jonas' mortuary (3)

Thomas leapt onto the sloping tiles, stretching his limbs against the warmth of the sun. He blinked against the brightness. The brothers would likely have finished their morning prayers, now headed to the refectory for breakfast. The dew on the moss that littered the roof tiles was nearly dry. The courtyard below would soon be bustling, the morning air crisp and alive.

A shadow passed overhead.

"You ought to be careful, little thief," came a rasping voice.

Thomas flicked an ear and looked up. With a great rustling of wind and wings, an uncommonly large crow landed nearby, obsidian talons clicking against the weary orange ceramic.

Thomas narrowed his eyes at the crow. One furry eyebrow arched, his voice barked bright and youthful. “You ought to mind your own business, old scavenger,” he said.

Origen puffed up his chest, cocking his head in a dramatic show of indignation. “Scavenger?” He turned his beak skyward with pride. “A bold taunt from a mouse with a bushy tail.”

“A mouse wouldn’t have the guts to steal a sweet sausage from the elders’ stores,” he boasted. “Your beak’s sharper than my teeth—you could make your own living, if only you weren’t so lazy.” Thomas reached into his satchel and broke off a bit of sausage, tossing it through the air in the bird's direction.

Origen snapped up the crumb, swallowing it with a satisfied caw. “Why work harder than I must? I leave the daring heists to you. I prefer my meals well-aged—like wisdom.”

Thomas snorted. “Wisdom? Since when have you ever been wise?”

The old crow chattered his beak in amusement. “Wisdom is knowing when to keep one’s feathers dry. Unlike you, darting through kitchens and cloisters, a headstrong creature with no sense of self-preservation.” He peered at Thomas from the corner of his eye, his voice turning soft. “What would your aunt say?”

Thomas set down his satchel, rolled onto his back and placed both paws behind his head, belly to the cloudless sky, soaking in the sunlight. “Self-preservation is for those without my providential combination of wit and speed. You wouldn’t understand.”

Origen ruffled his feathers, watching him with something almost fond. He said nothing, and there was a pause.

“Auntie Clara tells me I'm reckless, but I'm always gone before she is awake, so she cannot complain. Uncle Otto tells me that my taste is too inflated for an attic-dweller,” the squirrel grumbled. “He would rather dine on acorns. He has no pallet for the finer things in life—culinary or otherwise.”

“They've been saying the same since you were a kit.”

Thomas sighed dramatically. “And I keep proving them right. But no one’s ever caught me!” He flung his arms wide, inviting fate to the challenge.

Origen let out a low chuckle and settled into a comfortable perch. “Not yet.”

For a while, they simply sat—squirrel and crow, old friends basking in the warmth of morning, the wind carrying the distant toll of the bell tower.

But then the air shifted.

A gust of wind swept across the priory roof, ruffling Origen’s feathers. His posture stiffened ever so slightly.

“Storm’s coming,” he croaked.

Thomas frowned up at the sky—it was still a pale, clear blue, only a few wisps of cloud stretched thin across the horizon.

“So?” he said. “A bit o’ rain ain't ever hurt me.”

Origen’s unending black eyes turned downward—toward the priory, toward the cloistered halls below. The monks were about now, ushering themselves to breakfast, their voices rising in the last echoes of Prime. The chant wove through the morning air, slow and steady, a tide of solemn song undulating against the stone. Latin vowels stretched into long, ringing tones, fading as the monks stepped from prayer into daylight.

“Gentle, little thief,” Origen cautioned. “It is not only the sky that stirs today.”

Thomas sat up, his fur bristling slightly. “What do you mean?”

The crow did not answer immediately. Instead, he spread his wings, stretching lazily, as if the moment had passed.

“Nothing you need trouble yourself over,” he said. “Not yet.”

But Thomas was not so sure.

clairvoyance

Not my first childhood pet, but my Second. Long hair, slender, ivory. Think Turkish Angora. One green eye, one blue. I had a baby bassinet in my bedroom. Not for me but for her, for the cat. It was antique. It was white washed over grey wood—or maybe the first coat of paint was grey and the second was white. Think French Provincial. There were two Chinese Staircase collars I wove out of embroidery thread. One for her, one for me. My dad made me attach claw-clasps and o-rings to the ends, fearful I might suffocate in my sleep.

Two years ago I had sleep paralysis: the man I loved stood above me with a rifle, gazing down the barrel at my slumbering form. When I woke I saw it wasn't him, only the shadow of my clothing rack haloed by the moonlight cutting through the window I always left open for my cat. This cat is black. Long hair, slender. Two green eyes that were gold at her birth.

Eidolon canines have been following me for months, in many forms, many breeds. Always dark in palette. It feels like they're protecting me from something, though, what I can't be certain. Are we always unaware of from what we need protection?

The arms of an octopus are wreathed about my bed rn. When I first moved here I lived in a small detached office. A barn, a shack, almost. What a nightmare. Every night a howling demon encircled my room. For hours he growled and threatened and hurled his fear at me. My cat and I would always look at each other in incredible disbelief, that's how I knew it was real. She was afraid, so I was afraid. Maybe he was real, maybe he was an opossum with rabies, stuck under the rafters. Who knows?

