Confession by Lady Persephone

[This is a true story...]

Candles flickered in the side chapel; the bones of ancient ancestors settled deeper in the dust of centuries many feet below me. The statue of Our Lady gazed ever downwards as if watching over those whose memories had long been lost to the worms. I shuffled on my knees the names of those buried beneath carved on the marble slap that was my cushion.

It is freezing outside but my cheeks are flushed, hands clammy under the folds of my habit and I fear that my sins will never be forgiven for they are beyond the forgivable or perhaps it's because I don't believe; have never really believed. I begin reciting my sins to the Virgin knowing her cold demeanor will not thaw to my entreaties.

The chains of the turret clock rattle and creak as midnight approaches. I rise and pad towards the altar, a tomb containing some ancient saint's bones and along with them the sins of my earlier life. A howl of pure sorrow echoes in this hallowed place, mine. I tear at the altar cloth it's silverware clattering to the floor and prostrate myself across the stone. My lips move. I cannot be forgiven for I have no regrets and I would do it all again.

I push against the top stone. It yields almost too easily; smells of musty dampness rise and strike my nostrils. He lays there almost uncorrupted by the passing years, his naked body with dry skin peeling the only testament to his time in the tomb. I close my eyes and visions sweep across the intervening years of desolation and isolation.

Sacrilegious memories. His pale body nailed to the cross, here at this very spot. My whip across his puny almost fleshless buttocks rattling flesh against bone. The priest who promised his God chastity yet who worshiped me as the Goddess incarnate. ....Later a soft nipple placed between his lips and devoured in an archaic parody of transubstantiation.

Perhaps if it had been one moment of pure passionate insanity I might believe in my own salvation. Not one moment but scores of times leaving the chancel and nave littered with unholy fluids our breath condensed into tongues of infernal hellbent lust .

-----

He died All Hallows Eve some thirty years ago, his gluttony for pain and my yearning for the pleasure of torturing taken to its ultimate end. Those years of total mental and physical supremacy have fed my life of contemplation. When I kneel in prayer with my sisters, the rosary slipping through my fingers, I smile; dogma and doctrine pale when compared to my divinity.

Next Halloween he will lie unmolested as I too will be laid in a tomb and our story  will be  lost to the dust and cobwebs of time.