Darker Edge of Desire

by Mitzi Szereto

  Another, come late to the party. Typical, Father Mihalis thought; quick to sin, slow to repent. “I heard the last confession. Contact the office to make an appointment if you are in dire need. Otherwise, I will hear confession again after our next mass,” he said, sitting back down.

  He never liked facing the sinners on their way out of the confessional. Awkward, it was. Best to let them leave cloaked in the silence of their shame and the glory of their contrition.

  This one did not leave, nor did he reply.

  Father Mihalis waited him out. He’d had many years to cultivate patience.

  He was rewarded when, finally, the Englishman spoke again. “You are inviting me to see you whenever I wish?”

  Within reason, Father Mihalis thought. It was with the calm of many years’ service to others he replied, “Yes, of course. Anytime.” Only later did he think of the odd way the question had been asked after the long, uncomfortable silence.

  He waited for the man to speak again, to offer thanks, or perhaps argue for time now, but no words came. He peered through the shadows into the other side of the confessional. After a few minutes, he had to accept that no one was there. Somehow, the man had disappeared without making a sound.

  Father Mihalis, or John, as he preferred to be called when he was not in the church, scraped the last of his supper into the trash bin. Lean Cuisine’s newest offering had not sat well with his stomach.

  His feet made scuffing sounds on the linoleum as he shuffled from the small galley kitchen back into what served as his living room. The church provided meager lodgings, but free was better rent than many paid, and he did not require much room. He had managed to save most of his salary over the years and looked forward to retiring to a warmer clime, perhaps near an ocean where he could afford a large house and a maid to clean it.

  The television cast shadows along the walls and ceiling. No other light shined, not even a candle. John liked it dark at night, after being under the bright fluorescents of the church office all day. Even the stained-glass windows tourists gasped over grew tiresome after long enough, the sun making the red glass stab his eyes like knives, causing terrible headaches.

  At first, he thought the dark shape in his reclining chair was a shadow. It had to be a shadow. Then, it spoke. “Thank you for inviting me into your home.”

  “Who are you? How dare you? What do you want? Get out!” John shouted, blurting every thought in his head in his panic.

  The man did not move. “Please, sit,” he said, pointing toward the small chintz-covered chair John reserved for his rare guests.

  It was the Englishman, the one who had disappeared from the confessional. The one John had thought of several times since the incident. The one he’d dreamed of, much to his dismay.

  “You must leave at once or I shall call the police,” John said. It never served to let anyone see your fears, or know your weaknesses. But he had grown old, and it was harder than it once was to hide behind the mask of priesthood, especially here in his ratty old robe and dirty slippers. He shifted from one foot to the other, alarmed to find his hand shaking as he tried to point commandingly to the door.

  “You will do no such thing,” the man told him in a voice so deep, and so genuinely commanding, it caused John to stand up straighter, a frisson of energy crackling down his spine. “Sit. We have much to discuss, you and I.”

  John did as asked, his voice fainter as he offered one last protest. “You’ve no right to be in my private chambers.” Clamping his mouth closed, he swallowed thoughts about making an appointment, about the lateness of the hour, about custom and ritual, about the church. The strange man’s posture, tone and very presence told him he’d have none of it.

  Wearing a dark suit, white collar and black tie, his shoes shined so that John saw reflections from the television, the man looked like an attorney, or an undertaker. His features, even masked in half shadow, were arresting. Strong, angular jawbones met to form a firm, wide chin; long blade-like nose, and lips managed to be sensual though they were thin.

  “You’ve dreamed of me,” the man said. His expression held no animosity, yet his brown eyes glittered with fierce intensity.

  A ripple of fear coursed through John’s middle. It would do no good to lie. “Yes.”

  He’d seen him, in those dreams, though that was not possible. He had known his name too. Now it was elusive, having slipped away back into the abyss.

  He was young, young and full of brash optimism, his future laid out before him. At his side was a handsome man with sharp features and shaggy brown hair. A man whose presence John felt as if a tether bound them, though they were careful not to touch each other. The time had not yet come when such a thing was accepted on the street, even in Los Angeles, even in the Summer of Love.

  They’d met Easter Sunday on the day when the Sun had crossed the celestial equator. The Elysian Park love-in was crowded yet, like stars aligning, or planets drawn into orbits, they’d found each other through the smoke and dancing bodies. The man’s brown eyes, locked to his, had enticed John away from the seminary students there to protest such a pagan display on the day of Jesus Christ’s resurrection.

  Instead of holding his cross high with the others, John dropped it. He took the man’s hand when he offered it to him. He kissed his lips, free for the first time to do so, surrounded by people in love, who had nothing but peace in their hearts for all mankind. Soothed by the man’s hands on his body, his mind turned from everything he knew and found a place where only desire lived. And, it was good. It was right.

  Days passed and he had not returned to school. Instead, he wandered the streets with his new lover. Soon, they looked like hippies, long hair, shoes worn thin, unshaven faces lit with inner happiness. They found places to touch behind bushes, in parks and alleyways and in dark clubs where other men like them dwelled.

  John showed him his scars, and rejoiced when they were kissed and tears were shed over them. He told the man his secret longings and hugged him when they were accepted.

