It's Not Art Until It Hangs

A Short Story

Threads, millions of them, stick from my fingertips in cilial splinters. I tie nooses in my spare time. Where they fray, the rope splits, digs into my fingers like nettles. Like I’m growing fur.

My white shirt has pink smears down the front from where the edges of my hands have accidentally grazed. I forgot to change out of my clothes before I started, and now that I’ve started, I’m not going to stop until I’ve made enough nooses for the month. If I am precise, then that will be enough.

I don’t want to feel this more than I must.

People come to me out of need, and we both provide each other a service, although the details of our contract are never known, and never completed until the end of our session.

Some want a listening ear, someone to spill their secrets upon and feel redemption after their ritual-rebirth. Others have more erotic proclivities, of which I cannot and will not judge. These people pay me a great deal to allow them to arrive just at the brink.

There is a third type who comes to me.

And they pay me everything.

###

My first client is a civil liability lawyer of all things, and he is a good client. Discreet. Most importantly, he is enlightened to the suffering of others and his soul is dripping black.

I have thirty-four minutes and twelve…eleven…ten…seconds before he gets here.

Seven.

If I focus on the time, I will keep counting the seconds until there are none, so instead, I focus on the red markers that are my fingertips as they dye my nooses deeper colors.

###

The only light comes from the dimmest setting of the wall lamps and the candles I’ve selected at the altar under the feet of our savior, Jesus Christ. Blue for our mother, six in total—a high vigil. The artistry of the church at night is a spectacle only made greater by the haunted blue that traps the prayer flames behind their tint.

I leave a place for my lawyer’s Votive candle if he’s remembered to bring it. It’s not important. None of it is important. All that matters is it’s blue, and he believes enough to get in the box.

The church is empty, the priest home with his boy for the night, as if I couldn’t smell it on him. As if She hadn’t been whispering it to me for days, the filthy man.

Her eyes are dull amber. Mournful in reflection as rust colors her cheeks. The candle flames glance off her face, making it change, making my breath quicken as her marble smile swells with dusklight through stained glass, spattering her face in colorful disfigurement.

If I had time, I’d rest my head in the nape of her marble neck. Feel the cold as it vibrates beneath.

Lose my flesh in her sculped form.

###

The confessional is set up before my client arrives. Three nooses coil like milked snakes in a basket on the bench next to the preist’s seat. I am not allowed in here, I know. If I were to be seen, I’d be excommunicated, or worse. The church is not without its secrets.

Neither am I.

A single-use noose, ready to go, is tied to the support beneath my bench, slung over the top of the booth separator, looped once over a roof support, and then down, down, hanging into the other box.

I’ve left the door unlocked, the same as every other ritual night, and I’ve yet to be bothered by a wayward intruder. So I wear my black alb, black stole, and black dalmatic. The soft blue they prefer the deaconry wear is an affront to the mother.

Blue belongs to her.

My watch alerts me, but I already know because I counted. And after the agreed-upon time, I count the minutes, watching the tones of stained glass darken over her pallid form. At 438 seconds—the exact number of shattered hues from the Betrayal pane, plus the nineteen that make up the fleeing face of the Judas on his exodus to Calaphas—there is a hesitant knock on the door.

His usual.

When the latch clicks, I settle back onto my bench and close the thin door as Mary’s eyes follow mine. When her blank stare locks onto me, there is weightlessness, a tugging on my insides, and when my confession booth door taps closed, it is gone.

Above us, the support groans as the lawyer settles into his noose. He coughs once, and then speaks.

“Good-d-d N-n-night,” he says. His teeth clack like pew kneelers, and the wooden support beam groans.

“Relax,” I tell him. “As always, you are under God’s care.”

“Yes. Yes. Father?” He coughs and the rope tied underneath my seat thrums.

“I am here,” I lie.

“‘Good night’, that’s kind of a fucked up—sorry—that’s kind of a messed up greeting, you know? Like what the… how am I supposed to greet someone at night without sounding like I’m going to fu— like I’m going to sleep, you know?”

This isn’t what he’s come for, and he knows it, so I do not respond.

