Work Text:
“Where is the boy?”
“In the schoolyard.” Sister Agatha shakes her head, creasing her wimple. “He was unhappy with a mark.”
Yang finds the boy under a linden tree, a smeared sheet of paper crumpled in his hands. He offers it willingly to the priest, and Yang thinks, this is trust, and takes it.
“A fine essay, Yoon,” he says, when he has read it over. And because it is bright noon and he does not feel the devil’s eye on him, he rests a tentative hand on the boy’s smooth dark hair. “A fine essay, at heart. But it suffers in execution.”
Yoon fixes him with a serious gaze. So serious, always. So haunted. Father Yang thinks suicide might be a mercy, for this boy, but it is one he is too selfish to suggest.
Yoon asks, “What does that mean?”
“Well, sometimes how you say a thing matters just as much as what it means.”
“Like prayer?”
Father Yang feels black water, black laughter, and the devil’s eye on him. “Yes,” he rasps, with effort, and he smiles, too. The boy doesn’t need to be afraid, not yet. “Like prayer.”
You can take a child from the edge of a bridge, but you cannot take the bridge from the child. You cannot take his heart, and his willingness to fling himself over chasms, no matter the cost.
(You do try.)
They drag Yoon away to the punishment of isolation. His exhortations still ring in your ears. You shut your eyes and shake your head as though you disapprove, when truly, you are hoping against hope that they will keep him there.
(You do not pray. You never pray.)
“Tell me,” says the devil. “Will you fail me?”
Park Hong Joo never shrinks before him. She is mad and cruel and you do not have her ghastly courage. You steel yourself out of resolve instead, out of self-preservation. You don’t believe in anything. You aren’t a man of faith.
“Have I failed you?”
The old man’s face is carved open by a smile that does not come from within. No; this, like all of his expressions and all of his power, is dropped from above—like a stone upon an ant. Like sun on the desert.
“You all fail me,” he says. “But it pleases me to know what you think that you will do.”
So this is you, now: a murderer. This is you, stooping low and soft with hands of ministry, communicating death like disease.
Desire and fear—you set them free and they hound each other like beasts. The devil smiles, and you are numb. You think of your hand on the boy’s hair, on his neck. The way his tears stained your priest’s garb.
Do priests wear black because they carry sin, or so that they can hide it better?
“Kill them,” says the devil, and he says it so softly, so kindly, that you almost see the man he gathers around him like a mantle. Those pouchy old eyes, that vacant smile. A grandfather. A man who roasts strips of beef for a grandson he raised as his own child.
(You, too, are my son.)
A man who is not a man, a man who bathed his hands in blood and water to prove it.
Blood and water that gushed forth from the heart of Jesus, be our salvation.
His laugh fills the sanctuary like the swell of an organ chord. “Could he save you?” He raises one shaking finger and then, in that holy place, you see him rise. Him, out of the body. Him, ravenous and slimed and very, very old.
There is nothing holy here.
The crucifix glows golden, and he laughs, and you are numb.
“Father Yang?”
This is a child who has never once forgotten an honorific. Father Yang—who hates the title, flat and constant—lifts his head.
“What is it, Yoon?”
“What if I am meant to be a priest?” The boy looks terrified.
Father Yang should stop him. Should tell him to run.
He has never once done anything that he should, since the day he ended all pretense of belief in his own mind, pledging allegiance to something else.
“I will help you in any way I can,” he says, and he says it so kindly that Yoon smiles.
A rare and holy sight.
(There is nothing holy here.)
On the rooftop, he is an angel. The pale planes of his face, the strength resting on his shoulders, the cross in his hand like a sword.
(They will not let an angel abide.)
He stumbles. He is a man. He clutches at his heart, and you know what he feels there—slashing, stabbing, sacrifice.
Kill them, says the devil, and you would. You would leave the boy who hears and sees all, just as you were told to. You would strike down the girl who dogs her mother’s footsteps like a soldier, and you would let the angel-priest-Yoon bleed out in a heap of insufficient flesh and bone.
(You would.)
A voice, and his arms around you. A boy on a bridge with a monster on his back. (The monster didn’t have to be you.) A boy who used to grieve over his words and his family and the way his prayers could never bring them home. A boy who smiled brightest when chrism marked his forehead.
(You, too, are my son.)
So this is you: a murderer.
But you have always suffered in execution.
Suicide is a mercy. You claim it with both greedy hands. You are selfish; you are free.
He prays over your body as if there is something holy here.