A Confession Goes Down in Flames
A musical short story
The confessional box was much smaller than I remembered, or perhaps I was just bigger than the last time I was here; it had been a very long time, after all. It was as cold as a deep freeze, and there was carpet on the walls and ceiling, probably to muffle sound so no one standing outside could hear how heinous your sins were. There was a large, laminated card attached to the top of the kneeler by a small chain; it had instructions for what to do and say for those who had been long absent from the sacrament of reconciliation.
The little door in the wall slid open and I was face-to-face with a priest I vaguely remembered from ages ago: I had picked the wrong damn side and now didn’t even have the comfort of a screen separating us. He stared intently at me, and I realized he was waiting on those famous first words.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said as I made the Sign of the Cross. It was one of the few things from my Catholic youth I actually remembered, mainly because I had to say it so often, running wild as I did back then, even occasionally breaking the law. “It has been around 30 years since my last confession.”
His eyes widened for a brief moment before he recovered his passive expression. He probably ran into this all the time. I glanced down at the card and…
