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It was silent in the old brick shed in the backyard of the church, save for the soft pooling of water from inside the silver tub. The air was light, and cold, making Alois’ flesh hard and bristly.
It felt as though he was covered in frost, from the tip of the ears to the quicks of his toes; his eyelashes seemed frosted over, obnoxiously obscuring with each blink.
The sore crater of flesh in his mouth still festered and burned. Alois’ stomach churned because was hungry—he’d avoided eating well in fear of the sting of eye-watering pain that met every bite. It was better to just suckle on bread and then sip his too-cold and yet not-cold-enough water when the build up against his wound became too much, sometimes to the point where he’d started to bleed at the rim.
That was the coward’s reason—when he’d eat, he was always immediately put off, as a sickly sensation settled in his chest, clogging his oesophagus with syrup and swiping most of the breath out of his lungs in place of sharp little rocks.
Alois felt the residual stodginess for days on end, now. The hunger pangs hitting his diaphragm like a bow and arrow didn’t help matters, either. Neither did his cracking lips or his bleary eyes or hanging jaw; nor his blue feet or pocket-knife ribs, or even the soft, merciful pulsing in his head, just under the bone, or the timid but persistent one-note ringing in his right ear.
He’d lost a tooth the other day. One of the unimportant ones, right in the back. He’d tried exercising his lacerated tongue by brushing the tip across the bars of its oral jail cell, only to find he’d lodged one of them awry. When he’d then attempted to check it with the new fingers, it had come out with such a horrifying crack! that he’d nearly been convinced it had broken in two.
Immediately his mouth had filled with a warm, coppery river that flowed between cheek and gum to the corner of his lips. He’d licked it away, and the strain on his tongue made him wince.
Alois leaned forward in the hot water, his thatched shoulders slack, jaw hanging, features pallid and grey, and then His large, firm hands press into his skin, nursing his invalid wounds.
“Recovery is coming along swiftly,” He said, voice echoing through the cold brick shed as though it was the only sound in the world.
The water sloshed as He—sleeves of his poet pushed up to just under the elbows; pale hands strong and warm—swirled a cloth in the water. Then, He wrung it out and applied it to the raw, lumpy stitchwork on his back. Each seam varied in age. Each seam varied in quality.
Steam filled the air around them. Alois was still cold.
“With progress like this, I’m sure they’ll allow you into heaven in no time.” Again, his voice echoed. It bore the lilt of a smile but all Alois could do was blink through his snowy-lashed haze. “Lay back for me.” Only part of that entered his head.
Firm, warm hands coiled around Alois’ shoulder and drew him back until he was close to landing against the side of the tub, but was deftly kept by his highness from the sharp metal at just a hair’s breadth do avoid tearing his newest stitches.
In His right hand, the soaked cloth was ran down Alois’ bare chest and into the face of the water, against his stomach, whilst His left hand kept him in place. Such a gentle, merciful action.
“There we go…” His voice was hushed and reverberated. As gentle as a purr. It made Alois want to strain his eyes enough to focus for the first time in days. He wanted to purge himself, too, but that urge he resisted. “Isn’t that better?” He pressed the ball of His palm into Alois’ chest, pawing the untouched parts of his skin as if to reassure him of His presence.
Alois recalled the time where such ministrations would be rougher—more calloused—and harder to bear, back when he’d first been taken in by the old loon in that grandiose, loony old castle. Times that he’d suddenly be reminded of if the new hand, controlled entirely by him as though it was as much of his own as it was everything else, and yet not his at all, accidentally brushed against his thigh.
There was the demon, too, who soiled him with a somehow less unholier touch. But now, Alois finally felt the touch of heaven—purity—with each millimetre of his highness’ flesh being the very plush manifestation of everything fair and holy.
Even as His arm submerged itself, as Alois felt the touch of warm redemption on his cold, sinful thigh, fingers nearing his groin from either the side or from above, Alois knew that this was what being cared for truly was. Everything holy could only care, only sympathise, and only nurture.
Even as He showed his angelic dove wings and tickled his flesh with feathers both shed and not, Alois knew that he was safe and that he was well looked after.
Ivory feathers started to decorate the surface of the water like sleeping bodies. His highness’ left dove wing trailed its tip down the dry parts of Alois’ bare, bruised and weeping skin.
“We’ll make another,” He promised in his ear, in his mind. “Just another. One more incision. One more cut. I promise.”
Alois often believed Him. He was always honest to him, unlike that demon. He never made more than one more seam at a time. Yet even as there were generously placed fortnights of respite between each one, Alois—well in need of praying to rid himself of this hideous ungratefulness that still plagued him, like a red-eyed shadow of The Devil Himself—still longed for the day when the last cut would finally come.
And despite all his sins, his highness was still kind. Alois’ heart belonged to him fully for that, as did the rest of his body. The rest of his organs.
“From night into day; salt into sugar; water into wine, and defiled into immaculate,” He would recite, as he did now, like a sacred hymn. “My, how the worm has turned.”
And despite the lightness in his head and the tautness in his chest, Alois would try his best to listen over the quiet ringing in his ear. Then, he closed his eyes, and listened to all of what was being spoken to him.