The Gatherers

Kansas, 1871

What rank hunger plunges through these fields? Carrying like wind across the winter wheat. Grass heads trembling in aura’s of imperfection. Gusted bodies blow dry on the plains of Kansas. Something like sickness stirring the soil. Earthen houses dug into shallow hills. Water wells cut through limestone. Four bodies ride across these bitter vacuums. A passenger train pounding across the prairie. Fresh tracks set into the fecund ground. Lacing together the limestone loam.

Father holds a pen knife in his shirt pocket. Mother toes the valise beneath her seat. Sister gathers a fly from the window glass, and brother lies along the bench seat. The train howls with inertial desires. Sliding across the empty land. Four bodies suspended in the aether. Carrying further towards intractable night.

They slow their mortal progress. From under the bench seats, they gather their things as if they were eternal wellsprings of replenishment. Mother holds the valise at her front. She inspects the others. Looking for trace euphoria among their suit jackets. Sister’s bimodal blouse.

“We have brought that which is required of us,” she says. “The rest will be gathered in its own time.”

A porter holds a lamp to the darkness. A stone post stands above the grass heads. Limestone hewn from the monolithic landscape. The train pulses, squatting over the long rails. Mother lowers a foot down from the side step. Testing the deepening strata. Landing on a lone wooden platform. One by one they debark, carrying what they cannot hold.

The tall stems spring against their motion. Swept beneath skirt, boot, bag. In that interstice of motion and distance, what deviation from a footpath can occur? Paths set inescapable before us. Fluttering like moths in the lamp light of fate. The dry rub of insects scours the night around them.

Out of the void, a door appears. Shaped by a lamp hanging from the lintel. The eve of a roof throws shadows above it. They stand and wait beneath it. Sister reaches out to the door. Rough pine against her palm. Slats shipped from back east. Not a tree to be cut in ten miles square. “A treeless void,” she says, “in the heart of the buffalo grass.”

The keeper opens the door. A blond man carrying a blue light in his cupped palm. He holds it out against the night to read their faces. One by one, they coalesce like cards in a hand. Father’s blood-webbed eyes. Mother’s florid lips. Sister’s shallow bones. Brother’s buttoned collar. Peering into the soul of a murderous congregation. “I wasn’t expecting boarders,” he says.

“We wrote ahead,” says Mother.

“Well,” says the keeper, “I didn’t get it.” He draws a heavy finger down his cheek, feeling the skin throb there. “What’s the name?”

“Gather.”

“Gather.”

“Yes.”

He waits a moment, seeking answers. Around the light, the gnats draw thick. He waves a hand through its orb. “I have a room,” he says, standing aside. “You can have it for the night.”

They follow him inside. Through a store with shelves of dry beans and grain. Shovels, axes, stoves. Lamps and oil. Thread and needle. The coat of a bison hanging stretched above it all. The keeper’s light shivers a cold blue hue along the walls.

He says to them, “This is it, this place.”

The back room blossoms out from the dark. Holding them in its light. They gather before a curtain hanging from a dowel rod. A bed on either side. A vanity in the corner. Father sets down his bag. Taking it up again, as if to test the darkness. The keeper passes the flame. Quaking across the open air.

Saying, “This is it, this place. This place will be yours.”

*

In the morning, the keeper prepares them a table in the kitchen. Serving a breakfast of tenderloin and sauteed onions thinly sliced. Plated with silver and porcelain ware on a clean cloth. Mother takes up her napkin. Smoothing it across her lap. Brother sits beside her. Sister sits alone on the other side. At the end of the table, Father takes the first cut. Letting the knife fall across the meat. Sawing sweetly through the peeling flesh. “Toto zvire bylo bohem,” he says, “a ten buh byl zvire. Uz nelze znat opravdovejsi milost.”

The keeper stands away. Cradling a paring knife at the countertop. The heart of an onion lies stranded beneath his gaze. Recognition rounds his pupils. What awful reality has sloughed upon him. “Jsi Cech?” he says, looking at Father.

