Judgment day

By Rick Hartford

The priest sits in the confessional, his head down, waiting for me to speak.

I can see his shrouded face through the dark mesh that separates us.

The distance between the sinner from the redeemer?

“I guess this is the part where I say bless me father, for I have sinned. But that wouldn’t be appropriate.”

“In my world there are no sins. Just acts and their consequences.

That doesn’t preclude the fact that there is evil. You know something about that, don’t you.”

The priest briefly looks to his right and then corrects himself, quickly making the sign of the cross and then looking down, his fingers making their journey through the rosary beads that hold his silent prayers, releasing them to the heavens.

“I know what you did, Father. I was there in the tree.””

There is silence for a moment.

Go on, my son, he says now, an edge to his voice, the faint odor of alcohol floating through he screen that separates us. He now boldly looks at the mesh.

He sees nothing. Not even a shadow.

Could this be something supernatural?

“I had a pretty good relationship with the old lady,” I say. Even though I know what she did, too. It wasn’t nice. But he got what was coming to him. Don’t you agree?”

The priest says nothing.

“No matter,” I say.

“The old man she killed was a grifter. He was stealing from her, like the others he scammed, all old widows such as herself.

He came along one day on the road, telling tails of a man of fortune turned into a hobo. He looked the part, too, wearing an ancient grey pinstripe suit with moth holes in the jacket and patches in the trousers. She took him in. She fed him and got him clothes from her departed husband’s wardrobe. The visitor and the old lady used to sit by the fire and he regaled her with tails of adventure, conquest and ultimately corruption and his descent into squalor.

He was honest, to that degree.

He was a keen observer and learned where she kept her money and her jewelry. So one night after a few glasses of wine she excused herself and retired upstairs.

He set to work tiptoeing up the stairs and into her dark bedroom. With a small flashlight he found what he wanted, as well as they keys to her old and creaky old sedan.

Just as he was about to start the car there was a whisper. It was his name.

He turned and saw her with her husband’s service revolver. Why hadn’t he taken it he screamed to himself.

“Out,’ she said, flatly. He emerged, and she prodded him to the back of the home and into a meadow not far from the house.

With terror striking his heart, he saw the freshly dug grave.

“Now turn around, and face me, you thief.”

He turned, judging the distance between them and waiting for his chance.

“Now beg,” she said.

As he opened his mouth to plead she placed a bullet right between his lying lips.

Her husband had taught her to be a crack shot.

“The old lady then confessed her deed to you,” I said now to the priest. “Now it comes out that you, too, are a grifter. You snuck into the meadow one night to dig another grave. And the next Saturday in the cool dark of the confessional you strangled her, placed her body into a burlap bag, and dumped the body into your pickup.

The priest suddenly leapt and tore open the curtain and in the seat before him sat myself, a single crow.

“You’re dead,” he said as he reached for my neck.

But then the door to the church swung open and in flew a murder of crows, hundreds of black birds with gleaming red eyes with beaks that stung and stabbed and drew crimson blood as the soulless priest writhed and screamed in agony.

When it was all over and the body eaten to the bone, only a black robe remained.