Every fortnight, she enters the cathedral, part stained glass Sistine, part fighting chapel perched above the gates of Caernarfon with arrow slits adorning its floor like a mosaic.
Each appointment is scripted. She finds comfort in the ritual. She signs her name to the Doomsday Book, waiting in the echoing vestibule until her name is called. In the quiet of the confessional, the priest listens patiently then prescribes her biweekly penance.
From the closed chamber of the confessional she is guided to the openness of the presbytery where choir monks tend the high alter. There the ritual goes into motion with blood counts, the reading of vital signs, more blood sacrificed for a divination. Should the numerology augur well, the port is re-baptized in the sea.
A pinch of nightshade soothes and prepares her before the demon-hunters are introduced, a tube of the Red, a bag of the Clear. The Red is reluctant and volatile, requiring the sister to coax it in by hand. The Clear is more amenable, dripping and clicking like the well-fingered decades of a rosary. Both are powerful inquisitors charged with ferreting out malignancies wherever they may lurk or hide. They pursue their mandate militantly, unconcerned with the innocent sheltering among the guilty. The innocent receive eventual redemption, the guilty eternal damnation.
As the Hospitallers continue their ministrations, she accepts a communion of saltines and grape juice to appease the lesser demons stirring in her stomach while an anonymous quartet chants Gregorian whispers into her ear. In a final sacrament a warding glyph is laid across the port sealing it with a sigil broken only when the two-man tribunal rides forth again to terrorize her enemies.
By the night stair, she hears the learned priest in his cell reciting Latin dictation like a mantra, quick and practiced, the repetition as meaningful as the liturgy.
At home, pills form the beads of a private rosary, each dedicated to a different patron, capsules for the saint of nausea, whites for receptor 25, blues for the saint of aches and minor pains. Each is a different murmured prayer repeated at the prescribed intervals, some at Prime, some at Vespers, some following certain feast days, others as a random solace.
The next morning she tithes at the chapel for a short but powerful benediction, a booster to guard the innocent against overzealous inquisitors. In a week, another blood sacrifice, another augury to determines whether she spends her days in cloister or toils the fields beside her lay sisters.
In preparation, she shears her head like a penitent nun awaiting censure, praying her interdiction will be temporary, a time for pensive meditation, an indulgence.
© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III
--------------------------------
ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
--------------------------------
When we were leaving the oncologist’s office after Karen’s second treatment, we walked by a room where the doctor was giving dictation to a machine. Something about the sound of him rattling off notes and instructions like he had hundreds of times before reminded me of a priest in a confessional giving absolution. The idea stuck and became the inspiration for this piece.
Each week the nurses flushed Karen’s port with saline before treatment then sealed it afterwards with an anti-coagulant called heparin. On various days before and after treatment she had special pills to take. Those were fun to keep track of.
In the gatehouse above Caernarfon Castle, there really is a chapel with arrow slits in the floor to fire at attackers who make it past the first gate, as strange as it might sound.
Picture notes: Another picture from our trip to Wales in 2006 (little did we know then what we’d be using some of these pictures for). This is some of what little remains of the interior of Valle Crucis Abbey, inside the Chapter House. Karen added the streaming sunlight for effect.
ReplyDelete