“Ahem, hm. Hey, I guess I just wanted to kind of talk about my family. My wife, she—”

The lawyer drones on while I listen in silence, thumbing the taut rope like a standup bass. The lawyer, like I said, is an easy client. Of all of my services, this sort requires the least amount of work.

He’s already placed his money on the ledge of the sliding, opaque window—I can see just enough to count. Five flat bills laid bare, Mister Benjamin Franklin, the scoundrel, staring back at me through the black curtain of building sin. Dripping filth. Now, he opens the seems of himself until only his shell is left—an empty thing to be filled by God. God’s light does not shine here at this hour, and I have never lied to him.

When he is done speaking, I stand and slide my bench out through the side like a loose brick, which in turn slides the bench out from under my lawyer’s feet, and he hangs.

I listen to him gasp and sputter for a moment before I grab my bowl of water and a rag to wash his feet. He wanted to go longer, so I let him. His face is finally getting to the shade she likes. I know she is watching over me—looking over my shoulder at the blue that calls her name.

After I cut him free, I drag him to the feet of my ivory maker. I run a trembling finger up the curve of her arm, tempting her, and I’m convinced I feel her marble flesh pucker in horripilation.

As my client’s face begins to turn back to its fair shade, blood returns like stained glass. Veinous cross-sections lighten or darken, splintering his face, and I have the sudden urge to return to the confession booth for the knife I used to cut the rope.

To paint a new scene at the feet of Her.

My Lady shivers. The ground beneath us rumbles just enough to question if it’s real, and the lawyer returns to life, grasping at my collar.

I subdue him and regain myself before helping him to his feet. The incense I lit before our ritual turns acrid—sulfuric—and my client knows our time is done.

He leaves without speaking, and this time, I don’t know if he will return. I have to stop shaking before returning to my booth, so I time my breath with the seconds I’m counting while holding her statue’s sticky hand. I see the red begin to form at the base of her woeful eye and realize I am fully erect.

###

My last client’s words affect me even as my new client pleasures himself in the booth next to me. The things he said of his wife, the disdain.

Sometimes, I wish to speak back to him. To converse—to confess that I once had a family and that his words make me question my place in our current roles.

It was too long ago to matter. A mistake and a son, and a long road back to proving myself in the eyes of God. I know these misteps to be fate. Ordained obstacles that led me here, to the truth.

To her.

###

My third client is the same as the last. A middle-aged male with a 5 o’clock shadow over most his head. He grunts and tosses a couple piles of cash on the ledge, makes the ceiling groan, and his belt buckle jingles down and clatters against the bench.

His sounds are an affront.

I have the slider partway open, and I tell myself it is for my client’s safety. Twenty-five hundred in cash sits on the ledge; this client heard about me in Narcotics Anonymous. I know its wrong, but I can’t help but wonder if he stole for this new drug of his. I wonder if this creature has a wife, too, somewhere. Certainly not at home. And children, I could never imagine.

I want to tell him to keep his money because I’m just going to burn it, but I don’t. It makes him think he’s getting more than nothing.

###

My fourth and final client is new, and I do not know how he has heard of my services. He is nervous and refuses to tell me, which I decide is fine. His mind will change upon feeding our marble goddess his sins.

I hear the noose creak and feel the rope tighten in my hands. “Is this what you do?” he says.

He will tell me all.

As it is, with anything else, this boy, is not shy. There is no money on the ledge this time, and I don’t have to ask what service he needs. His offering is something much greater than what false idols may hold in their diseased ink.

The boy speaks of his past as I test the sharpness of my knife by running its edge along the stretched rope. The blade sings like angels with each scrape.

“I didn’t have it fucking easy, you know?” I hear the tears in his voice and hope his question is rhetorical. For, what is easy, I’d like to say. Boy, if you only knew how easy it was to bear anything on this plane—I would say that, too, but I feel her presence steeling my tongue.

“Please, continue.” I don’t know when I began spinning my knife into the tip of my pointer finger, but I hadn’t felt it until it stung like a bolt from above. Blood drips on my dalmatic; I can’t see it, but I hear it and do nothing to stop its flow.

