Flynn's Last Confession
Flynn was failing. His organs could begin shutting down. The retired priest might not last the night.
"I want to confess grave acts of commission and omission," Flynn confided to the hospice's Catholic chaplain who had been summoned by the staff — not for the first time. "I've hidden these for decades. I’ve no need to keep these secret now."
Flynn was as hairless in his gown as a newborn's butt despite his advanced years. Futile had been chemo. Flynn had joked in Admitting that, on the bright side, he needn’t shave.
"I charge you: Write it down; publish after."
"The seal of the confessional! I’ll grant absolution after your sincere act of contrition but I cannot grant your request," the chaplain peeved. "You'll need another for dictation." Father O’Rourke shifted in the armchair growling, "Not my job. Not here. Not now."
"Publish."
"No."
"Help me! I had a dream earlier. I was back in the Vatican in a library. The papyrus I held was not the text I sought to study. The papyrus told of the Gospels."
"Now's not the time for dreams. I'm not your amanuensis. Confess so I may anoint you and administer the Viaticum." The chaplain tapped his left breast where, beneath his priest's suitcoat but visibly suspended from O’Rourke's mastiff-thick neck, a leather burse held an aureate pyx. "Begin, 'Bless...."
"To hell with you if you won’t indulge me. Come back tomorrow."
“On Christmas Day? Not a snowball’s….” snarled O’Rourke as he removed his purple stole without ceremony, returned it to his coat pocket, and exited, his mission unfulfilled — not for the first time. After some time as agitation yielded to boredom, Flynn dozed.
ooo
"That's all right," said Flynn, and he thanked her.
"I'm taking your vitals," she declaimed and put a thermometer under his tongue, an oximeter on his finger, and a sphygmomanometer cuff over his bicep. Squush squush, "Be grateful you weren't unresponsive," she deadpanned, inflating the cuff, squosh squosh, "else you would’ve gotten the rectal," squash squash, "thermometer after an enema," squish squish, "of mild antiseptic," squesh squesh, "which you might not enjoy."
Flynn took in her eyes and face and garb as she listened for a resounding systolic beat and the fading diastolic rest. His unaided eyesight could read neither her name tag nor her nurse's fob watch clipped to her blue smock but could appreciate her B-cup chest under a white tunic tee. The fob, he could discern, featured Betty Boop M.D. poised with her stethoscope, but not the inverted dial engraved with, "Choose Hospice for a happy ending." Squeiaoush.
After noting his pulse and peeking at the drainage bag beneath the bed she annotated his chart, drawing out, "You're not...too bad...given the circumstances." Flynn thought it uncanny her smock should compliment the zany hue of her highlights.
As she stowed the meters Flynn risked, "Can I share a secret with you?"
"'Kay, for a bit, but I'm on rounds. I might come back later."
"Deal. Let's start. Forgive me, but I don't remember: What is your name?"
"Tháleia...Tháleia Lækisis...c'est moi...like-KISS-is," she puckered and audibly blew him an air kiss, "n'est-ce pas?" Then holding out both sides of her smock she curtsied a French maid. Coquettishly she spun her torso away while swiveling her face toward him and over her shoulder vamped, "I’m temping over the holiday. You won't forget me; no man does," and winked.
"Pretty name, Tháleia," said Flynn thinking, "Greek, wasn't one of the — what are they? Catholic? Likely not."
"Here's my secret: When I was a young priest they sent me to the Vatican for graduate study in ethics. I was researching the Alexandrian Church doctors' teachings against promiscuity via sexual abstinence, their defenders and detractors among the ante-Nicene ethicists. I had been directed to a chamber with several armaria or ikon-decorated cabinets holding medieval tomes. I understood these to be copies of third century texts. In Greek! I intended to read a detractor of Clement. In the designated armarium and on the designated shelf instead of a book I found a breadbox-sized casket clasped shut with an ikon of Saint Anthony the Great.