“Nase noze a zuby shromazduji to,” says Father, letting the loin unfold from his knife, “co kdysi rozdelilo Zemi. Tyto inkarnace masa a ducha, gravitacni vinuti, ktera tlaci a tahnou proti nam; toto zvire, tento buh, tento posledni dech.”

The keeper looks around the table. Examining each face as a portrait of his own ruin. He says to mother, “Do you know what he says?”

“Tell us,” says Mother.

“You don’t know what he says?”

“He says that this animal we eat is a god,” says Mother. “And that together we gather god into our knives and teeth. He says that we move in conflict with those around us; these incarnations of flesh and spirit that inhabit our lives, the windings of gravity that push and pull against us; this animal, this god, this last breath. This animal was a god, and that god was an animal. There is no more truer grace to be known.”

The keeper turns back to the counter. Sister steps out behind him. She adjusts the cuffs of her sleeves around her wrists. On a cutting board lies scraps of onion and a knife. Brother reaches for the keeper’s hand. The keeper looks back at him, surprised.

“Our forefathers of common heritage knew the laws transgressing reality,” says Brother. “My sister and I have a mother in common. This is all. I see in her the tireless worship of my father, even though she is not his. Her devotion is unceasing in a miraculous way.”

The keeper looks down at the fleshy hand. His own fingers rigid with terror. “What are you?” he says.

Sister takes up the knife. Screaming as she slides it around the keeper’s neck. A heavy grin of gore crossing his throat. She holds his head against its falling. Cradling it to her chest. Father watches her with stone gray eyes. Webbed with vessels. She smells the keeper’s damp scalp. Kissing the light hair. In that moment, a desire for meaning shapes them. Life sundered of its foundations before their eyes. What could be more clear? Only for the willing.

*

On a bright Kansas plain, a cloudless sky fills with sun. Sun drenched land. The tall grass hiding an illicit meeting. A minister and his lover. They are two vertical bodies upright and alone upon an endless flatland. Like two roots thrust forth to bear alone the weight of the world. Like two broken stems carrying a faultless sky.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” says the lover to the minister, her eyes vibrating in their reclinations around him. “I’m sorry I couldn’t write you. I tried to write a few drafts, but nothing was right. I have to tell you everything. This is it. This is the last time I can be openly honest with you.”

The minister calms himself. Unlacing his fingers. Righting his posture. “I have to move slow,” he says, “to keep myself centered. Otherwise I’ll spiral into hopelessness.”

His lover’s fingers search the grass heads around her. Tickling the stems like piano keys. She starts to say something and stops. Words catching. Face contorting. She finds a vine climbing the stalks. Leaves shaped like arrows. Her fingernails peeled to the flesh, she peels the leaves back from the vine. “When I got your letter, and I read it” she says, “I couldn’t stop shaking. I just sat and shook all night. Reading your words, your honesty about loving me, it was the first time I let myself be honest about loving you.”

The minister watches her take a leaf into her teeth. Bits of green stuck to her lip.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you, too.”

“And I let myself wander into that world,” she says, smiling. “I let myself think about being with you. I told myself I could change my name and we could go somewhere away from here. I thought of your body and mine tangled and it made me happy.”

Then she stops. Her eyes sinking back into their spheres.

“Thank you,” says the minister. “Thank you for telling me that.”

She tears a leaf and nibbles as she says, “But I can’t do that. Even if it is a decision made out of fear, like you said in your letter. I can’t give up the relationship I’m in. I ask myself why now? Why couldn’t we have met before? But this is the way it happened. We have found ourselves in the woods, and must find our way out.”

The minister studies the torn foliage around her. Heart shaped leaves split down their seams. “I trust you with my heart,” he says, looking up at her. “You are so wise. I need your guidance through this. When we parted that night, and I told you that you need to go away and be with him, I couldn’t bear the weight of that decision on my own. It crushed me.”

