by Tim Marquitz
Nothing happened. Sarah’s creation was just a large, elaborate gingerbread tower in the light of four little candles. She sighed, feeling her exhaustion. Her hands ached and her eyes were dry. She also felt more foolish by the minute: what had she been thinking, playing at black magic? Stealing from her own business, trying to be her grandmother. Of course nothing was happening: this was just a gingerbread tower, destined to be destroyed at a party.
Stupid, Sarah. Stupid.
Stripping off her gloves with swift, angry movements, she shoved the tray away.
With a tiny snap, the gingerbread man fell off. With a tiny thud, it landed.
Sarah froze. The cookie must have been very weak, since its cushioned landing onto thick frosting had cracked its almost nonexistent neck.
A faint noise buzzed in Sarah’s ears, like a long, thin scream from far away; abruptly cut off. With a final sputter, all four of the tea lights went out at once, leaving her in darkness.
Slowly, Sarah backed away. The tower loomed in the dark, like a block of pure blackness.
Eventually, she left the kitchen.
#
Sarah was awoken very early, by the scream of a siren outside her apartment.
She sat up in bed, blinking sleep away. Sirens wailed past, devastatingly loud so close to her window. Standing up and dressing hurriedly, she went downstairs.
Outside, the dark morning was freezing: ice coated the sidewalks, and snow whirled overhead. She pulled her coat closer around her, following the whirling lights of the ambulance down the street. It was pulled up outside East Street Luxury Towers, along with a police car.
“…Possible suicide,” she heard one officer saying. “White male, mid-thirties, fallen from an upper floor…”
Unnoticed, Sarah pressed in, knowing already what she would see.
Tom wasn’t wearing pajamas. He never had: just shorts, even in winter. His legs were bare, long, oddly obscene lying crooked on the snow. Not as obscene, however, as the angle of his neck, or the expression of glazed terror in his open eyes.
In the wind, his hair fluttered.
“Hey, lady.” Sarah started as a police officer loomed over her. “This is a crime scene. You need to leave.”
Without replying, Sarah turned and headed back to Missus Cupcake. The morning was cold and dark, and snowflakes blew into her eyes, but she hurried on, bent against the wind, back into her shop.
The door jingled behind her as she made her way across the serving area back into the kitchen. The gingerbread tower still stood, surrounded by the blackened remains of the candles. The gingerbread man with his broken neck.
Eileen had been so looking forward to that party. How on earth was Sarah going to explain?
Thy Just Punishments
Edward M. Erdelac
The steady flow of sins petty and titanic, real and imagined, droned in hushed whispers through the confessional screen, punctuated each time by a myriad of variations on the Act of Contrition;
“O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments, but most of all because they offended Thee, O Lord, who art all-merciful and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more.”
Father Tim O’Herlihey half-listened, doled out Hail Marys and Our Fathers, muttered out rehearsed advice when prompted, and checked the passing of every other minute on his watch, fighting to keep from laying his head against the finished wood wall and snoring. He squinted at his racing form and wondered if he could hit the ATM and catch the Blue Line down to Suffolk Downs in time for the last run.
The Bishop had promised him a new priest this month, just in time for him to saddle the poor bastard with Saturday confession and free him up for next month’s Belmont Stakes Day.
Of course, first he had to pull a stake together. There had been questions about the lightness of the parish’s tithe last month. He had thought he’d had a sure thing with this maiden horse Norfolk Enchants, but the stupid nag had busted its leg on a turn and thrown its jockey over the withers, losing to Peony’s Envy.
“Bless you, Fadder, for you have sinned,” growled the next voice through the screen.
The setup of the booth was supposed to foment anonymity and ease the nerves of the confessor, but he’d been at St. Brigid’s so long he knew every one of the parishioners’ voices anyway, just as he knew the owner of the deep Southie accent was not one of them.
“How many months has it been since your last confession?” he wheezed. A bullet in the lung had given him that hazy whistle years ago.