"Sorry, rounds. Maybe later…or not. I'm dimming the light. Rest. Don't be getting yourself up without lil' ol' moi. That's my job."
After she had backed from him on her matching blue clogs, dimmed the light, and closed the door on exiting Flynn recognized whiffs of raspberry and honeysuckle. Flynn whistled softly hweeEEEE HWOOoooo.
Flynn had been fitted with a Foley catheter. He tried to pass water. He could not tell if any flowed. He mused over how Tháleia might get him up and induce some flow.
ooo
Tapping gentle accompaniment to her patter, "Mister Flynn...James...oh ♫ JIM-mee ♪," Tháleia smiled as Flynn opened his eyes. He smelled her honeysuckle raspberry.
"Have you used a smartphone lately?"
"No, eh, not lately."
"I downloaded a voice recognition app for you. To work it follow me. Press the microphone icon, here, and say something."
On the device she held before him he pressed where she had pointed and spoke, "Test. Test. Testing, one, two, three." She pressed the icon.
"Let's see," she said. The screen displayed, "Tess tess esting 1 2 3." She pressed the file icon, and she showed the screen to Flynn while repeating back his words, as if to a toddler, and asked confidently, "Good enough?" Squinting Flynn could not read the text but he nodded his head and voiced, "Aye."
Handing it to him she directed, "Speak what you want into the microphone. You can edit later."
Flynn held the smartphone with both hands before him and resumed his confession:
"I moved the casket to the carrel, sat, and worked. I copied and translated from the papyrus into my notebook. I remember the text as something like, 'Whosoever the truth will know it is necessary this he confess. That Marco Proto with silence and the tomb ended. Marco Proto with death and entombment ends, "And they out from the tomb went and with trembling and astonishment griped fled, and they nothing said." To die we each shall, but Marcopoulos Déftero added. Marcopoulos Déftero to Marco Proto added,"He to Mary Magdalene first appeared" and ''He to the eleven as they were at supper appeared." Unless one wholly Marco Proto knows, without doubt in time everlasting by Marcopoulos Déftero, a deceiver, and by Matthaíos Anóitos, his disciple, a fool shall and misled be.'
"I did not understand. I worked on. The next papyrus seemed not to follow the first. Nevertheless, I copied, translated, and recorded, 'They approved his having in Jerusalem himself showed. They, "Touch me not," approved. They then, "Woman, now it touch, it is risen," knew and they approved and to Marco Proto, having Matthaíos Anóitos and his disciples accepted, would back not go.'
"I remained uncomprehending, but worked on. 'Marcopoulos Déftero Marco Proto with lies shameless polluted, but Matthaíos Anóitos Marcopoulos Déftero polluted. Each church what it wanted to hear heard.'
"With that I saw a glimmer: I had seen in Rome the movie I VAMPIRI. I-oh boy if ever there was a temptress for this celibate she was Gianna Maria Canale in CinemaScope: una giovane donna, full breasts, brunette, arched brows, small waist, and on ubiquitous magazine covers were her eyes of Apennine lake aquablue. What I, drowning in desire, would have suffered to be in her sight!
“With that insight I inferred my author's message: if Marco Proto were the evangelist Mark and Matthaíos Anóitos were Matthew then Marcopoulos Déftero had been the one who had added the Resurrection story onto the Mark’s original Greek Gospel. My author was stating that the gospels were spinning a reanimated-corpse tale differently at different times to different churches, different cultures, as those vampire re-tellings had done millennia later. My Resurrection History author was inveighing contra such spins: That the Resurrection, as we had come to know it, had been like an evolving crypt-tale of increasingly explicit sexuality, warped around the Mediterranean by entertainers. The frame had been changed: The sinister drinker of innocents' blood was the inverse of Our Savior’s innocent blood shed for us sinners to drink, the Eucharist. We are the spiritually dead imbibers of His eternal-life-giving blood. Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei."
