The church door was open, flung wide by a fist of wind, and I had no temptation to enter but for
the air, frore and heavy.
The deer stood at the altar, his antler velvet hanging in cascades as though he were falling, piece by
piece, to the floor to pray.
He surveyed the brickwork forest.
His pedicles, melted wax at the base of a candle, his antlers, bony hands grasping to understand what
this place was and how he came to be here.
The velvet on his head, his blood seeking earth, each drop an autumn leaf, trees gambling on
spring’s eventual arrival.
I was quieter in that church than in the moments of sloth when the good fail to act.
Sloth is not a lazy Sunday morning sprawl, it is when grace is rejected with a whimper of
indifference.
The stag did not see me standing by the pool of Holy water, unrippled, breathless, staring.
Oh my God I believed in nothing before this altar of antlers, cerviadaeus preacher,
hallucination or not.
This moment, the full strike of ripe apples falling under their own weight, the cadence of
shedding, I was quieter than the gravestones, my lookouts, peering through the untrimmed
grass.
I had never been quieter.
Not at the Sunday dinner table —laden with food that fed us till we ached— while my aunt recited
her rhythmic thanks, a memorandum I knew by heart though my mouth had not conceived a
prayer since I was a child at church on Christmas Eve only for the Christingle
I was given to hold.
The tangerine, the world; a red ribbon, the blood of Christ; four raisins, skewered on cocktail sticks,
the four seasons; foil for the nails of the crucifixion; a candle, Him, the light of the world.
One section consumed for the juice, the rest too pulpy, my fingers too sticky.
The raisins I would pull from their skewers, drop them in the darkness as we walked home, a
breadcrumb trail I had no plans to follow.
M. J. Arlett is an MFA candidate at Florida International University where she is the nonfiction editor for Gulf Stream Magazine. She was born in the UK, spent several years in Spain and now lives in Miami. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Poet Lore, Mud Season Review, The Boiler Journal and elsewhere.
–Background & Foreground Photography by Jon Damaschke