Father Tim smiled into his hand. He knew where his stake would come from now. No heat from the goddamned Bishop this month.
He slid the screen open a crack, and glimpsed the fleshy, bulldog face of Peachy Muldoon. That voice, like a crocodile with a belly full of gravel, suited that meaty, half-lidded face, even if his nickname did not.
“Heya Peachy, you got something for me?”
A plain white envelope slid through the crack into his fingers. Thick.
“For the orphans, Fadder. You know you’re the surest thing Murphy’s had since Terry Dunne got sent up the river to South Bay?”
Father Tim slit open the envelope with his pinkie and counted out five hundred dollars.
“Is that a fact?” he said with the same disinterested tone he reserved for the confessions. His brain was already working out his spread.
“Don’t know how you do it,” said Peachy.
“What’s the name?” Father Tim said, slipping the envelope into his pocket beneath his vestments.
“Michael O’Bannon.”
“OK,” said Father Tim, sliding the screen shut. “Tomorrow’s Mass.”
“Tanks, Fadder.”
Creaking as he started to rise. The little light above the screen that lit to let the priest know someone had knelt down in the booth flickered.
“Hey Peachy.”
“Yeah?”
“Any word from Sullivan? What’s the fix today down at Suffolk?”
“Jesus, Fadder, the track closes in an hour.”
“So?”
“So you’re too late.”
Father Tim sucked his lips.
“Hey let me know if you hear anything about the Belmont next month, OK?”
“Awright, Fadder.”
The light winked out.
Father Tim rubbed his eyes.
“Peachy.”
“Yeah?”
“How many more out there?”
“I’m the last one. Go home.”
Father Tim listened to the door slam shut and folded up his race form in his bible. He flicked out the light and stepped out into the church proper, already unbuttoning his cassock, when he turned and nearly bowled over a trembling little old white haired woman in a tweed house coat and white knit cap.
“Oh excuse me, Father!” laughed the old woman nervously, in a brogue as thick and whimsical as an extra from The Quiet Man.
Father Tim didn’t know this woman. They’d had an influx of new parishioners while Gate of Heaven over on 4th Street was being renovated. She was probably one of the refugees.
“You’re Father Tim, aren’t you?” she said, smiling like a mummy and putting out her withered hand.
“Yes that’s right,” said Father Tim, his heart sliding down into the pit of his stomach. She had that hopeful, talkative look about her. Probably stood outside after the dismissal pumping her pastor’s hand and going on and on about her cats or her grandkids or both.
He tucked his bible under his arm and took her dry hand in both of his, being careful not to let her wrinkled fingers clench his own.
“I’m Mary Ladhe,” the old sprite gobbled. “I usually attend Mass at Gate of Heaven, but you know…”
“Yes, the renovations, I know,” said Father Tim, keeping a thin smile plastered across his face. “Well, welcome to St. Brigid’s.”
He released her hand and began to step past
.
“Thank you. Am I too late for confession?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Ladhe, but confession only goes to three forty five,” he said, half stepping into the aisle and looking apologetically over his shoulder.
“Oh is it past that now? I thought I was on time. I had trouble getting up the steps. We’ve got a ramp at Gate of Heaven, you know.”
“Well I’d plan for that next time,” said Father Tim, raising his eyebrows.
Miss Ladhe’s expression slipped a bit.
“Oh yes, well….do you have somewhere to be?”
“I’m afraid I do, or I’d surely make time for you,” he said, gaining the aisle at last and genuflecting to the altar, rapidly crossing himself. “I’ve a deathly ill lady to look in on. Mrs. Rodriguez.”
“Oh well, I suppose she can’t wait then.”
“No,” said Father Tim, hastily crossing to the sacristy door. “I’m sorry, Ms. Ladhe. It was nice meeting you.”
“Father?” Miss Ladhe called, her haggish voice echoing in the cavernous church, making the candles flicker, he imagined.