Flynn glanced around his room. He found himself alone. He thought maybe Tháleia might have backed out as he had become engrossed about Gianna Maria. Tháleia’s scent of raspberry honeysuckle lingered.
Then that squeaky wheeled gurney sang crescendo — HEEEE‑meee... HEEEE‑meee...HEEEE‑meee — its dirge through the wall from the corridor beyond as the gurney approached, passed, then faded decrescendo — HEEEE‑meee — "Likely for Persky," Flynn inferred; "they'll be wheeling that for mine soon," which reminded him of his first professional corpse.
ooo
At the hospital from the triage nurses' desk Father Flynn had been directed to follow the red stripe down the main corridor until the next-to-last door on his right. He knocked, and announced, despite his novice's nervousness, "Forgive me; I'm Father James Flynn." Hearing sobbing from within but nothing otherwise forthcoming he risked entering. He saw in that windowless room an ashen patient on a gurney, its side-rails down but with the chest and head elevated, beside which sat a sobbing woman holding the patient's hand — the patient's eyes closed, early-forties, street clothes, but covered by a sheet to mid-chest — and a nurse, mid-thirties, sitting in a corner. For the patient there were neither intravenous drips dripping nor monitors monitoring. Flynn nodded gravely in turn to the woman and to the nurse who blinked her green-gray eyes twice and with the smallest head shake signaled him that all hope had been abandoned. Flynn slow-blinked, “Acknowledged.”. He caught odors of beer, of urine, and of bowel.
Without further introduction given the circumstances he removed his stole from his priest's suitcoat, kissed and affixed it around his shoulders purple-side up, removed from his black leather sick-call bag his leather-bound Ordo Administrandi Sacramenta, and opened to the page marked by a red satin ribbon. He paused. The woman placed the patient's hand on the stilled chest and stifled her sobs. Flynn then read softly but audibly the conditional absolution, making the sign of the cross at the patient as directed, "Si capax, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis✝in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen." Flynn turned several pages. He took then from his bag his phial labeled OI, removed a fresh cotton ball from a glass jar, and opened a small pewter box. He set both the cotton and box on the gurney sheet, unscrewed the phial, moistened barely his right thumb with the oil for the infirm, and re-screwed and returned the phial. Bending down and forward he anointed the ashen patient by making a sign of the cross on the cool forehead with his moistened thumb while reading audibly but softly, "Si vivis,✝per istam sanctam Unctionem, indulgeat tibi Dominus quiquid deliquisti. Amen." He straightened up. A black-green fly flew from under the gurney and lit on the anointed forehead. Flynn whooshed the fly that lit on the door. Flynn wiped the cotton across the patient's forehead removing the oil, deposited that cotton into the pewter box, and put the box into his bag. He decided, given the circumstances, to dispense with any anointing of eyes, ears, nose, lips, or hands.
Once more Flynn turned pages. He softly, audibly, read the indulgence and the blessing, "Ego facultate mihi ab Apostolica Sede tributa, indulgentiam plenarium et remissionem omnium peccatorum tibi concedo, et benedico te✝in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen."
Flynn closed the book and put it into his bag. He backed a half-step from the gurney, finished. He thought he had been professionally thorough given the circumstances and had passed his first trial in professional ethics — appearing to do good despite patent evidence of futility. Before any sign of nervous relief could cross his face, Flynn took in the woman's questioning look.
"Gee, if you can, say a prayer in English," coaxed the nurse.
