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Now it’s easy. Everything is blessed. You’re probably having a vision. You begin to gather grass. You walk to the wasteground just before the tip. Arrayed at your feet are fragments of glass. You collect them attentively. Diamond, emerald, amber. Then stones; slate, brick.

Marble for the sepulchre. Anything can make an altar, as long as it’s beautiful.

‘Agnostics,’ your dad says, ‘believe in something but they don’t call it anything.’

And if the something isn’t just in the church, it could be anywhere, you think. You dig out a ring of glass. A halo. You look through it, up at the sky, grey now, overcast. Grit blows at your legs. You see your reflection in the murk of a puddle.

‘When you die,’ you say to your dad one day after school, ‘you go through a living fire that burns away your sins.’

Your dad clears his throat.

‘My real father is my Father in Heaven,’ you say.

Your dad says nothing.


Sins are dark smudges on your soul but they go deep like bruises. The fire doesn’t singe though. It clears them. Cleans. You touch your middle. That’s where your soul is, inside. Deeper than your conscience, between your stomach and your heart. Sort of light and meaty but somehow, when you die, it flies up out of you.

You gather some more glass and try to pick up a feather but your hands are too full. Then you see him. The man. He’s on the edge of the tip, on the rim near the road. You are in the hollow, like St. Bernadette burning bandages. He is in an overcoat, alone. You straighten up slowly and start to walk, but not too fast at first. Soft slow steps. He might be no-one. A nobody with no friends on a Sunday, out for a lonely walk. He might not want anything. He might be another prophet, looking for God in the dirt. You could talk to each other. But no. It’s too late. You’ve too far to run and you’ve frightened yourself. So you take off fast and you pray. You pray as you try to run; hands gripping everything tight. Tumbling, jumbled breathlessness, urgent in your head.

Protect me oh lord I beg thee protect me oh lord I beg thee protect me oh lord I beg thee.


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