Her tone had changed slightly. He looked back curiously.
She was straightening up, having just stooped down apparently. Her face wore a deep frown, the wrinkled eyelids half-lidded.
She held his race form between her fingers.
“You dropped this.”
“Nope, not mine,” said Father Tim smiling airily. “Must’ve been one of the parishioners.”
“It slipped out of your bible.”
“Did it?” He squinted across the church. “Oh that. I found it in the pew. I was using it as a bookmark. You can toss it.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded, smiling.
“Good day, Ms. Ladhe.”
He ducked into the sacristy and muttered a curse against the old bitch as he stripped off his vestments. He’d never make the track now.
He phoned the bodega in East Boston and asked Jose, the young chicken killer, to put aside a black cockerel for him, then locked up the church and hopped on the Blue Line with his kitty carrier.
Being in veritable eye shot of the Downs was a bitch, but he resisted the strong urge to jog down to the track and ducked into the bodega instead, waving to Josefa at the counter and proceeding to the back hallway, where a couple of kids were eating Chiclets and impassively watching Jose through the glass.
The dingy killing floor was flecked with blood and white feathers, and Jose in his black apron and rubber boots stood between two large grey plastic garbage pails, one full of dead chickens, the other with a lid on it.
Jose mechanically lifted the lid a crack to slip his yellow gloved hand in and pulled out a squawking chicken. He twisted its neck and flung it into the other bin.
By the time Father Tim had rapped loud enough on the glass to get Jose’s attention he had killed six the same way, rapidly and unmercifully, Father Tim supposed, as the End of Days must be.
Jose grinned a golden toothed smile and put a red brick on the lid of the live chicken bin, then came over and let him in.
“Padre! Necessita un negro, si?”
Twenty bucks later he had a black rooster in the kitty carrier and was on his way back to the church.
The sun had gone down and Eladio had locked up the church, but Father Tim had his keys.
He locked the door behind him, went into the sacristy, and changed into his vestments, taking the old red iron knife that had been his great uncle’s from the lock box at the bottom of his closet. He took the carrier out to the altar and lit the candles.
He laid out the chalice, missal, and the black corporal, and began the orate fratres.
“Orate, fratres, ut meum ac vestrum sacrificium acceptabile fiat apud Deum Patrem omnipotentem.”
The greatest injustice to the Roman rite had been the Vatican’s abandonment of Latin. His uncle had always told him that old words had power, and English diluted that power.
He had loved the old Latin Mass since his boyhood, and as an altar boy had not confined himself to the responses, but memorized even the priest’s words. Indeed, he had imagined himself not a mere server, but a kind of acolyte in the sacred traditions, a boy-priest on a mystic path. He sometimes fancied in his most blasphemous moments that the opulent house of God with its marble floors and golden accoutrements was his own throne room.
Then once during a particularly early Mass, he had mistakenly dashed the silver paten against the edge of the altar and the Holy Eucharist had fallen to the floor. Just a clumsy, daydreaming boy’s mistake, but the entire congregation had let out a collective gasp that had colored his cheeks and ears.
The disapproving scowl of Father John as he stooped over to retrieve the Host by hand had solidified his embarrassment, and to make matters worse, Sister Doligosa had slapped him in the sacristy when he’d returned to change out of his cassock after Mass.
“You serve like a cowboy,” the wrinkled old woman had scolded.
He’d been eleven, and run from the church with stinging tears.
He’d been something of a bad boy after that; smoking, profaning, drinking, fleeing wholly from the Church in frustrated anger. He had decided that in that moment of innocent clumsiness, he’d been afforded a glimpse at the true nature of so-called believers; that they put more stock in pomp and ritual than in the true love of God.
Hypocrites.
Yet his dear mother had been worried at his turn around, and sent him off to spend time with his great Uncle Patrick, a priest himself from the old country, though of a decidedly different kind than any he’d ever met before or since.