“I needed you to make that decision,” she says. “I was vulnerable. I needed your strength to make that choice.”

They stand in the sunlight amid the fathomless tallgrass. In this last meeting, their bodies pulse in a tandem rhythm. Inhaling one another’s aroma. Awash in a fog of pleasure.

“I can’t let myself feel too good around you,” he says, “but it is good to see you again. Thank you for coming. Thank you for taking care of me.”

She thrusts herself against him. Holding his chest to hers.

“I love you so much,” she says. “I’m so sorry to do this to you.”

“I would go through this a thousand times with you.”

They let their embrace linger a little longer. Then they cleave apart again, and she’s gone.

*

Word of the new tenants flows out like blood through the community. Whispers of witchcraft, sacrifice and possession blow across the land. A delegate is chosen. A minister of the flock suited to probing the issues of the unknown. Why have they come? Where have they come from? What is the purpose of a lost soul in a godless land?

Inside the lodge, mother and the minister sit across from one another. Not across, but diagonal. One on either side of the table corner. A little close for the discretion of the minister. He slides his chair slightly back when he feels a knee touch his. The room is quiet. A clock unwinds. A kettle cools on the stove, its tin alloy relaxing back into place.

Mother’s hands. Spotted gray. Stirring the liquid in her cup. She reaches across the tablecloth. Papery in his palm. Her skin a brittle tissue.

“Angst?” she says.

He goes to withdraw, but she holds on. She peels his fingers back like flower petals. Sinking her thumb into his palm. He feels her squeeze a knuckle.

“Trauma,” she says.

“What?”

“There is trauma here.”

She holds tightly. He feels as if her thumb has pressed through his bones. Pinching through the web of his hand.

“It’s recent,” she says. “You still feel the sting of its pain. Fresh and new every day. You wake up in the night in the grip of its terror. You want to escape it but you can’t. You want to forget about it but it won’t go away. Will you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What is haunting you.”

The minister breaks loose from her hold. An uncommon strength in those fragile bones. “I didn’t come here to talk about myself,” he says, holding his arm as if it might be broken. “I came here to talk about your family. Our community is concerned about your presence here. Your daughter’s behavior in public is… questionable. Are you aware of what she has been saying?”

“Yes.”

“And you… approve?”

Mother leans forward, as if to see better through a dim spectre. “My daughter possesses her own agency, minister” she says. “If you wish to address her behavior you should do it with her.”

“Is she here?”

“She is not.”

The minister looks around the room. A clean countertop with a tin basin. A stove with a kettle. The window behind them reveals a lead sky.

“Will you speak to me of how your family came into possession of this property?” he says.

“Will you speak to me about your trauma?”

The minister sinks to the bottom of his cup. Reflecting in the dark pool lying there. Emotional pain floods the barriers erected in his mind throughout the previous nights. He re-centers himself.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I’m sorry, too,” says Mother. “I can’t answer your questions if you won’t answer mine.”

He stumbles out of his chair. Back through the store, out into the daylight. A bitter gray sun blinding him. Searing wind in his ears. Dry grass against his body. The vulture hounds of dread sucking at his soul. He stops and breathes. What is this? he thinks. What is this awful thing inside of me? Nothing so treacherous as my mind set loose upon itself. Nothing in the pits of hell so tormenting.

*

Sister goes to see the minister. A visit of accountability to the divine faith. The holder of truth among the lost and derelict. Inside the chapel, rain drips from her hair. Her collar, her shirt sleeves, the hem of her skirt. A slow soak of the wooden pew beneath her. Fumes of the harsh varnish lifting towards the minister. He sits down the bench from Sister. His arm resting atop the seatback. Legs crossed, leaning towards her. He listens to the rain falling. A slight metallic ring from the steeple.

The chapel rests around them. Its ceremonies and rituals now quiet. Sister imagines the gathering of the flock there. A few benches leading up to the podium. A piano and a baptismal fount behind it. The cross in suspension above. Such power in that symbol. Commanding the masses to yield.

