Stepping-board

Seminary fluid trickled from between her legs, the place where rectors and altar boys took their leisure and fun. When she was a girl, ten or eleven, she took confirmation classes at the church beside the viaduct across from the haberdasher’s, the steeple visible from the highest branch of the willow tree, a stepping-board braded into the trunk for easy climbing. Her mother sent her there thinking it would calm her down and put a stop to her stuttering, which bothered her to no end. The rector was sway-backed and tonsured, smoked cigars and had whiskey breathe and a pinkie ring that he twiddled with his thumb. He connived her into the sacristy closet, removed his surplice and collar, and forced his hand up between her thighs, the creel of whiskey and cigar smoke reddening her face, his eyes trained on the cross, the floorboards crackling beneath the weight of his desecration. From that moment on she knew that her life would be lived on the periphery, places where people with surplices and collars seldom went.