The sidewalk outside the church is buried in orange leaves. You stand on them, you are convinced the soles of your boots can taste their damp fans, they are bittersweet. Overhead the last of the sun pulls away from a few stars, the waxing moon crowns the church’s bell tower. You think of the dream you had the night before, or what you can remember of it, how in the dream you knelt in the dirt in a sylvan place without borders, without horizon, a place green and wet, how you plunged your hands deep into the soil and, when the hands resurfaced, shoved fistfuls of dirt into your mouth. Your dream-tongue could not detect any flavor, could not parse textures between worm and stone and acorn, could not taste the old rain that had lingered in the ground. All that your body in the dream could grasp was full, full, a goal, a feeling you could not achieve even as you crammed your esophagus full of earth and the environments within. The possibility that you could not be satiated did not occur to you in the dream, the fervor with which you dug and ate occupied everything, your mind, your mouth, your hands, it took up space like a second body one whose interior seemed to dwarf its exterior. When you woke, you had forgotten where you were, if only for a second, a second that stretched like an opaque material over your hotel room. When your name found you, it was a blessing. In the early light you saw your hands clutch a bedsheet your skin did not recognize. You held your breath. You remembered yourself. You spoke your name.
The church is Gothic in style, and larger than those in your hometown. Or perhaps this one appears larger because you are standing in front of its grand stone facade and high bell tower, and you have not visited any of the churches in your own city since you were a teenager. Wind shakes more leaves from the trees whose branches sway like hair between the street and the front of the church. One leaf whose orange body is tipped with gold, with transparency, lands on the toes of your left boot. You stare down at it, but do not touch it. “Transparent,” you say to no one. “Unreal.” You lift your gaze skyward; above the wooden doors that are the entrance to the church is a rose window whose colors still offer a faint glow in the setting sun. Decades ago, when you were a student in a Catholic grade school, you would have burned to not only know the saints depicted in the stained glass, but to name them on your own. Now, looking up at the rose window, you can barely discern a halo, nevermind a face, or any attributes that might serve as clues in recognizing the figures (eyes in a chalice for Saint Lucy, keys for Saint Peter, books for any of the gospel writers). You think of Saint Margaret (“Her name means pearl,” your twelve-year-old self would tell anyone who would listen) and how the Devil, in the form of a dragon, swallowed her; while inside the beast’s belly she made the sign of the cross, and the body of the dragon split open. Saint Margaret then stepped out of the ripped flesh, unbloodied, unscathed. What a spectacle that would be in stained glass, you think to yourself. A massive dark green dragon torn in half, with a woman dressed in white, her head wreathed with a golden ring, standing in the foreground. Their pigments and entire countenance subject to light. Would the expression be one of triumph, or bewilderment? You lose this thought to the light disappearing from the rose window, the sky. The moon, though somewhat bulbous, keeps its luminosity to itself. You feel slightly colder with this realization. You look down at the leaf on your boot, the leaf that is now pale in the oncoming night. You decide to go inside.
You know that you cannot remember the names of any aspects of the Catholic altar. You do not try. The only word that comes to mind, sacristy, belongs to the room in which the priest and the altar servers prepare for Mass; it is hidden from the congregation. You walk down the center aisle that halves the pews. The floor beneath you is white marble, you think your boots can taste this, too, and it tastes cold. No flavor, just cold. Ahead of you, above the altar, is a tableau of figures: figures with halos, with wings, with arms out-stretched over other figures, kneeling, standing, rising in stained glass, the luster of which had left with the sun. Each pane of glass tells the life of a saint, or of a miracle performed by Christ, but you cannot see their details, your eyesight is not what it once was, you do not know who they are or what miracles are taking place. The only pictorial story you recognize is the one in the center: A woman in blue and white kneels before an angel who approaches her with lilies in hand. “A funeral flower,” you whisper in the empty church. The woman is Mary, the angel is Gabriel, and he is telling her that she has been chosen by God to bear the Christ child. The Annunciation. Though, really, you think, Mary wouldn’t have been a woman, she would have been a teenage girl, and probably terrified. Long ago you read in a tiny book about angels that you carried in your pencil case that some theologians speculate that Gabriel is female due to the flowers presented to Mary. But adolescent you wondered if angels, pure spirits, beings with direct access to God, had any gender, something earth-bound, unitasking, something you considered a nuisance and, at times, a burden. Mary and the Archangel Gabrielle, you think, your eyes on the lilies proffered by the angel, lilies whose brilliance, conditioned on light, had departed from the glass.