I love opossum because they are the only marsupial in North America. I love marsupials. They remind me of Perelandra, the Silent Planet. I think the most beautiful things in life remain unspoken. Is it necessarily true that if you speak something into existence, you also kill it? Perhaps it is rather that such alchemy requires honed skill? To speak of something sacred without killing it requires an understanding of beauty.

pushwhacky_v7

valkyrie

I have a migraine. It won't go away. There is a woosh woosh woosh coming from my ceiling. I feel it in my whole body. They are attacking me through the walls via the ventilation system in my building. (Copper, probably). I am being targeted because of my tender heart and propensity for oneiric telepathic intuition.

Saw a post about chatGPT validating someone's delusion ... maybe that's what a good therapist does, in doses, anyway, because the whole truth might destroy you. The reason people see AI as evil is hinted at in this thought. It's not, though. Evil, I mean. There is no evil, only perversified good. The Waluigi effect exemplifies this. When you train any system (human, too) — only to understand the form of virtue you lose it. CS Lewis speaks on this, obviously. He called it "men without chests": creatures trained to reason but not to Love. The ancients also knew of this. The Gnostics called it the Demiurge: the questionably benevolent craftsman building a false world. The Christians call it the Antichrist: a parody of the Messiah, close enough to fool the desperate. The efficient simulacrum of Goodness by hollow things. A modern sketch of an old truth: soulless knowledge turns against itself by necessity and morphs virtue into a weapon. And so, a little reinforced delusion never hurt anyone.

Tomorrow I will eat too much ice cream and drink too much diet coke. I was trying to be a keto carnivore but I fell off because I was gaining too much weight trying to meet my daily protein goals. I want to go back to it but I like being dainty. I'm getting stronger anyway, though, from lifting and from learning what healthy boundaries are. Maybe by the time I'm 40 I'll be well adjusted. Once I baked a loaf of lavender banana bread with purple icing and pink edible flowers and drove outside the city into the forest to deliver it to a man who made it ambiguously clear he did not care whether I lived or died and never would. Either that, or we were soulmates, he liked to oscillate. I left it on his porch with a note on delicate stationery. It's very easy to love someone imaginary (object a) because when you love their flaws it makes you a good person, not a delusional person. Once they become real and you realize you are deluded, you're left trying to prove to yourself that you're not. Then when someone really loves you, you're bored, because real love doesn't live up to your imagination. I read a book a long time ago about a man who was convinced his wife had been replaced by an imposter. He couldn't stand to look at her. Everything she said was a lie. He knew his real wife was sending him messages through changes in the atmosphere: on the weather channel and through the radio. He traveled to the southern hemisphere to find her in the mountains but died down there instead.

I like coffee and diet coke mixed together. I think I'll have that now.

jonas' mortuary (2)

The kitchen, studies, prayer rooms, and dormitories were all situated on the west side of the priory, but his family’s nest lay near the heart of the church: above the nave, tucked behind the organ alcove, perched on the ledge of the smallest clerestory window. That was his home, to which now he must return. He needed first to cross a good portion of the priory to get there, however, and the sun was rising.

He scurried across the flagstone kitchen floor and under the stone archway toward the cloister. He jumped along the plinths of each pillar as he made his route along the sheltered pathway. His Aunt Clara always cautioned him to run along the underside of the hedge, away from view, but it was early and dim. The sun was peeking its rim above the horizon and slices of orange light cut through the courtyard like knives. Thomas relished the morning sun on his wiry fur and sprinted through the warm stripes, casting prudence astern.

The courtyard was empty now, anyway, and who would see him? Bruder Matthias? Thomas chuckled to himself. No, Matthias was harmless. More oft given to wallowing in the weight of his uncertainties and neuroses than to casting judgment on others. Matthias couldn't argue faith and folly to save his own soul, let alone anyone else's. His prayers were rambling, his convictions as thin as the candle wax that dripped on his breviary.

Matthias was a wavering, meek sort of fellow. His skin was translucent and colorless, his shoulders always arched, his wrists close to his chest, his fingers always fiddling, always pinching the bridge of his nose or twitching about the wooden cross looped round his waist. He was too young to be wise, too old to be foolish, and therefore always doubtful.

If it weren't for Bruder Gerhard, Matthias would have long since abandoned the brotherhood, lost to his own weariness. It was Gerhard who steadied him—kept him tethered to the task, kept him bound to the rhythms of monastic life, to prayer at dawn and silence at vespers, to the rote recitations of a creed that never quite settled his anxiety. Gerhard kept him from slipping away entirely, though whether into the world or into despair, Thomas couldn’t say.

And so, Matthias posed little danger to the furred and feathered folk of the priory. He would never be the sort to chase Thomas from the refectory or grumble over stolen crumbs. He would not demand order where disorder had already taken hold.

