This story started out as a poem with the line “I found a dirty soul today”…The more I worked the less it worked as a poem so I erased and started again….and this is what came out.  It’s always interesting where my muse goes when she’s a bit off her normal game…

Word of warning: This isn’t exactly a pleasant piece….but I’m not sure what I should warn you about specifically…

~*~

“I found a dirty soul today,” came a whisper through the screen.  Father Jacob started and squinted through the stray beam of sunlight made bloody by the red glass high above.  He waited for more, for the customary language.  Nothing came.  “Do you wish to make your confession, my child?”

The stained light blurred his vision.  He couldn’t tell if a woman, man, child…who knelt opposite him.  “She was the sweetest bit of summer you ever saw,” the voice continued, ragged and full of broken things.  “Long hair captured in a neat braid, freckles on her nose, and a mouth that should have been eating strawberries, raspberries, clean, ripe things.”

Jacob leaned towards the screen.  His stomach twisted and he struggled to see through the odd wash of light.  How had he never noticed the depiction of the Passion spilled blood into his confessional before?  How appropriate, a small voice whispered.  Before he could speak the confession went on, rolling over him.

“It was one of those alleys the sun tries not to find.  You know.  Nasty.  Damp.  Smellin’ of piss and shit and things whores leave behind.  A place for rats and cockroaches and rotten, dying things.”  A sound tapped on the priest’s attention from the sanctuary but the words continued and he couldn’t turn away.  “I like those places, Father.  I do.  They’re real.  And oh that one was so real and with her sittin’ against that wall like a little bit of heaven come to hell.”  Father Jacob went stiff.

That noise grew more insistent.  It had that sort of solid wetness like a soaked sheet hitting a wall.  The priest shifted, uncomfortably aware of –

“But oh, that dirty soul, Father,” the voice dragged his eyes away from the curtain separating him from the bright open space of the church.  His gut coiled and churned and his blood thrummed in his ears.  “I followed the smell of filth, of greed, of deceit and sublimated lust.  That nasty soul led me to that alley.”

The confessional walls pushed in on the priest.  Lips pushed words at him, lush lips, bright red, so close to the screen he could have pushed his finger through it and touched their plumb curves.  His sin stood stiff and hard in his lap, tenting his robe, and the sound of wet impacts continued out in the sanctuary reminding him of a youth spent watching others fornicate wetly and loudly and without remorse.

“Such a dirty soul I’ve found,” the voice dipped lower, was it more feminine now? and Jacob shuddered in the red, red light of his Christ’s sacrifice.  “I watched you in that alley, filthy boy,” she whispered, “so eager to help that pretty little girl.”  The priest’s hand clutched at his cock too late.  The wet sounds escalated into splats and slaps of things thick and slippery and his own effluence leapt forth, staining the inside of his cassock.

Jacob slid down onto his knees, curled forward, and wept.  Prayers slipped from his lips.

“Father Jacob?”  A sharp rap on the wall of the confessional jolted the young priest awake.  He looked around, disoriented.

“Yes,” he cleared his throat and shifted on his seat. “Yes I’m here.”

“It’s time for dinner, Father.”

Jacob stood.  His cassock pressed against his legs, cold and clammy and his stomach clenched.  “A dream,” he whispered softly, crossing himself and pressing a kiss to his crucifix.  “It was just a dream.”

~finis~