“Every knee shall bow,” she says, arranging her damp skirt. “Every tongue confess.”

The minister cocks his head. “Are you a believer?”

“No,” says Sister. “Not in the Lutheran sense.”

“In what sense then?”

She lets the question soak in the soft rainfall. It gathers mass until it can no longer hold its shape and comes slowly apart between them.

“My mother says I missed your visit,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

The minister leans forward. Setting his hand on the hymnal placed in the pew pocket. As if to find his balance.

“This is difficult,” he says, “what I’m about to say. There has been discussion in our community about your family.”

He runs his fingers along the top of the hymnal.

“You came up in our discussion. You had a conversation with some of the young men and women in our community. It took place at a gathering a few weeks ago, at the municipal building. Do you know what I’m referring to?”

The rain. It deepens. Sister settles into it.

“You think I’m a victim,” she says, smiling faintly. “Thank you.”

“Your personal life is not my business, Miss Gather. But the wellbeing of our community is a concern of the Church. Do you understand?”

“You would offer me assistance?”

“I know that a young woman who talks openly of having intimate relations with her own brother is subject to severe mental and emotional repercussions.”

Sister gets up from her seat. Standing motionless between the pews. Mimicking the call for souls at the end of a service. She follows her spirit towards the altar. Down the aisle, she stops at the footboard where the gatherers kneel.

“What are you?” she says, looking back at the minister.

“I’m just a person. But if you need help, the Church has resources.”

“What about you?” she says. “Who do you go to when you have difficulties?”

“The Church has a hierarchy. Senior ministers who offer counseling and mentorship.”

“And God?”

“I go to God, too. Yes.”

He watches her explore the pulpit. Taking the steps to the podium. Looking out on the congregation.

“Will you tell me about your God?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Is your faith in God based on reason?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Nothing in my life is based on reason.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve tried to find reasons in the past. Reasons for my actions, my beliefs. I’ve never found them. I stopped trying. My faith in God is as irrational as any other belief system. It is as unexplainable to me as my own existence.”

“And what of Christ?”

“I think his model of sacrifice is a guide for all humanity.”

“But he was not the first.”

“No.”

“And you think he was the son of God?”

“I do.”

“And you think those who disbelieve go to hell.”

“Yes.”

She steps down from the pulpit. Behind her the piano lies spread out on its thin legs. Its soundbox sweeps out like a bird wing across the stage. She strikes a key and lets it ring in the air.

“How do you think they shipped this piano all the way out here?” she says.

“The same way that you came here, Miss Gather. On a train.”

Sister goes on. “Don’t you think there might be another system of beliefs based not on one’s own sacrifice but on the sacrifice of others?” she says. “And that those beliefs might be as irrational and as strongly felt as your own?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And would you seek to judge those who participate in those beliefs?”

“I am no judge, Miss Gather.”

“No, you’re not.”

She steps down from the stage. Descending like a falcon in its gyre. Wings tucked and talons spread. She passes the minister and flees down the aisle. Before she exits the chapel and enters the foyer, he turns and calls to her.

“Miss Gather,” he says. She stops and listens to him. “As long as I am in this church, you are welcome into it at any time.”

She leaves, and the minister sits alone in the empty chapel. Once a place of refuge for him, now a place of pain. The ghost of his lover haunting the hallways, the foyer, the altar. Panic filling the songbooks. He goes to the back. Into a small room with a desk, his writing materials, a wall of bookcases. His eyes absently run across the book titles. Following the spines and creases. Landing for a moment and then moving on. Nowhere to rest his mind. Grinding away the long hours of loneliness.

*

The authorities find them sunk in the cellar ground. Buried face down, shoulder to shoulder. Travelers, merchants, hunters, housewives. Husbands, daughters, fathers, brothers. Outcasts and loved ones, all gathered into a common crypt. Placed thoughtfully beneath the crates of raw tubers, jarred pickles and strawberry compote. And what is the separation between body and fruit? Spirit and seed?