Flynn started improvising: he joined his hands together and raised his voice subtly in volume beginning an Our Father in English. Neither woman spoke the customary response, so he, himself, hushed through, “...and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Flynn next began a Hail Mary but the same silence prevailed, so he whispered, “...Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” He bridged to, "The God of infinite mercy has granted His forgiveness on his soul. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord." Again neither joined his hushed, "...And let perpetual Light shine upon him." Unsure of his improvisations Flynn offered a blessing: turning to the woman, he lowered his voice in pitch but intoned, "May Our Lord and His Blessed Mother comfort you at this, your time of sorrow, and I, now, bless you..." — signing at her with his raised right hand to a six-count —"in the name of the Father..." — while modulating tone — "and of the Son...and of the Holy...Ghost..." rejoining his hands on a rising bump note of, "...A-," then mimicking a hymn's resolution with the final, falling, "...men." The woman crossed herself and resumed sobbing, a tear down each side of her nose. Flynn's eyes strayed down the likely course of her tears, and he noted her silver pendant cross above her amply filled red sweater. Flynn risked making as if to touch the woman's shoulder, but the nurse head-gestured for him to leave. He took up his bag, backed from the gurney, exited with that fly in pursuit, and retreated a half-dozen yards up the corridor so as to be in a position to express condolences or to offer comfort. After a bit the nurse too exited and approached.
Her badge read, "O'Kloth R.N." She wore a starched apron over her white uniform above white stockings and white gum-soled shoes. She had fixed her copper-colored braids plaited back into a terminal bun beneath her white cap.
"Thank you, nurse," hushed Flynn while taking in her green-gray eyes, retroussé nose, and freckles and surmising "Celtic, so possibly."
"Call me Moira. Your first time, father?"
"You knew?"
She whispered, "On this beat priests have that memorized."
Flynn’s face flushed at being chastised. Flynn felt again as if a black-habited nun had found cause to correct schoolboy him.
After a pause Moira O'Kloth R.N. said softly, "We give the widow some time alone before I cover it up and send it on. D.O.A. That's how their cardiac arrests at their tap rooms go. The ambulance pair called it and notified the cops who notified the widow. Gee, by the time she gets a neighbor or her mother to watch the kids and gets down here he's been dead and cooling for more than an hour. Still, it was good of you to have gone through with it for her and added on at the end."
"This happens often?"
"Almost every night, but they're not always Catholic. When they're wheeled into there," she head-gestured at the room, "someone ought to cry over them, but some nurse has to cover them. A‑and, believe me, covering them is easier than saving them."
O'Kloth continued to spin out softly for Flynn the protocols at this hospital as a professional courtesy she would have extended to any novice, but Flynn tuned her out with, "Forgive me," and he busied himself fixing the aforementioned tools of his trade back into their compartments in his sick-call bag. He treasured his bag as it had been compartmentalized for each sacramental and other essentials.1
Flynn smelled vanilla and apple blossom from O'Kloth, a relief from the ambient septic and antiseptic odors.
After what seemed to him to be few minutes the widow, composed, exited with her lipstick and mascara freshly applied underneath her hat and veil. She carried her coat over her arm, her purse suspended from her shoulder. She grimaced through her veil bravely for the nurse, nodded at Flynn, but turned and advanced further down the main corridor, her shapely legs and fetching bottom receding, purposefully disappearing from Flynn's sight, bound for her next station: the making of arrangements somewhere beyond the Admitting Office. Moira, struck by Flynn's corporeal interest, teased, "Interested? 'Kay, 'til next time," with a wink, turned, and re-entered the room before he could mutter, "Aye...deal." Flynn registered Moira's slim, uniformed figure. Flynn pursed his lips as if to hweeEEEE HWOOoooo. He felt a woody rising.
ooo
Starting from his reverie Flynn noted the silence grow after the gurney had rounded the corner toward Persky's. Flynn resumed his dictating.
"The next papyrus I translated as, 'Marco Proto first came. Marcopoulos Déftero after came. Matthaíos Anóitos Marcopoulos Déftero after came. Matthaíos Anóitos, "Simon, you upon my peter are," wrote...,' but a wimpled nun librarian opened the door. She had designated the armarium for me. I remember that musky sandalwood wafted while she conversed, not venturing beyond the chamber door. She was shapely yet small waisted in her black habit. She had aquablue irises framed by eyeglasses."
