"That Night I Go to Confession" by Jennifer Brown
That night I go to confession at Star of the Sea Church. The priest says I have committed the sin of being unmarried. I am crying. He says, “Live and learn” from behind green velvet fabric. I recite the prayer.
That night I remember being with Theo for the first time in a hotel room. The sheets were white and clean, they covered everything. I could smell the expensive soap, its otherworldliness. It rained and out of the window we saw part of the sky and part of a building. I said, “close your eyes” when I walked to the bathroom because I didn’t want him to see me. Later he said he loves—the body. And he looked.
The priest says I still have God’s abundant mercy. The prayer says I am contrite because I detest my doing and dread the loss of heaven.
Theo held my face in his hands and put his lips on mine. The water streamed over us. I can smell our skin, ruddy and dark like the salt of the earth. I was afraid. He said if I didn’t do this it means I am selfish. This time we were in a room on another side of the hotel. From the window we saw only a building. In this room he held me in the shower. I will never know why this moment happened.
Later we lived together in another country. I moved to a place whose green lushness was almost like death. I tried to touch the sky at night, but I couldn’t. I tried to touch the sea. I wore the perfume he gave me when he told me I was brave—that I had more mana than he. I left it behind to fly home, a long time, over the ocean. It took all night. When I arrived his wife sent me an email. When I arrived my mother told me I am destitute. Then she said, “Look at me.” I looked at the floor.
The priest says _______________.
He absolves me. I say, God bless you, and leave. I walk out of church onto the street in winter at sundown, past the Catholic boys playing basketball and the sound of shoes squeaking on the court mixed with shouts, past the glazed ducks hanging in the window dripping fat into metal basins, past the wan glow of neon, and the colored string lights against the pale sky on 8th Avenue for Christmas, the sidewalk covered in chewing gum, the clapboard Victorians and their dingy stoops. And God’s emissary on Earth has not yet delivered the love of our Lord. I think of all the girls, in all the places, in all the times, and all the priests who told them they had committed a sin when a man had said this thing about love to them: Your body is my body, and my name will be your name. I think of the Mother Church right there in the little room with the bench and the curtain. The priest is sighing; he thinks a sacrament could keep a living person from being held, left, and leaving. And I go somewhere. I go downtown. I drive past the hotel. I don’t look.
Jennifer E. Brown is a writer from San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Lungfull!, The Indiana Review, Fourteen Hills, The New Orleans Review, Digital Americana, and other American literary journals. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by The Indiana Review and Short, Fast & Deadly. She holds a master's degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and is studying for a DPhil at the University of Oxford.