To the left of the altar is a statue surrounded by votive candles in red holders. Some are lit. They attract your eyes not so much for their flickering light but for the glow of the red glass caused by the light. You wish the stained glass above the altar were illuminated in such a way, darkness worries you, somewhere in the autumn night there is a great drain and, when you let your focus slip from the object of your attention, you feel the pull of that drain on your body. You quickly look down at your boots; the stowaway leaf from earlier is gone. You stare into the flame of one of the candles as you think of the corner into which the lead blew, or fell, you decide fell because it seems more lonesome, you pray upon the flame. “O leaf, may you be light now,” you recall the verve of the orange, the translucence, the yellow fronds, it resembled the leaves that grew on the trees that lined the rectory gate of your childhood church, the gate that was the edge of the world, the demarcation where heaven ended and the earth began. You realize that you have been outside that gate for more than half of your life. You attempt to pray again on the flame, you want the leaf to be looked at, admired once again before it crumbles to dust but you do not believe this request will be granted, you close your mouth, you turn away from the fire.
You look up at the statue. It is of a young woman in red and white robes, and she is holding a lamb against her chest. You conclude that the expression on her face is one of serenity. Saint Agnes. You recall that the name Agnes means lamb, and stories of virgin martyrs bob at the surface of your memory. Beheadings, spears to the heart, burning at stakes. Lambs, lilies, wedding rings from Christ. Forsaking sex with men, the idea of possession. How did you know you were called to this life, you ask the statue without speaking. Was a breeze a kiss from God, a star a signal from heaven, was flesh simply words inscribed on blood in an attempt to speak to the rush beneath it? Perhaps it was about preservation, saving oneself from dying at familiar masculine hands or in childbirth. Perhaps it was about choice. The lit candles throw weak light at the feet of the statue, feet that are barely visible from beneath the hem of the carved robe.
“Wait.”
Candle flames. Flames you did not ignite.
You jerk your head around to examine the pews. They are empty. You cast a glance to the balcony above the entrance where the organ sits. No one. You swivel back to look at the altar, the side doors you assume lead to the sacristy and rectory. You are alone. You hear only the sound of the fabric of your coat brushing against itself with your movements. The church, with its arches, doorways and corners, seems a little darker. The stained glass above the altar reminds you of a dead body, an entity that was once animated (the glass by light instead of breath), an animation that is now gone. But you, in your chest you feel a buoyancy, it is sudden, like a greeting, a simple act of acknowledgement given to you by another. You look at the dark glass and the multitude it contains. Who is ratifying you now, in this vacant church? What moonbeam escapes this stained glass to touch your face? You think you can see your insides, they are pink and soft, they are glossed by a light that is not cast by a source outside of your body; it awakens within you, it is without matchstick or fuel, it is the color of what you see when you close your eyes. So you close your eyes. You see this light, this hello. You see it fade behind your ribs, into your stomach before you open your eyes. You are no longer concerned from where it came. The candles send up their little blazes.