Flynn acted out the scene for the smartphone in Italian, rendering the nun's role in falsetto.
"'Mi scusi, padre.' ('Excuse me, father.')
'Si, sorella?' ('Yes, sister?'),
'L'hai trovato? Stelle e crepuscolo e tre....' ('Did you find it? Stars and twilight and three....')
'No, ma non è importante per oggi. Sto traducendo un altro che ho trovato.' ('No, but that is not important for today. I am translating another I have found.')
'Taglia corto. Lavorare su ciò che cerchi, seguimi.' ('Cut that short. To work on what you seek follow me.')
'No, non oggi. Aspetterà un altro giorno.' ('No, not today. It will wait for another day.')
'Come dici, 'Kay.' ('As you say, 'Kay.')
'Si. Abbiamo un accordo.' ('Aye. We have a deal.')
When they had met weeks back and were swapping their life stories Persky had regaled Flynn with having been destined for a sonarman S.O. rating in the Navy.
"I finished high school and got thrown into the draft eligible pool. Not wanting to bleed out in a rice paddy I signed on for a stint in the Navy. See the world: am I right? I had always liked going down the shore. Anyway, the Navy sent me to sonar school. I passed. They billeted me to the USS Thresher, nuclear powered SSN‑593, the newest boat in the fleet.
"My girl, instead of joining me for my graduation ceremony, sends me her Dear John even after I had sent her enough dough. Well that was an 18 karat hurt. I had never hurt so badly up 'til then. I've hurt some since, though.
"I had leave before having to report so I went back to make the tomato see me. Well, doc, after I turned into the original Endsville loser, smashed and a crumb over that mish-mash. I couldn't stop thinking about her doing her new creep. I went AWOL. A‑and when I learnt it wasn't just one but a string of creeps — like the quin was recruiting an infield of goombahs — I couldn't stop thinking about her hey‑heying. After the MPs caught me I did lockup, got dishonorably discharged, had to forfeit everything, but, wow-ee wow wow, I dodged the Thresher's last deep dive, the big casino. Thank God Almighty, ain't that crazy? She and I never made up so you might say, doc, I dodged another effing disaster. And here I am now, the living end, more than fifty years later.
"Doc, I'm not hacked to be cashing out, but I'm gassed to have been so damn lucky."
To that sailor story Flynn had recounted for Persky his own analogy of the self and the soul that Flynn had formulated after having read how the nuclear powered USS Nautilus had operated submerged under the polar ice cap. He gave Persky, as comfort, the orthodox version with the soul being like a submariner who escapes his sinking vessel, swims to the surface, and is saved in the Light. Flynn had kept his apostate version to himself.
Some months after his library epiphany Flynn had reasoned that each self is a confederacy of the organs, an illusion, a mirage without anatomy, the insubstantial integration of sensory signals. Insubstantial, without substance. As if each corporeal organ (of sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch) sent up reports and an integrating function in the brain — like a submarine's officer — from those reports amalgamated a transitory chart of the sea and my current position. As it must be in that submarine: integrating situational awareness from sonar, making course plots taken from inertial navigation, engine speed, and depth of dive, from adjustments for currents: to issue a command to the planesman to rise to periscope depth for a look. How we each function in the world according to our own transitory, internal charting amalgamated by each brain's integrations, but we, per se, don't exist beyond the transient moment. Each self is as transient as that sub’s situational awareness, or, he had reasoned further, like music: Music, per se, does not exist except as it is played: the musicians playing what the audience hears. Let either stop and music ceases. Regardless of instruments or black printed notes, music ceases once the vibrations have dissipated. Each of us are but children of Euterpe, the muse of music. Each self ceases when the organs cease reporting and the brain ceases to integrate, with the act of dying being the brain's recognition of a grave lack of input. Most of us, Flynn had concluded, never rise to periscope depth, but sink in silence into an abyss, lost, gone forever, like the all hands aboard the Thresher in 1963. And as for any insubstantial soul, well, Occam's razor.