  “You’re going to dig this place,” his lover told him one night, leading him into a club with no name on the door, on a street littered with bottles and needles and razor blades.

  John kept his hands at his sides as they walked into a darkened room. Low ceilings pressed on him, and music throbbed. There’s a red house over yonder. That’s where my baby stays.

  People sat in burgundy leather booths, and crowded narrow walkways. Some were flower children, some looked to be workers from the nearby city of Hollywood, but some were like none John had ever seen. These were pale of skin, and dark of eye, with drawn features and long elegant fingers. Most wore black clothing but, in the back, in a small area exposed to the night sky, on a patio with a fountain of stone, one of them was naked.

  “What is this place?” John whispered, reaching out to clasp his lover’s hand as he saw the blood that flowed from the veins of the nude woman into IVs with needles that pierced the sweet blue veins in the delicate crooks of her elbows. Valves were opened and closed. Goblets filled. All around him, people sipped. Some fondled one another openly. Others dipped fingers into the blood and painted their faces or the bodies of others.

  “Home, John.” His lover smiled, laying a finger to John’s lips as if to still the protest bubbling there. The touch, so slight, controlled him, pressed him back until his spine rested on the stone wall surrounding the courtyard, his lover sliding a knee between his thighs, taking his hands and easing them up and over his head as he licked his throat where his pulse throbbed madly.

  Still, he saw the ones with blades. He watched as a man made tiny slices into the thigh of another, forming a neat row of cuts that ran all the way down to his ankle. He watched as blood tears wept from the open flesh. He moaned as the blade was tossed away and blood was lapped up, while the one who had been cut cried, gently cradling the cutter’s head.

  “I’ve never seen—” he said, his words cut off when his lover’s teeth pierced his throat, hi
s hand freeing his cock from his jeans, and stroking it until his blood pulsed there too.

  John woke from the dream in the middle of an orgasm and cried himself back to sleep.

  “Do you remember?” the Englishman asked, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees, a crook of fingers forming a resting place for his firm chin.

  “Yes.” It was a dream, John thought. A terrible, awful, frightening dream.

  “That was only the first. There have been others,” the stranger said. Again, he did not ask. He knew.

  “Yes,” John answered, his throat closing, fear a live thing that rippled through his bloated belly and dug fingers into his lungs.

  The girl was crying. “I have to do it. I know it’s wrong. I prayed on it like you said, but I can’t stop. It’s the only thing I feel anymore.”

  John had heard it all before. The sorrow, the tears, the shameful confession. But this young soul stirred him. He understood her, though he could never admit it. “You’ve made this a substitute for emotion. A way to feel and a way to control the pain inside, worse than the cuts you make into your body.”

  “No one will love me, if they see. If they know,” she said, sobbing now. The worries of a teenaged girl, unable to see that time would change these things if she let it. Not realizing the cruel words of other children would someday mean nothing to her, as she went about her middle-aged life.

  I love you, John thought. But, these words he could not say. Nor could he ease her wounds with fingers that understood or kiss away the blood that poured from cuts she made with a rusty blade so she would know that she was not alone. “You must see the school nurse, as you promised last time. You must continue to pray to God so he might show you the light and the way. And, you must promise me you will call, day or night, should you feel an urge to cut deeper.” You are so young, he wanted to say. So full of life. Can’t you see the world awaits you, and anything you desire could be yours if only you were not afraid?

  “I promise, Father. Thank you!”

  “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good,” John said, closing his eyes, praying along with the girl that this was true.

  “For his mercy endures forever,” she replied, like a good little Catholic.

  “Do you remember?” the stranger asked, his intense eyes drilling into John’s.

  “I do.” The damp of tears watered his gaze, made the man swim, and his own throat hot.

  The girl had not been a dream. She had died that summer, never picking up the phone to call him or anyone else for help.

  “Still, there is more.” The man reached for John’s hand, and held it as tenderly as a lover might, his thumb stroking the paper-thin skin.

  John shook his head, but he did not pull away.

  “Tell me,” the Englishman said.

  New York. Another borough. Far from the church. Drawn to the lover he’d met in the park on another coast, in another age. This time, after he’d said Mass, offered the Eucharist. I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.

  “I can’t,” John told him, even as bedsprings squeaked beneath them and he tore at the clothing of the one he could never resist.

  “You will.” Lips found his. Tongues tangled and breath mingled. The world dwindled to this place, this hidden room, where no one but his lover could find him.

  This time, after giving himself in an offering, still sore with it, he’d held the blade.

  “Cut across, not down. Not too deep, darling,” his lover told him as the blade glinted in the candlelight. “Do it slow.” His cock was hard again. John licked it. Taste of semen mingled with the metallic tang of the blood he had licked from the row of cuts on his lover’s arm.

  Without meaning to, he’d made a cross on the man’s wrist, earning the admonishment and direction. It reminded him of things he did not wish to think on. He groaned, even as his hips lifted to slide his disobedient flesh through the tightly circled fingers of his lover. Closing his eyes, he spurted, forgetting everything but the pleasure, shuddering as he passed the blade to his friend. “Please, do me now. Make them deep.”

