skonen_blades

The priest wheezed on the other side of the confessional screen. It wasn’t uncommon. Cyrogenia malathusmia. Freezer lung, we called. Or the holy cough. Most people that traveled by cryo in the sleepships ended up with it. That meant that the priests had it.

“Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It has been six weeks since my last confession.” I started. I heard the priest let out a rattling sigh and shift position.

The priests believed that transporters stripped a person of their soul. When a body is transported, it is completely destroyed and then reassembled on the other end. Technically, you die. All holy men only transported by cryoship. Popesicles, my dad called them.

“Twice I disobeyed my father this week and willfully looked the elder settler statues in the eye in the town’s main square. I have had wanton thoughts about two of the miners that came here for work. I was approached by the whorehouse manager and turned him down. He said he’d ask again on my fifteenth birthday. I was scared but also excited.”

I’ve never been anywhere except here. Newgodsville, Tantalina, Zeta-2KB7. A rock big enough for one town, my daddy used to say. Before he was killed in an evac when I was 8.

The priests wouldn’t hear the confessions of workers that were brought here by transporter which meant he didn’t hear a lot of people. We were far away from most systems but rich in tungsten ore. Mostly ‘porters with a few dollars to stake a claim came here, not sleepers. I’d heard that to get here, he’d been on one ship for nearly fifty years, sleeping in the cold. And I’d heard that this was his fifth posting. I’m not good at math but that meant he might be two hundred and fifty years old.

I found him handsome. That should have been part of my confession but I couldn’t ever tell him. That’s why I kept doing bad things so that I’d have to confess.

“I took the lord’s name in vain twice down by the river when I lost the washing. And I stole a toffee stick from the general store on my way here.”

Mustering up my courage, I stuck the toffee stick out and around the divider into his booth. After what seemed like half an hour, he took it. I heard him laugh on the other side of the screen and I heard him sigh as he put the toffee into his mouth.

“Thank you my child.” He said. “Say three hail marys and come back to see me whenever you want.”

Smiling, I pushed my curtain back and left the booth. I stepped into the green twilight of our never-dark night, Tantalina’s rings sweeping across the sky.

I skipped home.




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He let me in the back door of the church on a Tuesday. We’d found a loophole. Vampires couldn’t be hurt if they were invited into a house and that included a house of the Lord.

This had never crossed the mind of my sisters and brothers. Churches had been off limits for as long as there had been vampires. To go near one was to start smoking and fissuring. To actually go inside a church was impossible. A vampire would be ash before they got across the threshold.

Trust me to fall in love with a priest.

David was a tall man with a fire in his belly for the Lord. He was lusty. He preached with passion and commitment. He used fear and love in a good cop/bad cop routine with his parish to entertain them while keeping their faith in God Above at an all time high.

I remember I’d met him at a late-night supermarket while I was looking for victims. I was wearing my red dress. It usually worked. Lonely bachelors out fending for themselves that wouldn’t be missed for days tried out clumsy routines on me that lead to their deaths.

I had been a dancer in 1836 in Brussels when I had been taken. My body was taut and young for eternity. Men came to me, drawn with trance-like smiles. My life was easy. The feminine sighs these men released at death made it seem like I was doing them a favour.

I had felt the heat of David’s stare from across the entire width of the store. His lust made me turn my head. His fire was something I hadn’t sensed for decades. Mortals had so much power sometimes. Occasionally one would come along that outstripped the rest of them like a race car passing a jogger. This was such a man.

If he had not been a priest, he would have been another Hitler. He channeled the raging torrent of his passion through the Lord.

I walked up to him slowly and touched his shoulder. My hand caught fire. I ran out into the night screaming, bewildered and in pain for the first time in years.

He was there the next night with a smile on his face and curiousity making his features sparkle.

We bought long rubber gloves and condoms there in the supermarket. We used up the condoms and burned through the gloves up against a dumpster near the train tracks that night.

Two nights later, I killed a homeless man in front of him. I passed the warm blood from my mouth to David’s without touching his lips.

Wanting to bring him close and not being able to was intoxicating to me. I think that my own thrill at this predicament was mirrored in his passion; I could not be saved. He was not committing a sin by being with me. I became his outlet for an entire life of restrained sexual passion.

I would heat up where he brought his face and hands close. His hips would rake the insides of my thighs like coals. His breath gave me sunburns.

Every evening, I'd wake up brand new and eager for more.

He’d trace burn-scar graffiti in my back with his fingernails. I’d scream my love for him through tears I had long since thought I'd lost the capability to shed.

He invited me into the church a week later. We’d been using it as our late-night rendezvous ever since.

We’d fuck under Jesus and the smoke from both our skins would blacken His feet.

One night we’ll go too far and hold each other close until we die in flames.




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