It had taken time after his Vatican eureka for Flynn to reconcile himself fully to this personal apostasy but he never allowed that to affect him professionally: Flynn would ever outwardly and visibly appear to do what appears to be good.
ooo
In that wake of silence streaming after the gurney's passing Flynn resumed dictating to the smartphone. "Where was I? Simon, my peter! The next papyrus I translated as, 'The Physician Matthaíos Anóitos in everlasting time followed...'," but Flynn yawned. Thinking that there was too much to recount presently — his author's disparagement of the empty tomb of Matthaíos Anóitos, of the materialization on the road to Emmaus and the after-supper de-materialization as if as some tomb bat, of the behind-locked-door materialization and ghost talk with feeding by wolves on lambs and sheep by Ioánnis Evangelistís; his author's assertion to the veracity of the Gospel of Didymus, the Twin, not to mention Flynn's mounting inference that day that his author's history may be the gospel truth — Flynn pondered stopping with, "I can edit more in later Tháleia said."
Despite another yawn Flynn yielded to a compulsion to commit his conclusion to the record presently with, "There was my, one might say, sin of commission: I hid my Saint Anthony casket of papyri on a different shelf in a different armarium in a different chamber, where I would know to retrieve it, but any other, searching, would be frustrated. I had learned during seminary: what is misplaced in library stacks is lost forever. The armarium to which I had been directed had crepuscolo, tre pipistrelli e stelle.2 Or had that librarian said tre papa strulli?3 Regardless, where I hid my casket depicted Jonah and the Whale. I left the library at closing with my notebook copy and my translation. I never returned. I informed my adviser I would not continue to study ethics, but I did not confess why. I returned to America where I lectured at delinquents in the diocesan boys high on school days and I suffered parochial souls on weekends and sick calls. So I had two gigs with room and board and Blue Cross. I got cash stipends for wedding and funerals and the odd cash referral gratuity. I enjoyed consoling the occasional young widow through her grief too. After Vatican II I burned my notebook of The Resurrection History. I never sought to publish — that was my sin of omission."
Flynn ceased dictating. He felt lightened to have confessed. After a few minutes more, tired, he dozed. Flynn dreamed again.
ooo
"That might have ended the grift, the — aye — con. As long as there are sheep they have to be sheared. A‑and shearing them is easier than saving them."
She throws her glasses with, "Cut it." "All'inferno con te," she sneers and, "vieni su sorella Atropos.4 You take I given the circumstances, 'kay?"
She literally sneers revealing fangs. She pulls me close with both arms and bites my neck. My carotid artery gushing is for her an over-pressured drinking fountain. She slurps.
"Some flow," I recognize the voice of Lækisis.
Atropos clamps her right gloved hand on my gusher. She spits her mouthful of blood at the back of my left hand. With her own gloved left hand she bloodsmears my forehead, eyelids, and nose using the back of my hand.
"Give him a taste: checking: does his imbiber's palate find the vintage as tinny as une huître de mauvais goût?" teases the voice of Lækisis. “Sorry...not!”
Dropping my hand Atropos kisses my open mouth, laving my tongue with my own blood. My blood tastes metallic like a foul, French flat oyster.
"Gee, give him an earful of English," I recognize O'Kloth's coaxing.
Atropos tongues my left outer ear. She salivates and tongues a mixture of her saliva and my blood into my ear canal. She blows into my ear. I hear a breeze freshening. I hear male voices chanting the Dies Irae:5
Atropos orders, "Check." Each acolyte draws a sword and heats the tip over the other's burning candle. When the points glow orange-red Atropos orders, "'Kay," removes her gloved hand from my body's neck, and the acolytes, in turn, cauterize, each responding, "'Kay" as my body's blood hisses and steams from their sword-point treatment. I recognize the acolytes' voices as those of Tháleia and Moira. My body screams, "Bloody murder." The stench of burnt flesh overwhelms the perfumes.
