memory share.

[knelt]

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cw: csa, murder

[knelt]

It's not shocking to learn that on God's green Earth, true evil can take form in the dark. It's so likely to form in places where power coalesces, that even in the hierarchy of the church, even directly under God's nose, true evil takes mortal form. You're seventeen when God gives you a knife and tells you to wield it. The words speak through your uncle's voice, God's most trusted adviser — you are a soldier in the army of our Lord. You will use violence to purify God's kingdom. You will become God's vengeance. You are a Saint.

God knows, in the depths of your tarry heart, it feels like murder. It is murder. Even now, with the echo of the final words is that all? rolling around in your mind, with disgust fisting the inside of your stomach, it feels like a sin beyond the point of redemption. You have his blood in your hair, coating your face like war paint. Before you is the altar of a long abandoned chapel in Rome, Italy, where the wooden cruxification of Jesus has been carved with eyes slightly open, the pupils just barely visible from the first row of pews, staring at you, his holy murderer. You feel Roman. When the doors open and close, you don't move to look at the intruder — it's two in the morning, and only those who are in the thrall of God's most holy business know to be here.

Is that all? You keep thinking of his face, and it keeps lashing you — less because it was suffering or hurt at the first thrust of your knife, and more because it was confused, genuinely shocked. Is that really all? Clipped Achilles tendons, the horrible screaming, the little boy in the corner of the room with wide, wounded eyes, spotting what no one else has before seen: a Saint at work. Fort Smith, Arkansas, you say. Confusion. Confusion? You get angry. A boy and three girls. Did you think God wouldn't notice? Confusion. Alarm. Is that all?

Is that not enough?

Your Uncle stands before the first pew, where you have the kneelers down, knelt in confessional prostration. These old churches have kneelers without cushions, and it's your preference in prayer, the sore ache of kneeling on something hard, unforgiving, and painful as God's love. He sets his palm on your red-streaked hair, and the blood of a pedophile — one of God's horrible creations — is stained on his skin, too. It's there because you killed him. It's there because God has given you a terrible burden, to make His Kingdom a safer place to be. It's there because you're a murderer. It's there because some people deserve to die, and God decides who.

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was last week."

Your uncle smiles down at you, patting your head.

"God sees the work you have done, Isolde, and He has called it good. It is not ours to question Him."

But God knows you do question Him, because you are a sinner and thankless and wrong, because you can't just kill His creations and be forgiven without prompting. You don't get the confessional, because God already knows what you've done, because the order comes from Him directly. You blink your blank eyes at your uncle, who wouldn't be moved by tears, and lay out your case once again:

"If you could just ask His Holiness, it would help me —"

"Isolde," sharp, pointed, so like the knife you wield. Accented in your mother's homeland, musically Irish. "Enough. Corporeal punishment is not a common practice in the modern day. How badly you seem to want it is proof of the vanity — denying you is the harder ask, and therefore more holy."

Shame flushes you out, disturbed by yourself. There's no place to turn to, for any relief. You are a murderer who cannot be punished for it. You are the dark, holy thing in God's sanctified Kingdom, there to protect and defend and destroy. You want something to beat all the grief and emptiness and darkness out of you, but it's living with it that is your punishment, this great, yawning expanse of sin that cloaks you like a blanket, that shields you from the happy little girl you once were. You nod, and accept that lot in life. You can kill people, but you cannot be sorry — and you're not, really. You don't mourn the evil in the world. You mourn what snuffing out a light does to you, you mourn the monster you've had to become to be the solider your Holy Father needs.

"On the plane ride home, you may give forty Our Fathers, and forty Hail Marys," he says, warmly.

Eighty prayers is the price of one life. You'll do it, too, while punching yourself in the thigh, while ripping off your fingernails, while biting your tongue until you bleed. Please, dear God, let someone punish you, even if it has to be yourself. Please, dear God, forgive the punishment you think you deserve. Please, dear God, take this sinner's unholy heart and make it whole.