Gideon Protassow
Unseeing eyes of stone flicker in the candlelight, and I can’t meet them. They judge me, gazing down upon my unworthy form as I kneel at the foot of the altar next to the blood of Christ, a vintage from the tabernacle. I clasp my knuckles above my head. Each is heavy with swelling and guilt, pressed to cold marble so smooth that my skin is rough against it, betraying me as an earthly abomination in the pristine hall of the Lord, flesh newly beating with the insidious warmth of eternal hellfire. I will take my penance first from God, and second from the law whenever it comes knocking.
“Oh, Holy Father, hear me. I beg of you do not turn your face from me despite what filth you might see,” I press my forehead into the unforgiving steps I climbed just last week to give my sermons. The sweat and oil anointing my brow dirties the surface. Windows of stained-glass line the periphery of my vision, so dark beyond I could be at the bottom of an ocean. I imagine the pressure crushing slowly inward, a steady, suffocating embrace.
✝
I suck in a breath laden with burning wick and the harsh spray used to scrub the floor, screwing my eyes shut against this lingering trace of her. She cleans the floor of the church Saturday evenings and then the afternoon before the Holy days because they work in her schedule. I smile at her, hands clasped in my sleeves, leaning down to catch her eye as she gets out the wire brush for the grout.
“What’s new, Father,” she asks it flatly, pausing, swiping the back of a glove across her shorn head. Her eyes look like she’s been up all night.
“New souls baptised this morning before the Lord, but nothing new here, Betty. Nothing new.”
She snorts and keeps scrubbing. I don’t understand it then. She kneels before the altar with no fear of God in her heart. Hands plunging in and out of the plastic bucket, purifying the sacred, but not a drop of holy water on her soul.
✝
I clasp my hands tighter together, kneeling in her place. Candlewax sloughs off onto the floor beside me, ruddy and gelatinous like decaying meat. I’ll need to pry it off the tile before the morning’s service, and my nails ache out of distant memory of a time before Elizabeth. The mundanity of the sensation sends a shock like frigid water through me, the morning an unattainable concept, so bright and detached from the press of night and sooty candle glow around me. My inhale shudders. I imagine we become like candles when our bodies enter Hell, burning, melting, shedding and reforming in eternal suffering. I will lead tomorrow’s service if I earn His forgiveness. I will teach His lessons until the police come for me and scrape me from my purpose. But without a sign, I will not open the doors to the schools of faithful and preach to them a shark.
✝
On Saturday she turns up late. It’s dark outside and she knocks on the door of my office out the back. I always keep it tidy. She doesn’t touch it. The knocking springs from the silence and I curse then briefly repent with the sign of the cross. But I rise with a smile as she steps inside, looking around with resolve. She sits in my chair. I stand, smile unquenched.
“I don’t want anything fancy,” she’s staring at the ground, grim lines on her face. “But you always seem so happy, and I want to know what all the fuss is about. I want to see what you see. I want to believe there’s a home guaranteed once you die. Something to smile about, you know?”
I thank the Good Lord in the back of my head as I crouch in front of her to meet her eyes. “It’s more than a home, Betty. It’s a family, and it takes work, but what family doesn’t?”
She nods slowly, a weariness I’ve only seen in veterans behind her eyes.
✝
“I was supposed to introduce her to your embrace, oh merciful Lord. In her heart she was a heathen no more, a soul converted. I know you told me to baptise her in the dam down the road, Lord. Well, I sent her to damnation.” The heady spice of frankincense from the braziers clings to the inside of my lungs and my head spins. I clap my quaking hand to my treacherous mouth. “Please forgive the pun, Lord, I never—I swear I’m serious as all sin about this.” The silence in the church sounds like it’s reaching me from above a pool of water, my own ragged breaths distant as if coming from below the lapping waves of my pulse. The aching surface tension in my eyes breaks and my tears blur the dim room. My words wade up through my throat. “Pray Lord, have mercy. Spare me being a lonely herald of your knowledge. Did she witness the light too?”
✝
Some of the lines melt from her face in the sunlight as I guide her backwards into the largest dam, willing as a lamb. A hand clasped in hers, I hover her head above the surface, the murky water bearing her weight, leaving me only the weight of her soul, which feels pretty heavy.
“Do you willingly receive Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour? Will you obey and serve Him as your King for the rest of your life?”
She grimaces. “Don’t say it like that Father, sounds like I’m getting married all over. But sure I do, so long as he holds up his end of the deal.”
I smile. “Not a worry about that, Betty. Well now because you’ve professed your faith, by the Lord’s command, I baptise you in the name of—”
She goes under, but I’m looking further beneath.
✝
The brightest light he had ever seen was when he looked at the sun as a child. That was the first time he witnessed God as it clung to his retinas for longer than his doctor thought it should. The little boy spoke to the Lord through it, and it comforted him in the darkness and accompanied him through his dreams and nightmares. Sometimes it still returns although he’s a man and a priest, but it’s never touched the world outside his eyes like this. The light from within the dam illuminates its depths, gleaming through grime, weeds, growing impossibly brighter, ever closer, blotting out all else, a radiance so brilliant beneath daylight it can only be divine. Be it a doorway to heaven or a rift into hell, it is something new and everything behind the eyes of the priest tips right into it. Elizabeth fights him, clawing from under the surface of the dam, drawing blood, shattering bone with all the strength her last gasp of air can muster.