Men digging. Carrying bodies loose and putrid up the cellar steps. In the beds of waiting wagons, the identification process begins. Reassembling broken bodies. Torn skin sutured back together. Teeth gathered in piles to be sorted. Onlookers vomiting where they stand.

The judge stands with a kerchief tied across his face. His eyes bulging widely above it. They roll like marbles in their sockets, disbelieving the wretched scene.

“Minister,” he says, “what the hell happened out here?”

In the cold air, the winter grass stems wear leaves of brittle glass. Painted frost refracting the soft morning light. Blooming out into roses of pink and purple hues. The minister kneels to a victim. A young woman split down her torso. Breastbone still shining through the broken flesh.

“I spoke to the mother and the sister,” he says. “It was a few months ago, now. I remember the sister mentioning a religion based around the sacrifice of others.”

He imagines the family at the table, searching the souls of their victims. Holding them down at the right time. Guiding them like light bearers towards the darkness.

“Like human sacrifice?” says the judge, his breath escaping the sides of his kerchief.

“I think so,” says the minister.

“And you talked to them?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“And they didn’t kill you?”

The minister stands up. He looks around at the corpses stretched out in the grass. Around the symmetric artifice of the lodge, the figures take unnatural and misaligned shapes. As if the ancient god of war himself had taken up residence there.

“No,” he says. “They didn’t.”

“Any idea where they might have gone?”

“Probably back from where they came.”

The judge leans down into the grass. Looking closely into the shaggy earth.

“Down to hell,” he says. “That’s where they came from.”

*

In a long river valley, a single tree breaks free. Rising from the river bottom soil. Coiling over the dead earth. From its stark white branches, a body hangs limply. Suspended from a stake driven through the flesh of its back. Father breathing his last breaths. Dying of pneumonia upon the suffering tree.

Around the tree, gray stalks of corn slant under slight skeins of snow. Earless and forgotten. Sister bunches her skirt into a fabric bowl. Gleaning loose kernels from the cold ground. She pours them into piles like a sacrifice of teeth at Father’s feet. His bare toes dangling just off the ground. Brother sits with a whetstone. Laving a sharp blade across its slick surface. Mother works a pinch of cornmeal in her fingers.

“What are we to live and die in such fickle fashions?” she says. “How can we say that we exist? Leaving nothing behind us, we carry nothing with us. We gather only what we need, shedding from our bodies and minds that which consumes us, the connections between us that are no more real than our own meaningless existences.”

They bring father down and let him of blood. Pale skin draining of life. Blood running riverlike into the earth. Pooling in pale rosettes before sinking finally into nothingness. The skin is peeled and pulled back from the flesh. Brother sets to taking the meat from the bones. Flaying lean strips from the body and hanging them on a trestle to smoke. Mother breads the fillets with cornmeal.

“What is sacrifice when there is no loss?” she says. “If we are nothing, there can be no possession, no choice, no fulfillment or ecstasy. Only the raw experience of consciousness coursing through us, tumbling us like clay along the bottom of a mighty river; into one another and away from one another.”

They sit together and chew the meat. Dry and tasteless like ash in their mouths. Mute among the dead earth like a conclave of lepers. Father’s carcass is left where it lies. The hanging meat is wrapped and packed. They move on across the land, one less in their congregation of believers. One to less to gather from the earth the fruit of consciousness.

*

The minister and his mentor sit side by side in studded leather arm chairs. Shrouded in veils of smoke and darkness. The dim lights of cigarettes hover around their faces. On the stand between them lie a few rolling papers and stray strands of tobacco. They speak quietly, calmly. About nothing. About subjects vaporous and ephemeral. Like the smoke hanging around them, forming no meaning or import. Until the mentor speaks out from the darkness and touches a nerve.

“So you’re saying she’s available?” he says.

The words crash discordant among the ash and soot. The minister sits back into the shadow. Cradling himself in the sweeping arm chair.

“It’s a joke, Starling,” says the mentor.

