"I was not made in His image.
He looked away the day I opened my eyes."
The body was still warm when I began my sermon.
The moonlight, sliced by the dance studio 's shattered stained glass, cast ribbons of color over her naked skin. Reds, blues, golds,each hue bleeding over the pale curves of Elise Mwangi like the brushstrokes of a heretic iconographer. She lay sprawled on the altar I'd carried her to, breath stolen, faith extinguished.
I had taken her lips first. They always lied to me, even when smiling.
The blade...a small, precise thing,fit between my fingers like a hymn. Surgical steel, honed to perfection. Not a butcher's tool. A scholar's pen. One does not scribble sin into flesh. One composes it. With care. With rhythm. With devotion.
I dipped the scalpel again in the bowl of water, dyed red and sacred. The water hissed when I stirred it. Her blood was still warm enough to speak.
I traced another line down her torso, just beneath her sternum. The flesh parted like obedient silk, exposing the quivering meat beneath. I watched the skin stretch and fight before yielding to my will, the same way the world had once fought against my voice, my touch, my presence.
God never answered my prayers, but this, this silence was divine.
I whispered to her now.
"You were the Third Movement."
The name had come to me in the shower the day after I watched Elise pretend to cry at a candlelight vigil for one of the others. Wearing black, speaking with a hollow throat. All performance. All rot.
She didn't remember me. None of them did.
But I remembered the hallway where she tripped me and laughed, the laughter rippling through her friends like an earthquake in porcelain.
I remembered what she carved on the locker door. Freak. Worm. Rot-boy.
The names had become holy to me now. Relics. The first prayers of my own broken religion.
I took my time with her hands. They were so expressive when she lied. Trembled when she was caught. Clenched when the guilt came.
The right one,I split the webbing between each finger carefully. The flesh opened like flower petals, blooming in agony. No sound came. She had stopped screaming an hour ago. Died before that. But the nerves... they always linger.
Her left hand I left intact. A symbol. The duality of sin and salvation.
At her feet, I placed the folded note: a page from The Book of Revelation, smudged in her blood. Underlined in red:
"And I saw a woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus."
It felt appropriate.
They made saints out of liars like her. Now, she could finally become one.
I finished the rite at 4:44 a.m. My hands trembled...not from fear, but from clarity.
From happiness.I almost chuckled.
Each tableau was sharpening my focus. I could feel the next verse in my head before the body cooled.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Time wasn't real. Not anymore. Not for me. Not since the music began again in my skull,those whispers in the walls of the old church, the flickering candles that refused to die, the eyes in the mirror that weren't mine.
They call it madness.
I call it resurrection.
Fragmented memory
Mara was laughing.
Not at me.
Not yet.
She was on the debate stage. Hair braided, one silver hoop in each ear.
She said something about ethics and human value and the burden of truth.
And I believed her.
I did.
Until she walked past me after the assembly, glanced at my drawing, and said,
"That's disturbing. You should talk to someone."
She never knew it, but I did.
I talked to you.
Every day.
Present.
The candles died when I stepped out of my cathedral, the city yawning before me like a corpse.
I could feel her now...Mara. Closer than before. Her scent in the air. Petrichor and toner paper. Something inky and curious. I wanted to wrap it around my throat like a noose and feel it burn.
I walked the alley like a shadow, disappearing between brick ribs of a city that never forgave.
At the edge of everything, I watched her.
She was outside her precinct. Coat wrapped tight. Talking to that man again,the one with the ruined hands and the tired eyes. He didn't know her voice like I did. Didn't see how her pupils dilated when she found a trail of blood.
But I saw it.
She was waking up.
Just like me.
Back at my sanctuary, I began sketching. Elise's limbs first. The position of her neck. The curvature of the wound. I needed to preserve it. Archive it. There would be more.
Seven, I think. Maybe ten.
Each a different confession.
Each a chapter in my gospel.
I will become your mirror, Mara. You will learn the cost of forgetting me.
Somewhere deeper
A fractured monologue
"There was a priest.
He said I was unclean.
Touched my skin with salt and tried to burn the rot from me.
I smiled when he cried.
He was the first to bleed.
They thought I'd forget.
That time would stitch over the wound.
But some wounds become eyes.
And I have seen things they never imagined."
I traced a finger through the sketch. Elise's face was wrong. Too innocent. I crumpled it.
Tried again.
This time, I made her eyes hollow. Mouth sewn with tiny stitches. A crown of barbed wire. A martyr not for God, but for me.
The Third Movement was complete.
The Fourth would begin at dusk.
I already knew her name.