The Chapel

None of your friends will know what you did to deserve this curse. They’ll wonder, as they see you through the windows and gradually find they can no longer speak to you; they’ll wonder what such an apparently sweet soul could have done to earn such a fate.

You’ll wonder, too, eventually--for now you believe you know. For now you agree that this is exactly what you deserve.

*

The windows are stained-glass, but most of them are broken. The sunlight is plain white on the gray and the green of the ground. Bits and pieces of red and blue can be found sometimes, but only in certain places, and only at certain times.

You prefer the colors over the alternative. The pieces of white on the ground don’t really scare you, per se, but they aren’t a comfort.

*

The first day passes slowly. You don’t want to touch anything. You relent to sit on the grass, but only in the very center of the chapel, where there’s neither bones nor glass nor rotting pews. Your legs are crossed and there’ll surely be mud on your backside when you stand up. You don’t touch the ground with your hands; you rest your fingers on your thighs.

It is only you and the grass and the earth and the sun. The shadows and debris are confined to distant corners. Here in the center, it is only your body and your faded denim overalls, warmed by the sluggish sinking sun, and occasionally you feel a kiss from the specks of dust that float in the beams.

*

After the first hour, you open your eyes. There’s a crumbling altar directly in front of you, where the priest might have once stood for sermons and ceremonies. Now the priest is a skull--a doe, you assume, since there’s no antlers to be seen--and she stares back at you with a message you don’t understand.

Her message is not of God’s love, not of God’s wrath. Perhaps she is only here to say she has been cursed just as you have.

*

After the third hour, you grow restless and stand up, but only to turn around and then sit back down. Now the doe stares at your back.

*

When the white sunlight turns orange and pink, you’re lying down on your side, with leaves tangling into your hair and a spot of stained-glass-purple on your cheek. The soil is wet enough to seem cold without actually having a temperature to speak of. Your hands are tingling from the weight of your head on top of them.

You don’t react when you see the ghost stepping in front of you. At least, you’ll assume he’s a ghost. You see dark brown boots that don’t leave much imprint on the overgrown grass, and you’re too tired to move as he crouches beside you.

He looks you in the eye and doesn’t say a word. He’s beautiful. Curly-haired and warm-faced. He holds out a hand, and you take it.

You sit up, slowly, eyelids heavy. He doesn’t look like a ghost. You can’t see through him, and he’s not floating or glowing, and his skin feels firm as any living body’s. His eyes seem to smile at you, but his mouth doesn’t.

You don’t resist when he pulls you toward him, when he puts his fingers through the leaves in your hair and his lips to the shadow between your mouth and chin. You let yourself go limp and you let him hold you and it feels warm, no matter how cold he really is.

*

He stays close to you when the moonlight turns the chapel blue. You accept the chill now, and you kiss him back. His clothes don’t feel like they’re made of fabric, but you can’t think of what else they would be, and you can’t decipher what exactly your hands are feeling. Your eyes don’t give you any clues, either.

You notice another skull, when you look past your ghost’s ear as he bites your neck. This one is upside down, laying on the ground of the corner, and there’s an antler on one side. The other antler seems to have been broken off. There’s a dandelion growing through the skull’s eye socket. It’d be yellow in the daylight, you’re sure, but right now it looks just gray.

*

In the morning your ghost is gone and the grass and ground are even more cold and wet than before. Your ghost hasn’t left any visible traces, but you can feel every place he touched you, and when your fingers brush the side of your throat there’s the slightest indentations to match his teeth.

You lie on the dirt for longer than you thought you would but shorter than you thought you could. When you finally stand, it’s a little too fast, and you have to pause for a moment with your palm pressed to your forehead. The dizziness passes quickly, though. You look up at the priest, the doe perched atop the altar, and feel she is preaching a new sermon today. You stop and listen.

You can’t understand it now any more than you used to.

Still, you can’t help but be compelled to respect her ministry, and you give her a reverent nod before you turn away. Now you’re looking at the other skull, the slightly-askew buck with the dandelion in his eye. It’s a vibrant yellow, you can now see. Yellow in his eye and green through his teeth and black behind his nose and white across his face and a jagged, warped stained-glass-red on the spot where his antler was broken off.

If the doe is the priest and you are the congregation, where does that leave the buck? Does he listen to her doctrine, too? Does he understand more than you can?