You are afraid to look away from the altar. Since you had just searched the pews for other people and found none, your fear does not stem from a worry of being watched by a dangerous stranger. Nor is it because you believe in a god who demands your undivided attention while you are in his house of worship. The source of your fear is not a presence of any kind, but an absence. Absence invites thoughts to fill it, thoughts usually suppressed by usual human interaction, or the beauty of a light-populated landscape or cityscape, so you keep your eyes on the altar, the best lit area of the church, attempting to focus on the materials that compose each aspect of it. But the apprehension grows, and is now itself a presence, a presence whose touch prickles your skin even beneath your cold-weather clothes to the point of discomfort, you know you will not be able to maintain your focus on the altar, you know you must look away. You reassure your hands by putting them deeper in your coat pockets, the fingers of your left hand gripping your wallet and those of your right hand tracing the edges of your room key, they are like small animals in need of warmth. You turn away from the altar, away from the statue of Saint Agnes and her lamb, away from the chorus of candles, and walk toward the door on the right side of the church.
The door leads you into a narrow corridor that ends at another door, one beneath a curved triangular window. Like the stained glass above the altar, this window is somewhere between dim and dark; through it you see a faint orange glow in the form of a pixilation in the textured glass, its source, you assume, is a street lamp that looms over the road on which the church stands. You think about the night that has become the world outside, the night you attempted to evade by entering the church, something in your body lowers, shrinks to nothingness. There is nowhere that isn’t looking for me, you whisper to yourself, you are sure that those words were spoken by someone but you cannot remember who, Looking for me? Or you, you ask the choppy waters of your memory that answer only with the busy tumult of waves, the words become smaller in your mind. You look around the corridor, you notice the window, the wooden doors, a bulletin board on the wall covered with papers and photographs, the continuation of the white marble floor that still tastes cold to your boots. You do not know where you are. For all you know, the door at the end of the hall could lead to another room with a door, which leads to another room with a door, and then another after that, and another after that until the intention of your journey is adrift in a labyrinth of doors that will never finish, never open to the city that is also foreign to you. But you do not have to follow this potentially rhizomatic network of wooden church doors to know that right now, where you stand in this chilly corridor, you are already lost. You have forfeited familiarity. It is what you want.
The bulletin board is on the wall to your left. There are so many flyers, tickets, photographs, schedules in various colors and shapes pinned to it that you cannot see any of the corkboard from where you stand. You take a few steps away from the door and toward the board, you no longer want to be overwhelmed by these texts and images you cannot decipher from a distance, you want to see them. Know them. They will become less intimidating once you read them and study them, you tell yourself. You scan the papers, your eyes move over them in all directions without aim or method, skimming the faces in various photographs and advertisements. You want to know them, but you do not know where the entrance to engagement lies with these or any other faces. You remember the bar into which you wandered last night, it was almost lost on a hectic city street, the sun was sinking beneath the skyline at the time, you wanted to escape the promise of darkness then just like you did when you walked into the church, you sat at an empty table in the corner. You wanted to sit at the populated bar but thought yourself underdressed in your jeans, oversized flannel shirt and windblown hair, attractiveness was what you regarded as the price for placing yourself near people. You did not meet the gaze of your waitress, her short, smartly-curled blond hair the result of some concentrated effort on her part, you felt unworthy to look into the eyes of such a contentious person. You drank your wine in silence, thumbing through all of the cards, photographs and means of identification that had been nestled in your wallet to pass the time. You wonder if that is what you are doing now, merely observing momentos of the lives of others in order to pass the time. The time between sunset and sunrise, the time of feeling anonymous in darkness, you look for anything that will distract you from it. Anything that will remind you that you are a person with a mind that works and are therefore real, able to be open to the acknowledgement and stimuli of others. Your eyes stray from their task of seeking understanding amid the visual din of the bulletin board. “Transparent. Unreal.” You speak to no one, not even yourself. You think of the leaf that fell onto your boot and where it might be now, it is in its final resting place, probably, cold in the corner of one of the aspects of the church’s edifice where it is decaying, light will no longer touch it. There is a flyer for a lost bicycle near the bottom of the board that is orange, orange like the leaf but not orange like the leaf, the leaf that glowed, the leaf whose color was deep, earthy, almost with a tinge of brown like the rot it would become, with a yolk-like yellow at its tips. This flyer is orange, yes, but a one-dimensional orange, an orange with little substance, little knowledge of itself. You find nothing in this paper’s orange to compare to the orange of the leaf. As far as you are concerned, they are two completely different colors, and you resent this flyer for refusing to absorb a wavelength of light that would dare call itself orange.
