covenant

I agitate the wound because I only wish he would touch it again, and again, and again.

The priest keeps vigil by the window, picking at a spot of livid razor burn just above his collar. His cuticles are bloody and his eyes are washed out, pale, near the same colour as the rest of him.

I should call him by his name, after all this time, but the word takes a moment to reach me. The ache in my side ebbs, dull with leftover sleep. He has been spot-cleaning his shirts (all of them black) in the sink with a toothbrush, and I can smell the soap from here.

The house isn’t ours. I suppose there is no ‘ours’.

Nights are dark here. The corners of the ceiling are perfectly black though I’m sure they are fringed with cobwebs thick enough to choke me, should they fall. The floorboards creak when he shifts his weight. My lungs fill with a fleeting, penetrating sharpness and quickly deflate again; the priest lays the back of his hand, bruised knuckles and all, on my brow. He is cool to the touch, like the wind and the dirt.

We don’t talk. Perhaps it is because of what happened last time we were alone in a room together that he won’t talk to me once the lights are out. No doubt he is still waiting for an apology.

At sunrise he undresses my wound and washes it with his bare hands - delicately, a far cry from the rummaging of his fingers two nights past when he was trying, failing, to dislodge the bullet. Frogs sing in the swamp as he murmurs to himself, ignoring my hissing and my bellyaching. The stitches are too tight for the swelling, but I believe him when he says it is the best he could have done.

He looks more himself in the daylight, amber eyes exuding calm, young enough that it is easy to forget where I found him. When I ask whether he is homesick, he shrugs with his mouth and shakes his head, leaving behind the shadow of what could easily be a smile. He probes at my tenderness, all six inches of it, and asks about my pain.

There is nothing in the pantry but stale saltines two months past expiry. He subsists on these, and tea, and says I must do the same if I am to get better. I am sure that I want to get better, but it is difficult to want it still. Worse, yet, is the want I feel when his hands roam my skin with sureness as though he made me himself.

I notice him shifting in his chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs, and I ask - probably the first unbroken sentence I have spoken in a week - whether he has yet taken himself to bed. The laugh is uncharacteristic but not unwelcome. He looks out of the window, pressing his fingertips into the back of his neck to disperse a knot.

I dream up an image of what his ache would look like; something dense, I’m sure, something that sticks in your throat. I picture myself breaking it apart, quite like he must picture himself breaking my sin apart with his hands. When I told him - in earnest, before the bullets brought us here - that the truth would make him dizzy, all he could do was smile.

Flesh is flesh, though his flesh is the devil. My tongue rolls around the words without ever speaking them. My fingernails chip the paint on the door while he is on the other side, washing, dressing, praying. The air bleeds heat like tar and the water runs rusted brown; it’s a wonder he manages to keep himself so clean. The sickness takes me to thinking of his toothbrush, of the soap that still clings to it, of how he must cringe when the taste hits the back of his tongue.

If he knows that I am moving around, well, he doesn’t say a word about it. The hole in my side, attention-seeking thing that it is, seeps urgently into its dressing. I agitate the wound because I only wish he would touch it again, and again, and again. I think I will make small, glottal sounds of praise the next time that he does.

On the third day he finally submits to sleep. He is weary, and grey, but there is still a touch of gallows humour in his eyes when he says there is not a single door in this house that locks from the inside.

I want to know what God knows. Mainly, I want to know him how God knows him.

In his sleep I touch his feet. The shadow of the cypress tree dances on the linens and startles me as my index finger sweeps from heel to toe. I lay my head against the mattress, ice for my fever in the dark, and taste the sole of his foot with my tongue. Iron, soap, sunlight, dust. He tells me, soft and unperturbed, to return to bed.

In the blue wash of light that fills only a third of the room I realise he has taken my pistol for himself. I half expect his hands to tremble, to hear the clack of the rosary beads against the metal, but he is more steady now than he has ever been. I do not argue. I move no faster than my reeking wound will allow, slinking off into the dark.

The next afternoon I stir, bleary and sick, to see him moving toward the house, a blot of black against the scorched grass. You would never have seen anything more graceful than the Father carrying a jerry can of gasoline. He keeps his head turned in such a way that, even when bowed, I can tell he is watching me. The apology I had no intention of ever giving climbs to a simmer in my throat and threatens to pour out, across the bed and across the floor. He has more to fear from his God than from me, and yet he has taken the gun with him.

A week ago, far from here, far before the nonsense that got us here, I had pressed the barrel tight to the inside of his thigh. He was easier to play games with then, when he feared my silence the same way I feared my want.

He does not desire to leave this place with me in tow unless it is to deliver me elsewhere, somewhere he cannot follow. I would sooner chain myself to the bathtub, and starve, and thrust my skull repeatedly against the tiles.

From the window I joke that if he wants to get out of here he ought to bless the gasoline. He ought to kiss the engine, skirt a finger around the ignition the way you touch a girl through her underwear, bite down hard on the leather, for all the good it would do. He ignores me, and the car sputters to life.

A few days more and he will remove my stitches with a blunted kitchen knife. We will go our separate ways. This, he keeps saying as if it is true - that his time spent here with me is a small penance. If there is one thing that is certain it is that I will not get far without him, nor will he without me.

He leaves a ring of motor oil around the drain, black as his shirt, black as his pant legs, black as the nose of a pistol pressed into the mix. It clings to his fingernails - I taste them when I am half asleep, my mouth already torn apart by my suckling at his razorblades even though I was careful. He only entertains me for a moment. Only then do I say his name, garbled around the loss of his fingers and the cold intrusion of the gun.