The Eastern Cathedral

     Back at home, there’s an Eastern Cathedral.  Built towards the East, facing what--?  Facing—facing…And the pickpockets gather outside and they beg for change while they swipe whatever they really want that’s just sitting in your pockets.  Change?  Change?  Any change?  No?  Thank you anyway, sir.  Thank you for the thought.  But even when they give you the change, you still need to take whatever else you can grab.  Thank you for the change, sir.  Thank you.  ‘s good days and bad days.  But sometimes…Early, before morning services—you hear a whisper.  A call from the back.  From near where the pigs get brought by…Boy…Ssss, sss, sss…Like the snake from the garden.  Rich little boys come from homes with Bibles where the snake is all painted pretty and the apple is so red it looks like virgin’s blood.  Sss, sss, sss goes the snake and he motions for you to come forward.  And you go, because you know there’ll be ham bits and bread pudding and all sorts of other things you can’t get back at home on a Tuesday when your father’s still missing and your mother lays in bed all day and cries and cries.  You walk back, down a long outdoor corridor, into a back room, and you’re instructed.  You’re given things to do.  This and that.  Nothing too hard.  There’s a good boy, that’s a one.  Afterwards, they bring you into the kitchen and give you fat scraps and some of the pudding.  The ham like you ain’t never had at home.  And if the snake is really in a pleasant mood, sometimes you get a coin or two to take with you after you go, just as long as you promise not to say where it’s from.  ‘It’ll be spent before the hour, sir,’ you say.  And the snake says, ‘There’s a boy.  There’s a good boy.’

…It takes a long time to walk out of the shadow of the Eastern Cathedral.  Little bits of darkness get stuck in your hair like mites and you can only pull it out for so long before you give up and hope it’ll just die off.  Your ears go deaf from the bells ringing, and the smell of wood burning clogs your nose ‘til you feel like one of the dead boys—seeing nothing, knowing nothing…

When you get home, your mother sees you had a good day and it lifts her spirits.  You take the coin—because it was a pleasant day today, the snake was in a proper mood—and you bury it under the fireplace ash where nobody will look for it.  And where there hasn’t been a fire in years.  No wood, none to be had.

Your mother asks you how the cathedral looked today.  ‘Same as always,’ you say.  ‘One day you’ll have to be bring me there,’ she says, turning away from you in her bed, already half-asleep again, ‘Get me a blessing.’

You don’t tell her that the only thing taller than the cathedral is its shadow.  How it goes so high into the sky it must be hurting heaven.  And that the way the shadow stretches tells you however high something goes, it must go low too—deep past where any light can go.  And how its goodness can touch anything anywhere, but how the other side of goodness gets into you as well.

Sss…sss…sss…you whisper to your mother, doing it the way the snake does, to see if she’ll ask you what that is—where’d you learn that from?

Instead she lets out a breath and says—

‘Oh that’s nice.  Good boy’

Good boy, she says.

‘That’ll put me right to sleep.’