*

Your ghost returns when the night comes again. Tonight you dance together, your left hand clasped in his right and your right hand low on his back. You rest your head on the place between his neck and shoulder and you don’t feel breath or pulse. He sways you gently side to side, draws you in a little circle in the moonlight. You wonder if he can hear the music. You wonder if you can hear the music.

Eventually you stop swaying and spinning and he simply holds you and pulls your hair away from your ear. His lips touch your skin and he opens his mouth to say something. You feel those lips moving, but not a sound comes out.

If you could hear music, it’d be an organ. Not quite a true church organ, but a sound like that crossed with the sound of the organ you hear at a hokey old carnival. How curious that a circus and a cathedral play nearly the same hymns.

*

You dance by yourself in the sunlight. You unclasp your denim overalls and twirl in place in your bare feet and too-large white shirt. You make dents in the mud with your toes that interrupt the dents you’ve made with your body. Moving is much more powerful than staying put.

You spin too fast. Your foot catches on the edge of an old wooden bench, and you fall facedown to the ground. You bite your tongue and taste blood.

Real pain was almost something you forgot. You roll onto your back and stare up at the high rafters and let the blood on your tongue creep toward the back of your throat.

What did you do to deserve this?

*

Your ghost doesn’t seem surprised by your bare legs or swollen lip. He holds and kisses you just the same as ever before, but tonight he feels colder. Or perhaps he’s always been this cold, and tonight you merely feel it more keenly.

You speak aloud to him. You ask him his name.

He doesn’t seem to hear you.

Then, later, as you lie on your back with your ankles twisted around his and he kneels over you with his hands at your sides, he leans down and touches his lips to your ear again. He whispers a word that you recognize from a hundred Sundays ago, in a church different from this one. The word he speaks isn’t a name.

*

One day you turn and look at the buck and you see that his dandelion has turned white. For the first time you walk over to the broken windows set in the broken walls and you see the forest outside. There are trees nearby, close enough that you could walk to them in twenty steps if you were allowed to leave the chapel. There isn’t a green leaf in sight, it’s all gold and red and auburn under the sharp blue sky. A little further in the distance and you can see mountains, familiar mountains you used to be able to see from home, and they’re white with snow.

You were first cursed in summer.

You start to cry. Then you scream, and you yell. You curl up at the bottom of the wall and you hit your fists against the broken stone.

*

There’s enough twigs and dried leaves that have blown in through the windows that you can build a small pile where the sunlight is brightest, and where it lasts the longest. You start early in the morning so the pile will be under the light for as long as possible.

The pile grows with pieces of wood you tear from the pews. There’s more wood you could try pulling from the altar, but you don’t dare approach the priest.

When the sun is almost ready to set, you pick up a shard of glass and hold it above the pile. You have to adjust the angle a little bit, but quickly you get it. By the time the sun touches the mountains, you’ve started a fire.

When your ghost arrives, you don’t look directly at him. You keep your eyes on the fire and you point at the spot of ground on the other side of the flame from you, and your ghost sits there. You don’t want him to touch you tonight.

You speak to him again.

Are you lonely?

He doesn’t answer until you look away from the fire and up at him.

Are you?

The answer is yes, of course, of course you’re lonely. But you’re looking at his eyes changing color in the firelight and you’re feeling truly warm for the first time in months and he blinks twice in the time you take to hesitate and you aren’t sure of what you want to say.

So you wrap your arms around yourself and tuck your hands into your short sleeves, hold them under your arms, and you ask him another question.

What did I do to deserve this?

He looks down at the fire, and you look down at the fire, and you know nobody’s going to speak again for the rest of the night.

The fire burns itself out and dies and you’re cold again, but you don’t move until morning.

*

A gust of wind blows through the chapel and blows away the seeds of the buck’s dandelion. It makes you a little sad, but you’re comforted when you realize that they’ll grow a whole garden of new dandelions not far away.

You spend the whole day resting your elbows on each windowsill and watching the forest. The trees are almost bare. It won’t be long before the final crisp orange leaves let go of their branches and tell the sky that winter is here.

You’re nearly bare now, too, though you’re sure you shouldn’t be when winter comes. But you haven’t reclaimed your old overalls since the day you danced and fell, and now you’ve shed the dirty white too-large t-shirt. It’s left you chilly and strange and vulnerable, but you can’t bring yourself to take those parts of your old life back.