“When I heard you were doing this, I… I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what to think. I thought it was a lie—I thought there was no way a priest—you, would… I don’t know, I guess we all have our secrets.”

The hour is late, and what little empathy I can gather is failing me. This is why I suffer the deconry. I must learn to serve. But all of me knows where this conversation goes, and along with it, the soul. My Lady Mary will not need these sins when his insides will feed her porous tongues.

“I confess I learned of your—your moonlighting at a meeting for sex addicts. There, the cards are on the table. I’ve been…promiscuious.” He whispers the last word and tightens the rope.

Why has this boy come to me to be with him in death, I wonder—yet, I know. Those unloved seek love wherever they can find it. I wish to tell him I am not a priest and that his death rattle is falling on deaf ears. More, I want to know—

“This is worse!” His cry echoes in a sharp blast across the sloped ceiling. If there were birds, the church would explode with applause.

“No mortal sin is greater than—”

“How can you?” He’s cut off my words again, and I am losing my patience.

I wait for him to continue. How can I what, I wonder? Do him this favor? To sit with one in death, to figuratively hold their hand as they wade through the tar to Her, to my beloved, Her. There could be no greater honor. I think of cutting the rope and leaving him to wallow in his tears.

Like a lovesick parent, to show him what he’s done.

“How can you sit there in silence, huh? Sure, I’m fucking around, but you’re killing people in secret? No, wait, not killing. It’s just a ritual; are you out of your fucking MIND?!”

This snaps my focus back to the grate—the thin mesh from which those words just arrived. A grin spreads across my face, and although I should feel something about it other than indifference, my smile seems appropriate.

“I thought you loved me, Father. Or should I just call you John, you sick fuck. You know what, I’m going to tell everyone

The truth, devouring the sin, and outing the sinners—permanently.

Sobbing is leaking from the other side of the divider and the marble statue grumbles so hard my washing bowl rattles on the stone floor. The new incense suddenly goes sour, like the Mother herself had just stepped in the room.

A decision lingers before me. Allow this fateful meeting to play its course and strengthen the church, or do I feed the stone?

I make the choice and kick the board out. The snap cuts off his cries like a guillotine and flushes his moans to throated hacks and gagging. I have to work quickly; with his noises, I can tell he did not take a breath and I do not have much time.

The rope is closing over an already closed throat, and the church is rumbling so hard I fear the alarm may sound. In my head, there is a chorus of whispering, gnawing holes in my thoughts. I have to say the prayers before he’s gone.

Her whispers are like locusts but my mouth is moving faster than the tinkering of the metal bowl at my feet. Their blackened sins slosh around inside as the ground quakes, and my lips move, the words hissing out of my mouth like her swarm is speaking through me.

The gargling on the other side slows, quiets to a clicking, and then all is silent except the rattle of all the glass candles. I open my side and bend to pick up my wash bowl, careful not to spill it.

When I open the side where my customer’s corpse swings, I touch noses with the bloated face of my dead and blue son, swingly gently, front to back.

The rumble, the gentle warmth of the frictionous grind, it leaves me shivering as it falls away. The rising sun paints my boy’s face in cast gold and glinting blues and purples. There’s a wanton layer of blue that drapes its soft shadow over the cracks in his stained glass face.

When I carve into it, it chips and cracks, but the patterns of the Betrayal shine down to paint him through the lens of Jesus.

My face stains that of the Virgin Mary, her porcelain now a death shroud to a new original sin, and I've painted a blood ring around her white neck. I don’t cut down my son’s noose I had lifted him from to drag him to my Mary. Instead, I slip it over my head as the morning bells begin to toll. My fingers are numb as the rope slides across them.

Hot tears of blood, steaming in the rays of stagnant light, flow freely down the statue’s face as I kick away from the stool. The sun rises over the wire crest that holds the blue glass above Jesus’s bowing head, highlighting the blood that makes art of my holy fabrics.

In the morning quiver of the rope and my stuttering heart, I see her shell begin to crack.