The Second Amen

Longlisted in the 2025 Prize for Speculative Short Fiction from judge Simon Spanton.

“It was a REALLY good list. Stories and characters negotiating different ways of being human, of being alive and of dying.”

In the early hours of May twenty-fifth, when the tender Spring sun begins its pull through the morning sky and the light starts kissing away the frost from all those blades of grass on the highlands and the daffodils in the town, a priest hangs. 

His cassock delights in the movement from the northern winds as they tempt the man into a dance. Gently, with the breeze, he sways. And the tips of his buffed brogues brush the hardwood floor. And the beads of his rosary whisper amongst themselves. And the fibers of the rope sigh while he performs silently to an audience of idols and saints. 

Poor priest. A holy metronome.

His mortal sin is cut short by a blade the priest once used to open contracts and letters from below and above. Those monthly obligations and temporal affairs he dealt with in a timely manner. And all those lovely letters from his congregation that he took great care when replying to. Like the thank-you note sent by a very young girl who particularly enjoyed his sermon at her father’s funeral and so appreciated how he held her little hand while her Mother gathered the family’s respects. 

When his body falls to the ground it’s with a thunder and then a gasp. Amen.

The priest feels life flood over him as a sudden, burning shame. His eyes begin to focus on his nose, which he always found rather small, until they adjust on the archbishop, whom he always found to be impossibly large. 

My son, says the archbishop as he slides the knife back into its calfskin sheath, less like a purr and more like a hiss, there’s still much work to be done. 

The archbishop stalks out the room and nary a squeak escapes his hallowed heel, but the knife echoes as it drops onto the ancient wooden desk, just as the door would have echoed had it been shut.

The priest lay there, working to regain his breath, slowly, so as not to flex the raw flesh of his neck against the coarse fibers that lifted him, so long ago now, like an angel to the heavens. There was too much agony to cry. His grief filled him so completely that it closed him up. 

As he gazes up at the rafters he wonders how long exactly would a cobweb hold its intricacies if left undisturbed by wind or rain or savage, tidying hands. He begins to marvel at the patience of the spider while the archbishop yes, yes-ses and heaven’s no-es. The archbishop speaks at someone across the road or across the world and the little creature has escaped, leaving nothing behind but an entire silken universe in the corner of a supporting beam. 

We’re sending you to America, said he.

To America? The priest registers the archbishop in the room like a catch of light in the corner of the eye, then his awareness wanders to the anonymous collaborator of his fate on the opposite end of the telephone line. But the thought is snuffed out by an expiration of breath from above.

To Texas. To a county of 24,564. Hah - 24,545, actually, as of late, the archbishop says. There’s a sudden influx of thoughts and prayers and you’re the man to sort them. It will be your penance. For attempting to assert your dominion over our Holy Father’s creation.

Some men use language like the faithful use prayers. They hide themselves behind words and trust that syntax and semantics will save them after their sins are said and done. The priest is not one of those men so he says nothing. Nothing at all. Besides, his throat aches and he knows that little would escape him save hellish vibrations. Like those young, eager violinists scraping catgut in Sunday choir. 

From the most important creatures in the country, the archbishop continues, from the president of the United States himself, if you can believe it. It’s important work. It’s holy work.

And as suddenly as he had appeared in the room, the archbishop leaves it and all that the priest is left with is a frigid waft of air from beneath the holy man’s holy garments. 

Time passes, the priest finds himself in a church that looks more like an office building. Nothing like the gothic steeples and stone walls he grew up alongside. He peers out a square window at expansive and barren nothingness cut by highways and advertisements and finds no beauty at all. He fights to fill his lungs with the hot, stale air and for the first time in his life attempts to recall the smell of freshly fallen snow. 

His meditation is interrupted by a cough that vibrates through the vacant church hall. The priest jumps, jolts himself around. He finds himself a handshake’s distance from a man so perfectly fitting the image of a Texan that he could only have been completely sincere. In one tick of the clock, the stranger removes his Cattleman with his left hand and places his right hand on a pistol at his hip with a mother of pearl grip, as tenderly as if it were a bible. 

