. If Johnny jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? Go and think about what you’ve done!

And you did.

You sat on the stairs where you were told to and thought for a long while. But no matter how hard you tried to make the pieces fit, you couldn’t wrap your mind around anything, anything, other than joining in. That’s just what loyalty was:

matching bruised fists, hand in hand in a freefall.

From between the chipped and peeling banister, Johnny waved at you in his kitchen corner - little palm covered in scratches and grass stains, smiling a gap-toothed grin.

You and he were sewn together, sutured like a wound. He was every part of you that was good and brave, and you knew this even then.

You hated him. He was your best friend.

He was you. You loved him.