✝
Dare I hope Betty shared in my revelry, but the bruises on my arms are dark wine stains, my fingers are the bent wire bristles on her scrubbing brush; I can barely raise the wine to my lips. I swallow, but the bottle slips from my shattered grasp and spills down the steps, blemishing white with red. I lower my forehead into it. My voice rings hoarsely through the room, scraping across the walls. “My hands were not my own, Lord! I was in the grip of something else, I know it sure as day because she’s got muscles beyond any you’ve ever given me.” I grope through the silt in my brain, but clarity eludes me. “I just didn’t remember that in the moment. So many baptisms, Lord, why this one? Was it all Your will? All of it?”
✝
Light rakes the water raw. Blood thunders in his ears, he never hears the point the thrashing stops. Her death comes and goes observed only by God. He lets her go, reaching out, stretching his broken mortal hands towards the glow, breaking the surface, pushing under, seeking. It leaves abruptly as it had appeared.
✝
I am face down in the dam, chilled to the bone and bleeding from the arms. Elizabeth is gone, blood and body consumed by the dying ripples. I don’t search or call because I don’t know what I’m looking for, and for once I don’t know what to say to anyone whom my shouts might draw near. I struggle up, retching, coughing, wring out my vestments and slither back through the fence, left with only the last marks of her life like scripture upon my skin.
✝
I draw in a breath to spill forth more confessions, spluttering more pleas into the wine on the floor, hunkering further down and raising my bent fingers high until the sinews in my elbows crackle. My nails open the scratches across the back of each hand, and I feel the throb with each pulse from my chest. My ears ache with my unanswered voice. I wish for my little guiding light to return. Its warmth. Its comfort in the deep-sea dead of this wretched night.
Light blooms outside my eyelids, glowing red through the skin like a brand. A rush of air buffets me like a shockwave. Dutifully, sound follows.
BE NOT AFRAID.
✝
A choir. Ears ringing. Teeth of chalk in his mouth. The priest swallows thick spittle, bile and blood. The agony is so bright, he considers if the light he saw was really just pain.
Dense matter beneath him. He has fallen back, sprawled onto the floor like a bug. Behind him, the pews are a cloaked audience. Before him, something hovers, greater than the sun. He’s not been rendered vapour, for the light is cold.
COME CLOSER, STRAY LAMB.
His throat is too raw to speak. He struggles towards it and the tiles on the floor lose their chill as the temperature in the air plummets beyond anything he’s known. As his breath fills the air around him, it occurs that of course, to differentiate from Hell, Heaven must be cold. Ice crystals form on his cheeks, then shatter as I speak again.
CLOSER, CLOSER, LOST ONE.
He makes it past the light, strung out from me on a rod as a lure. From beyond it in the deepest darkness, my luminant wings erupt. My eyes blaze open, enough to alight on all. Everywhere, fifteen thousand souls arrive. Everywhere, ten thousand leave. Disks churn out the order of the universe. My perpetual scream harmonises with his own as my maw opens wide to receive him.
He turns from my light and flees like a mortal.
✝
The confession booth is dark and permeated with the smell of spilled wine from my robes and fresh blood from every pore on my face. I try to keep breathing through the fear.
I tell myself the flashes through the cracks are flickering candles.
Periods of darkness come, then I wake with the terror of being pounced upon and torn from my box. Time trickles by and it doesn’t happen. I wonder if I really fled or have been devoured. Waves of cold come and go. I can’t tell if it’s shock or the angel passing close. Worst is the silence. Waiting. Aching. Timeless. I fill it with terrible thoughts, for I have abandoned God, turned from his mercy, consumed the blood of His Son to temper my own fragile ungrateful cowardly life force. I would while away the seconds or hours with confessions, but my lips won’t move and I know now He has seen it all. Instead, I listen to the slow drip of wine down the steps where I knelt just before, the ticking of time mingling with the smears of my own blood I’m sure lead right to the flimsy door of my hiding place.
✝
Knocking wakes me. Somewhere beyond the walls of my box. Somewhere beyond the walls of the church. A gentle, distant rhythm like the wavelets on the surface of the dam or the drip of the wine or the heartbeat of another, and it soothes me for a time before fading away and silence and darkness fall like a shroud in its wake.
Then it arrives. The knocking is here.
Knocking on my box. Knocking on all sides. Knocking on my skull. Flickers of movement through the cracks. I swear I haven’t moved. I can’t feel my legs. It’s the beat of a clock. I draw a breath. My number is being called.
✝
He tries his hardest not to be afraid.
Gideon Protassow has been a student of the not-for-profit Ranges Academy of Performing Arts since 2019 and has become a board member and mentor within the organisation. They are currently completing a Bachelor’s Degree with Honours at Swinburne University of Technology where they have pursued filmmaking and literature, most recently writing and directing their graduate documentary, The Frost, The Sun and The Wind. Gideon’s queerness and experience with chronic illness influences all their work as they seek to bend reality and interrogate the inner workings of the world.
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