Upon seeing the weapon the priest stiffens and can feel his pupils usurp the blues of his eyes. With a smirk the stranger, still holding his hat to his heart, removes his hand from his gun and extends it towards the priest.

Mmmm-ighty fine to meetchew Paw-dre, he slurs. Back home a man would have to marry his barstool to stretch his vowels so long and smooth. But the priest grew up on Western films, the ones with cowboys and damsels in distress, so the stranger’s accent is a delight after so many days of silence. I’m the grounds keeper for these holy ache-ers. I’m ‘ere to welcome you to Texas. I sure wish they were happier - er - circumstances that we were introduced.

It’s a pleasure to meet you, he rushes to meet the man’s hand, like leather.

The keeper places his crown atop his head and tucks both thumbs through the front loops of his Levi’s and sets the scope of his gaze on the foreign priest. His garments have never before caused him any bother but are now a constant assault.. He chokes slightly as his collar cuddles against the raw patch of skin left behind by the rope like a love bite.

What’s a padd-ie doing in Texas anyhow, paw-dre?

I’m no’ Irish. I’m Scottish. From the west. Near Glasgow. The details come to the priest like an afterthought. His accent always revealed his history.

Glasg-owwwwwww, the keeper gnaws on the second half of the city like chewing tobacco, y’know I didn't know there were Catholics in Scotland.

There’r Catholics everywhere. We’re quite the infestation.

Now that don’t sound very pious, paw-dre.

No. No, I've gone and misplaced mah fear of god these days. I suppose that’s why I’m here.

When a person lives long enough, as long as the keeper has, and they’ve had the good sense to pay attention, they begin to recognize when a man is on the brink of confession. The keeper is nothing if not a sensible man. But he has no time for absolution. 

Well this ain’t a bad place to be if that’s what you’re lookin’ fer. Fear, that is”, the keeper mumbles, “God on the other hand… Well he hadn’t been ‘round these parts for some time.

The keeper walks the priest through the foundations of his new life. The nature of his work. Directions to the liquor store, the diner and where to pick up a newspaper. The code to the gun safe. And then the keeper excuses himself from the strange priest and walks into the heat, like hell.

The work was this. Each morning the priest would be met by towers of papers to be sorted in two sections. Thoughts. Prayers. Many of the documents would bear official stationary, perfectly typed touting grand titles from every inch of the political and private sector. Just as often they were hand-written, barely legible, on scraps of torn paper, post-its, backs of grocery store coupons. The priest was under no obligation to lead a congregation or attempt to instill morality into the community in any way. He would read from no bible and would hear no confessions. Of this he was grateful, partly because he was disenchanted quickly by the local’s unwillingness to cope with his Gaelic inflection, but also because he couldn’t stand the sound of his voice as he recited those teachings and he hated how his throat scraped when he tried.

Day after day he reads invocations disguised as thoughts and prayers sent to no one in particular. Paper after paper he sorts, so many his fingertips turn to hide from the sheets reaching out and slicing him. 

Suffering, like faith, is perfected by repetition. Torturers and saints both know this. Circadian meditations hunched over a rosary strengthens the mind. Water dropping on the forehead breaks it. Each day the priest rises and greets his punishment like a begrudging lover comes to bed. He sighs, licks his fingertips and begins his work. 

There were nights, however, after hours of work, that the priest would come across a tear-stained paper that radiates a tender heat that feels like an embrace. These are always prayers: 

Please God, protect my child at school.

Please God, protect my child in the cafeteria.

Please God, protect my child in the homeroom.

The priest lays the sheet of paper upon his face and breathes in the words like incense. The solemn scent sinks into the meat of his lungs. Tears well and drop onto the papers silently, unwilling to let his sobs disturb the caustic night. Well before the coming dawn he rises from his desk, places the prayer in the appropriate, meaningless pile and haunts the empty halls toward his bed knowing that sleep will pay him no visit.