Uncle Patrick had seen the anger in the boy, and one day coaxed the story of why he’d all but abandoned his faith.
To Tim’s surprise, Uncle Patrick had said;
“It’s entirely right you are, Tim. The world is populated wholly by dumb bleating sheep with no understanding whatsoever of the power of the Mass. The Mass is nothing less than magic, Tim. Magic passed down to us from the agents of the gods. And through it,” he said, touching the side of his red nose and winking one sky blue eye, “those with the knowing can bend the will of the angels to our own purpose.”
Tim recited the sursum coda, sang the trisanctus and the hosanna, and then unlocked the carrier and took out the twitching black cockerel.
Now, with relish, he lifted the clucking chicken high with the iron knife and recited the consecration, the ultimate blasphemy, naming the fowl the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.
The knife was a relic of the Old Religion, Uncle Patrick had said, given to a monk named Finnian by one of the legendary Tuatha De, the magic folk of Old Ireland, Tuan mac Cairill. The story was that the monk had sought out Tuan and preached the Gospel to him. Tuan had told the monk of his own gods, and that the monk Finnian had realized the folly of Christianity, and pledged himself to Tuan’s instruction. Tuan, knowing that Christ had conquered his people, saw an opportunity to keep their memory alive and strike at the Church from within. He bestowed Finnian with the sacred sacrificial knife, and the monk became the first of a secret line of priests who paid lip service to Christ but honored the old gods, and perverted the Mass to their ends whenever they could.
And so Tim had become the latest of that ancient line.
He passed the sacred knife of Tuan beneath the beak of the rooster and lets its blood piddle into the chalice.
When it was drained, he raised the brimming cup of blood and the dead animal carcass again to the empty church and proclaimed;
“Per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso est tibi Deo Patri omnipotenti in unitate Spiritus Sancti omnis honor et gloria per omnia saecula saeculorum.”
He recited the rest of the rite of transubstantiation, broke the chicken’s neck symbolically, and laid it on the paten.
Then, he recited in Gaelic the age old curse;
“Michael O’Bannon —
No butter be on your milk nor on your ducks a web
May your child not walk and your cow b
e flayed
And may the flame be bigger and wider
Which will go through your soul
Than the Connemara mountains
If they were a-fire.”
He raised the cup to his lips and downed the warm iron-tasting blood.
That night, as ever, he roasted and ate the chicken.
Sunday morning he returned to St. Brigid’s and found his new priest waiting for him, a beaming young Filipino man, fresh from St. John’s seminary, with huge oversized glasses, his dark eyes made dim from years spent squinting at theological texts.
“Father Tim?”
“Father Matthew,” Tim said, smiling and taking his hand. “Will you be assisting me today?”
“I thought I would watch from the sacristy, if that’s OK.”
“Alright,” Tim said smiling. “Sunday’s as good a day as any to take a leave of rest. This is yours. But I expect you to assist tomorrow, and I want to see you run your own Mass on Tuesday.”
“OK Father,” Matthew laughed nervously. “OK.”
The Sunday Mass went smoothly. The usual crowd was doubled due to the number of temporary congregants from Gates of Heaven. A week ago he would’ve been squeezing his fists at the sight of that brimming collection basket, but today he had money in his pocket and felt good.
He saw the Ladhe woman sitting in the front pew. She had squeezed out some of the other old biddies who liked to arrive early and get the seat before the rail, shuffling through the morning paper as they passed it back and forth before the rest of the sinners drifted in; haughty old bitches who thought themselves lordly and righteous, as though grace alighted faster on their blue and white heads because they got their Communion first.
When the time came for the Intercessions to be read he ascended the podium and said;
“All grace flows from God. Let us now turn to God with our needs and the needs of the world, confident that our prayers will be answered.”
After leading the respondents through several general prayers for the country, the Church, the Pope and the bishops, he got out the list of recently departed old Mrs. Villalobos always brought him before first Mass and read the list of names.