There’s animals running around. They come near the church, but never cross the walls. You see a mouse, a squirrel, a chipmunk, a rabbit. In the distance, for a moment, there’s a large dark shape that might be a bear just about ready to fall asleep.

In the space between the sky starting to darken and your ghost making his entrance, four living deer pass by. First is a buck who doesn’t pause in his path. Behind him is a doe and two fawns, one larger than the other; they wander and graze for a few minutes before they move on.

*

It starts to snow that night.

*

You make another fire. You’re careful to keep track of where the wind is blowing, so no snow puts it out. The one-horned skull in the corner is half-buried; the one on the altar is still untouched.

Maybe you’re the ghost. You haven’t eaten or slept since the curse began, and though you feel the cold, you don’t think it’ll kill you. You still bleed and bruise, but it never lasts more than a day. Maybe this is why you can feel your ghost’s body so surely--because you’re just as spirit as he is.

The snowflakes that land on your naked back and shoulders nip more sharply than your ghost does. It’s a clashing mix of senses. The fire is hot on one side of you. The air is cold on the other side. And your ghost, lying under you tonight, almost seeming to breathe as you kiss him--his lips are lukewarm.

*

There are no more pieces of color. It’s all white. The clouds won’t let the sun touch the stained glass, and the snow won’t let any vines peek through. You are alone in the center of the chapel, just you and your skin and the earth.

The doe atop the altar still sits unfazed. You’re starting to wonder if she’s really the priest, the vessel chosen to teach the religion, or if she is the religion itself. Is she the cross the church wants you to worship?

You shift a little, and handfuls of snow fall from your thighs. You rise from sitting to kneeling, and you hold your hands in your lap and intertwine your fingers together, and you bow your head. This is what a church is for, after all. All the months you’ve spent here, and you haven’t once said a prayer.

Today you do say a prayer. You sing a hymn. You truly, truly listen to the sermon.

You don’t know any of the words that you say or sing or hear.

But somehow, today, you feel you understand.

*

Spring arrives almost all at once. One moment you’re lying in snow and feeling it turn to water on your face. The next, you’re lying in damp grass and soil, and there’s a bright yellow dandelion sprouting up between your fingers.

The buck in the corner is right where you left him. The snow melts off and you see him again. There’s two spots of stained-glass color on him now.

You look out the windows. The trees are turning pink. The animals are returning. There’s another fawn, smaller than the first two, dappled with white and wobbling on its little legs.

There’s organ music playing again, a bright happy chorus, and you don’t care if the lyrics are true or not. A living church’s organ will try to tell you that it is the only word and the only way, and that its scripture is the only path to joy. A living carnival’s organ will try to tell you that there is no word, there is no way, and the path to joy is whatever sweet and bright and strange and mysterious thing you can see around you. This chapel is neither of those things. It’s not trying to tell you anything. It simply is.

*

You dance with your ghost again. You’re both breathing, and you’re both smiling. He twirls you under his arm and you move your feet faster than you thought you would. You don’t stop spinning even as you kiss, legs and lips moving just barely out of rhythm.

He finally slows down when the moon is low in the sky. He takes your hands in his and he looks right at you, and his smile is gone.

He speaks to you--really speaks, more than just whispering.

Four seasons, he says. One year.

You don’t listen. You kiss him again. You don’t know whether his lips are warm or cold. You think you love him. What did you do to deserve him?

*

There are six dandelions within the chapel walls, and seven that you can see just outside, and surely more you can’t see. They all came from the one in the eye of the buck.

But they’re all far from him, now. You don’t think he can see any of them. He certainly can’t touch any of them.

You frown and kneel to pick one of them. The stem snaps far too loudly.

You try to place it in his eye, right where the old one was. But it just falls out. No matter how you try to position it, it just falls out again.

You look up at the doe for help. She’s silent.

There’s two large sunbeams coming in through the windows, two little pieces of stained-glass-color. One has landed on your faded old overalls, draped over a wooden bench. The other is on your too-large dirty white t-shirt, crumpled on the ground.

You stand up, slowly.

You pick up the clothes and hold them over your arms and start walking toward the chapel’s empty doorway.