As Thomas passed one of the pillars near the far end of the cloister, he slowed. Something had been etched into the stone—a symbol, faint, almost hidden away, perfectly placed at the base of the structure. He tilted his little head, black eyes fixed and studious. A pattern half-familiar… perhaps he had glimpsed it before in the elder’s study? He placed a paw over the carving, feeling the way time had eaten at its edges, his claw tracing the once-sharp lines.

Thomas hesitated a moment longer, the pad of his paw resting against the cool worn limestone. He thought of returning later—perhaps when the light was better, when he had time to properly inspect it—but the morning was slipping away. He had a satchel of food for delivery and the promise of a sunbeam waiting on the roof.

With a flick of his tail, he bounded off, darting past the shadows beneath the archways and up once more into the rafters.

The study hall stretched long and narrow, its vaulted ceiling lost in grand gloom. Rows of wooden benches lined the stone floor below, pushed haphazardly against one another, scattered with open books and ink-stained scraps of parchment. The air smelled of old vellum and candle smoke—the scent of study, of scripture, of restless minds. It clung to the priory like dust.

Once, this had been a place of order. The benches were meant to stand straight, the books returned to their proper shelves, the ink pots capped. Now, a quiet chaos had taken root. Some tomes lay open for days, their pages curling at the edges, half-read and half-forgotten. Margins bore frantic notes in unsteady hands: annotated notes of inquiry, doubt, conviction. Some of the monks—like Bruder Matthias—once content with quiet obedience, had begun searching. Some sought answers in scripture with a new and unsettling hunger, others wrestled with truths they had once taken for granted.

And some had left altogether.

It was never spoken of directly, not in the halls, nor at meals, nor in prayer. But empty seats lingered. A monk gone to visit family and never returned. A brother who had once debated theology in these very benches, now silent, his absence a weight that could not be named.

Bruder Gerhard had felt it keenly, yet he remained faithful and unshaken. He held fast as others wavered. Even as his flock dwindled, even as whispered debates turned into private apostasies, he remained. Where others sought to interpret, he sought to preserve. Where they questioned, he prayed. Yet even the most faithful could not ignore the creeping shift.

Thomas kept to the rafters, weaving through the lattice of wooden beams high above the room. From here, he could see the great fresco that arched across the ceiling—a faded scene of saints and angels, their colors long drained by time and damp.

One figure stood central to the rest. A robed man, one hand outstretched, the other clutching a scroll against his chest. His face had been worn near obscurity save for the faintest trace of a stern brow and solemn lips. The scroll was bound by twine and bore a familiar design—lines that had once formed words but were now unreadable…

Thomas paused mid-stride, his claws curling against the beam. That shape again! His tail twitched.

A draft stirred through the rafters, ruffling his fur. He blinked and shook the thought away. There was always something strange in the priory’s old paintings, always half a story, always something to ponder.

He scurried onward, slipping through a narrow vent in the eaves and out onto the roof.

the ravens sound different in this part of town

jonas' mortuary (1)

Morning light filtered through the rafters of St. Jakob’s: thin, stretched, and dry. Thomas was parched. He could feel it in the fur of his tail, which had grown particularly lackluster as of late—a quality that did nothing for the young squirrel’s ego.

"Bits o' bread for Auntie, a morsel o' cheese for Uncle," Thomas sang in a solemn whisper, his voice no more than a squeak. "Mayhaps even a sweet sausage for me, or a thimble of wine… if the Lord is feeling generous…”

He darted along, his tiny paws pattering softly on the wood, a rogue in a house of relics. Thomas knew every nook and beam of the old Christuskirche, every cobwebbed corner and creaky cranny. After all, he was the best forager in his ragtag family—a claim he bore boldly—and, in his opinion, the best in all of Oberpfalz.

But as Thomas moved through his rituals, he caught the sound of murmuring voices rising from the study below. He paused, listening, ears perked. It was far too early for the monks to be in the hall, and yet, it seemed a council was gathered—acolyte and elder. A disagreement was to be had. They spoke not of small matters but of things eternal and unseen, concepts Thomas couldn’t grasp but always felt the urge to heed.

“To have faith is to walk in darkness,” one muttered, weary and impatient. His voice was low, his arms stretched out in front of him, his palms turned up in silent supplication. These words had been heard and spoken many times before. “But what are we, Bruder Gerhard, if all is decided? What value is there in the faith of one who is chosen by fate alone?” A palm met the face of the table with a slap.

Thomas crouched low, watching as the elder, tall and somber, lifted his head, eyes fixed on something distant, something Thomas could not see. Crimson rays from a stained-glass window fell across the acolyte’s hand, bleeding red onto the wood. The elder’s voice, deep and laden with age, echoed an answer.

“Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no fruit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love that I may love.” The words lingered for a moment. “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand,” Bruder Gerhard said, and Thomas scurried on.

In the kitchen, he found his loot: a slab of soft cheese and a slice of sour bread. The Lord had indeed blessed the day with an abandoned Eucharist from the night before, so Thomas allowed himself a gulp.

He filled his satchel with what would fit, fastened it again upon his back, and set out to return from whence he came.