Beneath the flyer, toward the very bottom of the bulletin board, something catches your eye. It is an advertisement, but the font of the lettering (or what you can see of it) is unlike that of any of the other advertisements, it is more elegant, and the polish of the paper is unrivaled as far as you can tell; this was not spit out by a parishioner’s personal printer. It is barely visible, its title is masked by the lost bicycle flyer, another flyer for a church potluck leaves only the letters HOU unobscured on its right side, another flyer still for an entrepreneur whose many phone numbers at the bottom of the paper are fringes that beg to be torn off cover its two southern corners. What remains discernible is a painting. It is a watercolor portrait of a human face, neck and shoulders, though the features are not definitive. The paint strokes look more like blotches, touches that were allowed, no, encouraged to spread, bleed, blur into other blotches; this face dripped into being. Beneath the paint are lines drawn in pencil, lines that map out but do not form the hair, eyes, nose, clavicle. You are dazzled by the colors, you savor them, they remind you of the flavors of an early spring sky, at sunrise, at sunset, the moment after a rainshower full of dynamic hues, pale greens that taste of mint, soft blues rolling off of gray that carry a vegetable sweetness, the agile tartness of pink. The curl of bruise-colored hair on the forehead and the gold that weeps down the jawline and onto the shoulder delight you, but it is the mouth that draws you in, its tight, intent lips, the wine-red mingling with the black-purple, or purple-black, you wonder if the mouth wishes to speak through the colors, if the colors continuously talk over this person and this person, recessed for eons behind the loud chromaticity, has accepted this. For the first time since entering the church you remove your right hand from your coat pocket. You reach out with it to touch the face’s lips, you half-expect them to be warm, wet, to fulfill their visual beauty with an equally beautiful fluidity, but they are cold and flat, and your fingers chastise you for anticipating anything different. But your fingers then decide to do work in order to salvage the moment: They pull away the surrounding advertisements so you might read the text above and beside the painting. THE FRANCIS MOON MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART. Below that and above the portrait, you read the name of the artist and the exhibition: Christopher Takada, “Affirmation.” Your hand pulls back the church potluck flyer even farther. HOURS: Monday closed, Tuesday-Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday-Sunday 10am-4pm, and beneath that: 331 Turski Street. Despite the lack of precise features in this painted face (or perhaps because of it) you see your own in it and, for the first time in a long time, you find it alluring. Or, perhaps still, it is not your face you see, but the opportunity to disappear into another’s face, a captivating face, a face with the power to circumvent structure and exist solely as water and light, and this is what you truly want. You put your hand back into your coat pocket. You are determined to go to the museum tomorrow.
There is a door across from the bulletin board, one that would allow you to exit the church. You have no reason to believe it is open, you have no reason to believe it is closed. You had no reason to believe the church was open when you decided to enter it, and here you are. You walk to the door, it is wooden, heavy, you pull on the handle with both hands, it opens. The air is cold, a cold that had settled on the city for awhile, or, rather, a cold that had cleared the city of any warmth some time ago. You look up into the wind, more stars have thrown themselves across the sky since you arrived, the moon witnessed this. You walk down some stone steps, tread on a path blanketed in leaves, walk down a few more steps, ones made of concrete, you are on the sidewalk that is the margin of the church’s left side. You gaze at the traffic lights and skyscrapers, buses and apartment windows that inhabit your view as you begin down the block. You do not know where you are. Night lies down on the city, stretches its back across your face. This is a dark autumn world, you think inside your coat, and I do not feel like a fruit. Leaves come loose from the trees in the church yard.