Atropos orders, "Down." She rips off her wimple. She has short cropped dark hair. She throws the wimple at my body. With ceremony the Knight Hospitaller lets the ikon fall and I recognize the hospital widow, who proclaims, "Melpomene is here," and tosses aside, "though I'd rather be throwing myself under a moving train."
On striking ground the Baphomet ikon metamorphoses into that widow's ashen patient who jumps up with his own feet. On landing he metamorphoses to a female gospel singer who declaims, "♫ Euterpe is here ♪."
With ceremony the Knights Templar throw down their swords and candles. They throw down their helmets in unison exclaiming, "The belles, Clotho and Lækisis, are thrilled to be here."
"How thrilled are they?" Melpomene straightmans.
Moira adjusts her tabard at her neckline while scanning the scene, wisecracking, "They're so thrilled that if that isn't a banana under Flynn's gown Tháleia's gonna ring some peals outta him.
"Bah-DUM-bum," quips Tháleia.
“I'm gonna have that old clapper swinging in a bell’s mouth," vamps Lækisis.
"Idiophonies," Euterpe taunts.
"Don't you know campanology?" sounds off Melpomene.
"No respect; we get no respect," sighs Moira.
My self watches the Knights Templar kick each helmet that, on taking flight, metamorphoses to a tomb bat. The tomb bats, helmeted with green mitres, fly circles above my body while dropping batshit on my body's scalp. The monks are humming in chorus to that Dies Irae melody backing the gospel singer's solo:
Sings Euterpe,
"O, my sisters,
Tháleia, Melpomene too,
Whack Flynn's backside 'til any blue-
Veined skin shows welts of zany hue.
Wearing a navy blue sharkskin suit and Cuban-heeled, pointy shoes, a young Persky appears, his wavy hair side-parted. He's snapping his fingers in time. He chimes in with, "Aren't they ring-a-ding? They call themselves The Fates and Muses and they're backed tonight by Les Frères de la Mort. They're gonna swing that ditty now, so dig." The ensemble picks up tempo, singing:
Moira shoves Tháleia's novel
Bovine-sized enema nozzle
Up Flynn's rectum. He does grovel.
"He's gone down, Thál, see? Gee, he's smote.”
Boof starts, wine flows. From Flynn's — "WHEEeee!" — throat
Wails he from boof, pitched high-C note.
Cried he, quaked he, Flynn's yet slumpin'.
"Wail less," coax’d nurse, the wine pumpin'.
Flynn's butt burns like taurine-hump'd been.
"Resurrect," Atropos urges,
"Corpus meum," up emerges
Flynn's cock at sister, as dirges6
Chant Gregorian we dour, "Him
Cut down..."
My self beholds Les Frères encircling Clotho and Lachesis who raise my body up, its erection patent, to their sister Atropos who draws out a reed-like thing.
My body protests, "You pain me for sins I committed. I drank, I lusted. At least I never molested a child."
"But your pastor did: see," flash in English subtitle like an Italian cinema while Atropos rants, "Ma il tuo vescovo ha fatto: vedi."
My self beholds the parish pastor then, Monsignor Weissmann, spread-eagle naked, posterior up, atop a pile of cow manure, a bovine-sized colic funnel in his anus. Pubescent lads and gals of every race take turns, from a platform above, dropping a vole into that funnel while alternating, "Dolor vobiscum" with "Adulescens mus, per quam serpens resurgemus."7 As each does, Weissmann disgorges, gagging, yet another vole from his mouth, each vole coated from the pastor's gastrointestinal slime and stench. The colony of violated voles trumps to a ground spring where they groom themselves clean. Father O’Rourke appears, becomes a dog, and gently fetches a clean vole in his muzzle to those youths to have another run through Weissmann.