These nights he slipped backwards to the days when his shoes were smaller and he had to stand on his toes to reach the sugar for his mother’s tea. In those days, the would-be-priest thought grief would feel like death. And then he grew and he grieved and he knows now it’s just another life. The stubborn continuation of it. Life after life, collecting heartaches like daisies on a chain. After so much loss the boy who became a holy man is weak, his garments lay heavy on his shoulders. So unimaginably tired that he can no longer imagine a future where his eyes wouldn’t be heavy and his shoulders wouldn’t sink and his heart wouldn’t ache and he wouldn’t wake up longing for the moment he could crawl back into bed after a long day of useless toil.

How does a heart break? 

Slowly.

Night after night the priest stares at the moon and waits for the inevitable Texan sun that rises in a fury. When he returns to his desk the next morning he knows the keeper has come. Not because he heard any footsteps or hollow shuffling throughout the night, but because of the new mess of papers, somehow identical to the ones the morning previous, that awaits him. And so, another day begins. 

In the beginning he often wondered about the holy consequences of his work. Did all those thoughts end up shifting legislation? Have the prayers healed those fractured families? Then day followed day and then another day came and then a year had passed and then two and somewhere along the way he stopped wondering entirely because nothing had changed. Now his hair is gray, or had it always been? His bones are stiff, even in the heat. His neck has a constant crick. 

For he’s a believer still, even after all this time. Even after all those unanswered invocations, his heart still calls out to god like it did when he was a bairn. So hope was the thing, not grief, that caused his soul to shatter. Hope that thoughts were sincere and would lead to action. Hope that prayers will be answered by people who have the power to answer them. Hope that god would hold accountable the people, holy or not, that sorted the pleas into piles and forgot them. Hope that God was there at all, or that the church didn’t kill them off long ago.

If hell is as finite a place as Glasgow or Uvalde then the priest knows that that is where he belongs. He knows it in his heart that so longs for home. Not because he had avoided his penance. No, he had paid dearly for his sins. But because he had done nothing blindly, willingly, because someone had told him nothing would absolve him. He couldn’t survive another day of holy work, and he couldn’t think of a way to help in the ways he had imagined he would when he was young, gazing out at the heather on the hillside. 

No more thoughtless words. Not one more unanswered prayer. He knew where he was going, so he runs there.

0-5-2-4-* 

The lock releases with a mechanic melody that sounds like amen and echoes through the hollow-ed halls of the fraudulent church until it’s smothered by a languishing silence. Expecting an armory, the priest finds a single pistol, with a mother of pearl grip. 

He wraps his fingers tenderly around the handle and blushes at the piece’s unfamiliar feel, like an atheist would with a bible. He feels the cool metal in his hands and the touch of it feels like sin. The weight isn’t right. It isn’t natural. The object sways past the threshold of his fingertips when he tries to balance it in his palm so he tenses the tendons in his hand the way men do in a handshake when they want to feel powerful. 

He walks to the desk and thinks about the many thousands of people who have died by such unfeeling machinery, and how devastatingly unremarkable a death like his would be. Would his name appear in the local newspaper? Behind the ads? Would anyone even know he was gone? Or would his body be like the cobweb; suspended in time in the corner of the room until someone or something disturbed it? 

He sits in his seat and prepares his confession. That he can’t bear the world. It’s all too heavy for him. Too cold. He loads the pistol and thinks of his mother and the way she taught him to make the perfect cup of tea. He rests the barrel of the gun atop his tongue and tries to recall his evening meditations, the one he mumbled as he kneeled beside his childhood bed as his elbows chafed on the rough wool of his father’s plaide. Our Father, who aren't in heaven… 

No tears. No longings as he rolls inward his finger and takes his final inspiration. Less like a breath and more like a prayer. 

Head thrown back, the priest’s eyes are fixed on heaven as the pistol lays drowned in the red seas of unsorted papers below. 

He feels calloused hands wrench him from his shallow haze and feels life return to him like a cold recollection. The air is warm, suffocating, but those hands are ice. The priest has no mouth to speak, so he gazes up into the eyes of the keeper and they felt so familiar, somehow. Like staring into the eyes of god, or some other complicit and unencumbered thing.

Paw-dre… echoes he, there’s still much work to be done.