You hear a rustling to your right.
Is it a rustling? Or the movement of a car rushing down the street?
Should you look?
You know the responsibilities of looking.
You glance over your shoulder. Beside the church stands a maple tree whose leaves have been flurrying over the grass, the street. You squint to see beneath it, in the light by the nearby street lamp you can barely make out a small figure in a coat that could be dark blue, or simply black, with a tiny round face with tiny round features and, you think, black hair. It is a child. You are puzzled to see a child alone under a tree in a church yard on a late-autumn night, it is not a place you imagine a child might like to go, certainly not without being brought there by an adult. You stop walking, you focus on the child in the darkness, you watch for any clue in body language to learn what to do next. The child does not move. You turn your body toward the tree, the church, you no longer wish to merely stand there and wait so you take a few steps forward. The child meets your gaze, you think you see a smile, a smile without slyness or malice, a smile that makes you think that the child, this stranger, is actually happy to see you. As you come closer, you see the child’s eyes, you cannot tell what color they are but they shine nonetheless, their shape is of wings, wings that seem to be only seconds away from flying away from the cheekbones at all times. Under the right eye is a blemish, it is about the size of a half-dollar though not symmetrical, you think it could be purple, deep purple, a discoloration that is not in the variegated pattern of a bruise, but one that is more of a birthmark.
You find your voice. You speak the only words that you are able to form with your rediscovered vocal chords, slow, unassuming words:
“Do I know you?”
You hear a laugh. Wind touches your face.
A yearning comes over you; a yearning for what, you do not know. You suddenly become concerned for the child, you do not want the child to be cold, or lost, or lonely, all three are fears that bob at the surface of your thoughts. Instead of confessing to yourself that you are the one who is mangled by these anxieties you allow your body to be consumed by a feeling you cannot name, one that yawns over your whole being, one that displaces your distress over speaking with another human being and commands you to open your mouth again.
“Let me…” You pause. And then: “Let me ask you a question.”
The child does not move, does not relax from smiling. You look directly at each other.
“Are you…”
You want to say happy.
“Are you okay?”
This is where tears would come, should come, but they do not. The child laughs, you see the mouth move, you are certain this time that this laugh came from this child. You do not know how to respond to a lack of response except with silence. The child’s gaze lingers on you for a few seconds longer, the child then takes off down the yard, the grass, the street, takes off like those restless eyes threatened to do, you watch the child disappear into the night, the first moment of your re-acquaintance with solitude descends upon you faster than the late-autumn night did onto the city. Your thoughts drift back to the street on which you were walking, you feel so absorbed by the dark sky that you reach up to touch it.
You bring your arm down quickly.
In admonishment, or repentance?
You have no answer. You continue to walk down the sidewalk in the late-year wind. The stars know where you are. They shine, they say nothing.
Lindsey Warren’s poetry manuscript Unfinished Child is available from Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, and her collection Archangel & the Overlooked is forthcoming from that same publisher. She has been published in The Fox Chase Review, Broadkill Review, Icarus Down, Secret Lovers Press, Lame Kid Zine, Rubbertop Review, Marathon Review, Dark Wood, GASHER Journal, Josephine Quarterly, Boston Accent Lit, Rabid Oak, Anti-Heroin Chic, Figure 1, Kissing Dynamite, Utterance Journal, American Literary Review, Punk Lit Press, The Bookends Review, Night Music Journal, Foliate Oak, Gravel, Call Me [Brackets], Exhume, Mannequin Haus, FIVE:2:ONE, MORIA, Roanoke Review, Linden Avenue, Sorority Mansion Review and Hobart, and is forthcoming in BARNHOUSE, The Indianapolis Review, Quarter After Eight, Interim, Spry Literary Journal, CRAG, and Two If By Sea.