"Tu, Flynn, sospettavi che Weissmann predicava agli adolescenti...," Atropos rants while English subtitles flash, "You, Flynn, suspected Weissmann preyed on adolescents preparing for their confirmation. You heard their schoolage confessions that they, the innocent victims, had sinned with one like him. You did nothing but grant those innocents absolution. You kept silent. You hid behind the seal of the confessional. You sinned by omission. You never alerted civil authorities."
My body's mouth disclaims, "Not my job, not back then. I stuck to the ethics of the times: to never speak ill of another priest, of a fellow Republican. We priests were like doctors who never spoke ill of another's treatment though his patient died. In those times I harmed none."
My body’s eyes turn to the children. No longer vivacious they’re emaciated, gaunt from the psychological damage from having been abused.
"All'inferno con te," judges Atropos. My body's lips accept with, "Sorella, si." My self registers the wind strengthening to gale force.
Clotho and Lækisis are holding my body as Atropos, fangs bared, bites my body's neck on the other side before she backs a half-step. My self watches my eyes eyeing her aquablues turning to black through the exsanguinating fountain that is gushing with an impetus and velocity superior to any recorded on celluloid those eyes ever saw. Persky's voice calls out, "Dig it: Les Frères are swinging now."
"...Thar sub blows! Sub's hour's grim.
Leaks it. Sinks it. End we our hymn:
Demons hell-bound, devour him."
Clotho and Lækisis let my body fall without ceremony, the wind subsides, and the bats alight onto my body's neck. They feast on blood.
Persky reappears, lit by a baby spotlight, piping, "Witchdoctor, you're the living end! We're gonna take it down now real slow. Remember your waitstaff generously cashing out. Ta‑ta." The baby spot goes dark.
Within the deepening darkness my self takes in the ring-a-ding singers and Persky's crooner's baritone reprising the Dies Irae melody at chant tempo:
"Flynn shan't e'er more from supine rise.
Black pools, sister's Apennine eyes,
Drowns he in, Flynn's fate condign. Dies."
My conscious self beholds the scene fade to a bottom-of-the-sea blackness as all voices fade too to silence.
The brightest, whitest sphere of light — whiter than any ever known — appears and shines brighter than the sun, even, but without giving hurt. My self wonders, "What's that?" then knows fear, then dread, then digs the dire situational awareness with, "My god!"
ooo
Flynn's nightmare dissolved into corporeal unconsciousness unrelieved unto time everlasting. Flynn’s colon and bladder sphincters released, the catheter having become previously dislodged. His prostate seeped.
⚫
None ever did but had any examined she would have found the smartphone's recorded file to have contained only, "Tess tess esting 1 2 3," because Flynn had failed — not for the first time — to press the designated icon.
* * *
*"[O]elum infirmorum" (Latin), "oil of the [for those who are] sick," olive oil that Flynn's bishop had blessed.
**The curet "A" stood for "aqua" or water (Latin) & the "V" stood for "vino" or wine. Your editor notes, Reader, that a large number of Catholic clergy of Flynn's generation became alcoholic because, daily at Mass, they drank wine on an empty stomach and two or three times every Sunday, holy day, and November 2nd. Your editor testifies to have carted to the trash monthly empty cases of mid-shelf Scotch whiskey from a rectory housing three priests where he had an after-school factotum job.
2"Twilight, three bats and stars" (Italian).
3"Three struggling popes" (Italian).
4"To hell with you...you come to sister Atropos.…" (Italian)
5In Latin: 1. "The world dissolves this day, the day of wrath, in ashes, witnessed by David and Sibylla." 2. "How great the quaking will be when the judge everything strictly examines."
6"Corpus meum" "my body" (Latin).
7"Pain be with you" and "Innocent vole, rise through that snake" (Latin).
© Wilson Varga 2018, 2020 All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Illustrations herein are reproduced under "Fair Use" for non-commercial purpose."
