Sacristy Submission
Placing his sins before his mistress, he beckons her forgiveness
The vestry door opens, just a crack of light visible through the base of an oak wood door. She was in her space; divinity, sanctuary, preparing herself for a Sunday morning ritual at the helm of her ship. A prow commandeered, slipping into the ocean of tiny boats tugging in her wake.
I tapped, penitent; persuading her to consider my entry.
She beckoned me in and I nervously smiled.
As the cassock fell over her body, she looked as though no one would ever think of her in any capacity but this.
Her smile was a release for me as I stood before her in this spring etched, bleached interior with its mullion frames and Jacobean timbers; vessels of the sanctuary, loaded with cloths, coppers, gilts and brass, candles and tapers.
“Hello”, almost sounding like ‘halo’, her annunciation a cardinal quality.
“Good morning Mistress”. An overmused gesture of fondness for the familiar. I’d dreamt of the day when I might confess through a grill without hesitation and now, something stirring in me was granting this subdued wish.
Exchanges as brief as ice, languid, elevation.
A collar; white, held her neck.
I bowed my head to speak and she lifted hers to hear.
“May I confess Mistress?”
Her eyes met mine. She smiled lovingly. One of hers at last.
Confessional boxes and I are seldom friends; if it’s possible to imagine such a significant space being more than timber and shadows and little light. Yet now, as I knelt, supplicant at last, I was prepared to join the myriad and compelled to add my words to the utterances that seemed to linger in the lines of timber and the corners of ink black, wormwood.
The grille exuded a new breath, sweet, a hint of daffodil and incense and a voice parted the stillness, life now.
“Mistress this is my first confession,”
“Mistress, I have seen you and I am floored. I have had lustful thoughts.”
“I place before you my sins and beckon your forgiveness.”
“I dream of you.”
Silence except for the scratch of fabric, as she stirred, unseen but obvious.
He knows how it will end. She gives him instructions and closes her mind to his approach, the thoughts lift out and beyond, into the air, vortexed, imagined, albeit briefly, sex, fucking, fisting, dirty sex. Her mind races momentarily till her cast returns.
He leaves the box, as if having travelled to a desert and in it, only sand and her memory. He clasps his hand and clutches the beads, he feels them slip through the opening in his hands, he feels them slide past the band of flesh and he kneels as he finds her again.
Closing his eyes, the rite ends.
