It was in this place that he finally ceased wandering. No longer content to mull among the goatherds and incurable nor to pace the gilded marble of the Vatican’s sepulchred halls. His lamb’s heart stiffened from the cold contents of grubby subway sleeping bags, the slick varnished desks of the city. No longer did people weep with tears of blood, enraptured only by the Word—today’s miracles aren’t worth the receipts they’re printed on. Rousing Lazarus from his wormy bed, routing demons to a squealing frenzy of sea-drowned pigs— only so much myth and fairytale. Old tricks reduced to bookish curio, drowsy seminar in a lifeless tongue. Seeing this, Jesus knew he’d seen enough. Now his only neighbours are a whitewashed nursing home and a proud old magnolia that shades a fountain filled with dessicated leaves. Each Sunday he fatherly ushers a small but dedicated flock of floral women, their sons and husbands dressed to make a good impression. For the men, etern...
Fall The stark decay of the barn stood bright against the glowering September sky, its splintered panels bleached and broken by years of alternating sunlight and frost. Ragged strips of pink paint— remnants of the barn’s last good coat, twenty years back— bubbled off the wood in pale, crisp blisters. The planks were emaciated, silvered, split down their lengths by wide, deep cracks. During the winter months these cracks became bejewelled with hibernating ladybirds that embedded themselves into the grain, a find that could only have been made by the probings of a restless and lonely child. Now that small mystery had been reclaimed, lost like so much else, to a value beyond reckoning. Above the barn entrance, stale mud clods of swallow nests clung to the eaves, the ground beneath them spattered with droppings that resembled wet ash. The barn doors were bolted shut by a spongey wooden beam that was slowly crumbling into a trail of sawdu...