“I know,” says the minister. “But she’s married.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing good.”

“Yes there was. Tell me.”

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” says the minister. “I still can’t make any sense of what happened. It’s just pain, that’s all I can feel when I think about it. It was a short, intense pleasure replaced with overwhelming pain.”

The mentor stirs within the darkness. His long frame uncoils from the chair, towering over the room.

“I’m sorry, Starling,” he says. “What did you tell them?”

“Who?”

“The congregation.”

“I told them that I developed an inappropriate relationship with a community member. That I no longer felt comfortable leading them as a member of the clergy.”

“You told them that from the pulpit?”

“Yes.”

Pulling a stopper from a bottle on the table, the mentor holds its lip to his nose.

“You weren’t wrong, you know,” he says. “You mishandled your feelings, but they weren’t wrong. It is never wrong to love another person.”

In the quiet darkness, the bottle hisses its warm liquid into a glass. The minister sinks further into his chair, further into nothingness. Right and wrong, shallow meanings growing less and less distinct among the souls of the righteous. The mentor leans down through the shadows, holding out a wide rimmed glass.

“Did you fuck her?” he says.

The minister looks up at him. Tobacco stains tinge his gray hair yellow around his lips. He grins across the glass.

“It’s a joke, Starling.”

“No,” says the minister. “We didn’t have sex.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess it was a line we didn’t want to cross.”

From the glass, an acrid fume rises. The minister pushes it away.

“It wasn’t just her that crushed me,” he says. “There was this family out there, too. I spoke with two of them, before they fled. It was unsettling. They knew what I was going through. I hadn’t told anyone. I had never spoken to them before in my life, but they immediately picked up on my pain.”

The minister sits forward, gazing into his void shaped hands.

“It was after I spoke to them that I realized I hadn’t just lost her. That was only part of it. I lost my desire for God, as well. Something changed in me during that experience. And I found myself strangely drawn to that family. I still do, wherever they are.”

The mentor folds himself into his chair. The room seems to shrink around him. Light and space converging on his being. He sets the glass down on the side table.

“God is not a romantic partner, Starling.” he says. “He is not a corporeal body to be lost or gained. Our desires have no bearing on his effect on our lives. The cycles of closeness and separation from God are part of being a minister. Cycles of belief and disbelief. We are human. God is not.”

He takes up his loose stemmed cigarette, the fine paper pinching in his fingers. Its bud still smolders lightly.

“Don’t leave the church, Starling,” he says. “We have administrative positions in Cleveland, where your brother lives. Take time to relax and rest your mind. The human psyche is subject to immense amounts of pain; physical, mental and emotional. You will get through this. And when you do, you will be stronger for it.”

The minister’s cigarette dies in the ashtray. Their conversation dies with it. He returns out into the night, down three steps from the stoop of the mentor’s brick rowhouse. Outside, a light rain hisses against the gas lamps. Glowing like moons above the cobblestone pavement. He has nowhere to be. No flock to tend. What is a minister without a ministry? What is a church without its people?

*

Cleveland, 1872

Along the wall, a radiator fills with steam. Knocking dolefully into the hollow tenement. A stone floored basement wet and dripping. Corroded iron pipes strung across the floor joists above. Sister leans against the radiator. The long fabric of her garments enfolding the warming iron. Pressing her hot skin to the metal.

“Did you come here because you want to fuck me?” she says.

In the corner, a boiler sits bulbous and sprawling. Long pipes flung outward like some monster in the night. The minister keeps his eyes on Mother. Lying in an iron framed bed, her slight body hardly creases the mildewed mattress. Her bones give no rise beneath the blankets. Eyes shut tight in her shrunken face.

“Is she sick?” he says.

“Yes, she is.”

“They asked me to come here and identify you,” says the minister. “The authorities did. They said that you match the description of the family in Kansas. That you are living here, in the basement of this complex.”

Sister bows her face to the radiator. Setting her cheek on the painted piping. Letting the heat sting her skin.

