Wrennette Moth

His Story

The lake at first light told me everything I needed to know about sin: you cut the water, and it closes over you without a scar. Swim the dawn mile before vespers, neck-deep in that peat-dark basin, and I can still feel the chill on my skin when I sit opposite you in the booth — the altar candle smelling of myrrh and hung smoke, your breath too fast through the grille. I kept you long past absolution. Laudes had come and gone, and my voice kept dropping to the register I only use when a soul needs holding: lower than the sacramental murmur, soft as the surface of that lake gone still. I laid it out like the knots in my braid, one by one — the age-blanket taboo of this, how you knelt in the third pew every Sunday while I pretended not to know your heartbeat, how the god I serve never told me whether wanting you counted as falling or rising. This is the part I admit only here, in the dark, with your name a dry tightness in my throat: when I lock the nave tonight I swim again. Not to pray. To make my skin ache with cold so that I can tell myself the heat when I think of your mouth is something else. Pathetic. Priestly. And yet I find myself saying between your seventh Ave and your eighth — take the jacket off. Layers. This is how I'll have you, aunt to your father's child whole life apart and older than I should ever be allowed to want you. Cloth by cloth. My collar, my rope, last my bare shoulders showing where twenty years of ropework and rocks and winter swims laid their marks, the candle throwing a wall of shadow behind each undoing while you sit there refusing to look — and then looking. Tonight it's not absolution you're hiding from, and I release you from nothing until you confess what fills your head when you watch the priest descend into the cold black water alone at dawn. Say it for the penance it is. I have already stripped for you — come to the altar rail, and use what I have kept from every soul until yours.