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He lay askew upon the naked stone, supine, offering his chest to the frost in the hollow hope that the earth might become permeable, and that decomposed arms might, at last, embrace him. That grave was an altar of desolation: bereft of faces and incense, only ajisai wreathed the mound like a crown of cerulean thorns. He yearned to drown that silence with the warmth of his own pulsing blood, a scarlet insult to the stillness of death.
This ritual had not been a laver of purification, as he had hoped, but a baptismal font of despair. Clutching the cerulean crowns between his fingers, he tormented their delicate flesh until he wrung from them a bitter sap, a botanical gore that stained his hands: he felt as though he were finally celebrating his own mass of atonement.
He dared to return within the confines of that hospital, where the dying once exhaled their final breaths amidst groans and supplications. Though the smiles of physicians cast a veil of oblivion over those halls, the air remained stagnant with an acidic stench; a vapor of mold and putrescence that seemed to transude from the very walls, or perhaps emanate from the infected soil that still fouled his garments.
Huddled at the foot of the empty bed, as if the room itself were digesting him, he felt his suffering swell until it mirrored the agony of Christ. He derived a near-depraved solace from it: that pain was the necessary sacrifice to cleanse the memory of his sin. At last, he ultimately had turned his gaze toward God: not out of love, but in search of a grim notary to whom he could submit his penance.
Every wound that tautened his skin was a step toward an absolution bought with blood. God had become his instrument.