“But that’s not why you came,” she says.

A twitch takes the minister’s eye. A convulsion in his palm. He sits in the only chair in the basement. A skeletal thing with bare straps and supports. Mother opens her eyes. A deep cough shattering her core. Shaking the bed springs beneath her. She sits up violently. Searching the basement with blood dimmed eyes.

“You,” she intones into the darkness, “you came here because you are looking for something.”

“What is it?” responds the minister. “What am I looking for?”

Through the dim shadows, Mother thrusts her hand towards him. Fingers twisted and bone dry.

“I am a minister of death,” she says. “You are a minister of life. We are not so different, you and I. Follow me. Take my hand and I will show you what death can bring to the living.”

“I don’t want to die,” says the minister.

“Because you are afraid. Release yourself from these bonds. They are not yours to cling to. Do you understand that? The emotions, memories, and pain you hold so dearly are not yours to keep. If you can let go of them you will find what you are looking for.”

The minister looks over to Sister. She lifts her head and gazes back at him.

“Why didn’t you kill me before?” he says.

“Did you want me to?” says Sister.

“I was in pain. You knew what I was struggling with. I never told anyone. How did you know?”

She turns away from him. She sets her other cheek down onto the radiator, a hot patch of skin reddening.

“What do you think death is, minister?” says Mother, reclining back onto her pillow.

“Death is a result of sin,” he says.

“And what is sin?”

“Sin is separation from God.”

“Sin is decay, minister. And it is inevitable for all living things. It is the natural result of existing in a physical reality. To resist death is to resist all natural processes. Your church has it right. This physical world is a sinful, corrupt one. Death is the release from that corruption. Why would you seek to stay in a world of pain?”

The minister pauses for a moment. In the broken chair, his nervous body goes still.

“I think there is something to be said for living through brokenness,” he says. “For enduring pain, and finding what lies beyond it.” He looks over at Sister. “I think you know something about that yourself. I am here, now, facing you, facing death.”

Sister rises from the radiator. Her long garments drag behind her across the stone floor. From the dirty window well, light passes through the sheer fabric, illuminating her like an angel of death.

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t hold onto vanity myself,” she says. “What is life, if not a practice in vanity? Our own selfish habits of survival. Destroying others so that we might live. Pleasure, pain, love, hate; it’s all vanity.”

In the corner shadow, Brother crouches with a knife in his upturned palm. Sister motions to him.

“These acts of violence,” she says, watching Brother now rise and stand. “The pure joy I receive from seeing pain course through another body. The penetration of flesh, organ, intestine. Selfish acts that reveal my own corruption. Who can escape the snare of ego, of vanity? Only the dead, minister. Only the dead.”

Brother steps behind him. He brings the blade to the minister’s shirt collar. Scraping it slowly down the fabric. Brushing his chest until it finally rests at the minister’s navel. The minister feels the pressure of the blade slowly increase against him. A steady tightening of fabric and flesh until he finds himself in a vice-like grip of pain. He looks up at Sister.

“Is this it?” he says.

Sister turns away from him. Looking to Mother. She sits up in the bed, waving a flagging hand at the darkness.

“No,” says Mother. “I will take his place. Death is nothing to fear, minister. Look to Christ. He was able to surrender himself to death’s power.”

The pressure releases and the minister stands up from the chair. The coat in his lap falls to the floor. He makes for the stairs that lead out of the basement. As he climbs towards the light, Sister stops him.

“What will you tell them?” she asks.

“I am going to tell them that you’re here,” says the minister.

He takes a last look back and then climbs up and out of the room. Outside, a cold wind drifts across the narrow alleyway. Bits of paper caught in the lees of brick and mortar. Picking up and swirling in eddies. Shouts come from windows. People down the street passing. The minister joins them.

***

Christopher Aslan Overfelt lives and works in Kansas City, KS. His stories have appeared in numerous publications in print and online. A long time writer, his stories revolve around the theme of the anxiety of death.