  “Do you remember?” the Englishman said, softer now, his hand cradling John’s cheek as his tears fell.

  “I don’t want to,” John protested, shaking his head, afraid of the man’s touch, but more afraid of how much he needed it.

  “But you must. It’s time.”

  “The blood is not bad. The cutting is not bad. Jesus forgives all but the man who would call Satan the Lord. Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned, and sinned and sinned again,” John said, on his knees at his bedside.

  His pants were around his knees, pooled there. His naked belly smooth from the razor he’d drawn over it. His cock so hard, jutting up to the ceiling, its single eye gazing upon the crucifix over the bed without shame.

  Scars, long since healed, ribbed his thighs, and when he came, he rubbed his offering into them like a salve, the way his lover had so long ago.

  On his night table sat a long-handled razor. Next to it a cloth and a needle. When the blood flowed, he would paint it upon himself, until he was pretty again.

  “None of it was bad. Not then.” The Englishman stood before him, a different light shining in his narrowed eyes.

  “It never felt wrong. Not with him.” John clutched his robe around himself and tried not to cower in the chair. The light from the television shone above the strange man’s head.

  “It was never wrong. You were.”

  The man had come to him, so like the girl from many years before. “I don’t know why I do it. I like the sting. You can’t tell nobody, right?”

  “Do you…taste it?” Father Mihalis asked him.

  “Fuck! I mean, no, Father. No.”

  Pity, John thought. “Do not curse in the confessional,” he said, hands moving over his rosary.

  “Forgive me, Father,” the man said, chuckling, not taking this seriously at all.

  “Only the Lord can forgive you. Visit the altar dedicated to Our Lady, for one hour, and give thanks for the pardon received. Ask for her help so you may overcome your desires.”

  Father Mihalis made the sign of the cross and the man was gone, slamming the confessional door before he could say the words that sealed the deal. Ah well, he had other plans for him anyway.

  The Englishman waited more patiently than even John. He stood in the spread of John’s thighs and looked at his shriveled old cock, once so firm and rampant. In his eyes, John saw acceptance of all he had once been and what he was now.

  “I killed him,” he said, his voice flat and strange with the admission. As if he didn’t care, when he did. He always had cared so much.

  “You tricked him into the alley behind the church and slit his throat. You let his blood stain the cobblestones.”

  John nodded. “He kept coming back! Telling me things. He was a bad person. He hurt people. He didn’t love the girls he cut. He poured alcohol on their wounds!”

  “He opened yours.”

  “Yes! I missed you,” John said, knowing what his logical mind had refused to embrace before.

  His lover smiled, for the first time, his thin lips slanting across his face, a slash of a dimple appearing on one cheek.

  “He was not the only one.”

  “You were the only one,” John said, falling to his knees, kissing the shoe of the man he’d once loved. The only man he’d ever loved.

  “And you were my only one. I gave to you, of my blood, not so you would spill another’s, but so you would learn to live.” His lover’s hand gently stroked the top of his head.

  “You drank my blood.” It all came crashing back. The dreams that were not dreams at all. The fangs at his throat, suckling. The cock in his mouth. Real.

  “But you turned away. Became…this.” The sorrow in his voice made John’s tears flow anew, yet now fear had come back too.

  His eyes darted to the doorway beyond where his lover stood. He could never mak
e it past him but he had to try.

  “What now?” John asked, his voice sounding flat to his ears, old and resigned. He knew what was coming next.

  Before his lover, still so impossibly young and handsome, replied, John sat back on his haunches, grabbing the rosary and cross from where it sat on the table next to his recliner, holding it up before himself like a shield. “Be gone, devil! I cast you out in the name of the Lord!”

  The Englishman’s eyes glowed with intensity, amusement curving his lips into a grin. He reached out and curled his fingers around the cross, squeezing it so hard the spikes pinning Jesus to the wood burst his flesh. Droplets of blood rained down on the carpet as he snatched the rosary from John’s hands.

  “It only works if you believe,” his lover whispered, sliding a finger wet with blood over John’s lips.

  God help him, John’s tongue darted out. Tasting the blood, he moaned, closing his eyes, tilting his head back and offering his throat as his lover painted his mouth and made him pretty once more.

  SISTER BESSIE’S BOYS

  Gary Earl Ross

  When I was ten, just before the start of the Korean War, Reverend Cobb began filling my mother’s head with notions that I should attend seminary after high school. “Lucas has the gift,” he said—mainly because during his visit to my Sunday school class I had dazzled him with my grasp of the catechism. He might have looked at me differently if he had known I memorized it just to show up my brother and sister, who were part of the confirmation class I was too young to attend.

  While my father remained neutral and Matthew and Marcia indifferent, my mother embraced the idea her baby would become a minister. Throughout my teens she did her best to steer me toward pulpit life. We discussed Bible verses and sang together in the choir. We volunteered at a nursing home. It had been a long time, she told me, since our little church sent someone to theology school. “The Lawson boy,” she said. “We had a special offering to send him but he left school—and his family left the church—after he got a girl in trouble.” Her tone left no doubt damnation awaited me if I shamed myself and my church like the Lawson boy.