Mea Maxima Culpa

gay Catholics in space argue about absolution

[content note: description of war crimes, sympathetic portrayal of a torturer, homophobia]

The first thing that Tochukwu noticed was that Mikkjal was beautiful. 

Tochukwu had never been especially motivated by beauty. He knew he was a homosexual and accepted it without concern. Celibacy had been an easy practice for him to adopt. It felt like more of a joy than a sacrifice to lay his sexuality on the altar for the Lord, to sublimate it into taking care of the flock at Our Lady of the Three Moons and the city of Kanibur and the endless, endless refugees from the war.  

He wasn’t a man given to much speech; he didn’t have the way with consolation and condemnation that the other priests did. But many of a priest’s daily duties were set down in words thousands of years old, and the Church always had more work than men to do it. And so Tochukwu began work when Skaeri’s rings caught their first morning sunlight and ended it when they were an arc, black as a cassock, across the night sky. Each day, he performed the 7am early-morning Mass and the 11pm sinner’s Mass. He gave holy unction and last rites to those too sick to notice if he spoke. He baptized babies born deformed from the chemical weapons, more and more of them every day, until the words of conditional baptism no longer made tears fall from his eyes. 

He had, through considerable work, become good with children. The traumatized ones found something about his silence comforting. He learned to keep candy in his pockets. 

The familiar words of the Mass brought Tochukwu comfort, as he hoped they brought comfort to his petitioners. But far too often, when Mikkjal was in the audience, his mind turned from thoughts of God to thoughts of Mikkjal: Mikkjal’s hair, loose and soft and so blonde it almost matched his white skin; Mikkjal’s wrists, delicate and thin as a bird’s; the LED tattoo Mikkjal had gotten in a wealthier time, and which still glowed on occasion under his shirts. 

The second thing Tochukwu noticed was, perhaps, unvirtuous to notice, related as it was to his longing to accidentally brush his fingers against Mikkjal’s palms or tongue. It was that Mikkjal never took communion. A week or two wasn’t abnormal; sometimes people had a preferred confessor, or had broken the fast before communion without thinking. A month wasn’t uncommon for the scrupulous. 

In eight months of attendance, Mikkjal didn’t once take communion. 

The third thing Tochukwu noticed was that Mikkjal was always there.

Very few people attended Mass weekly, even before the war. They had shift work, tantruming toddlers, nasty stomach flus, Sunday morning sports. Tochukwu didn’t judge and he didn’t believe God did either; to be present at the sacrifice of the Mass as often as Tochukwu was a blessing often denied to the laity. Once the war had begun, well, judgment had even less of a place.

Mikkjal came hungover; Mikkjal came drunk; Mikkjal came with his pupils blown out and his face flushed from some designer drug Tochukwu didn’t recognize because a priest who talked more ran the addiction support group. Mikkjal came in sweatpants stained in takeout; Mikkjal came in miniskirts and eyeliner; Mikkjal came in glittery articles of clothing so skimpy it was impressive they were street-legal. Mikkjal ran in frantically twenty minutes after the service began; on one memorable occasion, Mikkjal managed to catch only the recessional hymn. Mikkjal came and kept nodding off until he finally fell asleep; Mikkjal came and paced back and forth in the narthex because he couldn’t sit still. Mikkjal came with a black eye and a missing tooth; Mikkjal came with his wrists bandaged; Mikkjal came and sat in the back and puked every five minutes in a bucket he brought along. 

But, every Sunday and every holy day of obligation, Mikkjal came. 

Mikkjal never committed to the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, almost as if he were worried he’d never make it. But Thursday afternoons he was there nonetheless, kneeling before the tabernacle, Rosary in his hands. 

—

“Bless me Father, for I have sinned,” Mikkjal said. “It has been a year, six days, and I think like four hours since my last confession. These are my sins.”

Tochukwu couldn’t repress the joy in his heart, not all of which was at Mikkjal being able to participate in the Blessed Sacrament. 

“Just so you know, I’m not sorry. We need to get on the same page here.”

The wise canon lawyers and theologians of the past two thousand five hundred years had failed to address this case. Tochukwu eventually settled on, “Why are you making a confession, my child?”

“Canon law says to,” Mikkjal says. “One confession, once a year, before Easter. It says nothing about having to be sorry during your confession. I looked it up.”

Tochukwu tried to always give a verbal response to what people said in the confessional. He didn’t want to put stumbling blocks in the way of absolution. But to this he had nothing to say.  

“Okay, so,” Mikkjal said. “I have a list of sins, I wrote them down so I would remember them all, but then I left it at home. I’m going to try to say all the ones I remember and if I forget any of them then it doesn’t really matter, does it, I’m not getting forgiven. I drink too much and smoke and take drugs. I drive drunk. I self-harm. I get in fights– usually with assholes who deserve it but I’m pretty sure St. Francis of Assisi thinks you shouldn’t punch someone even if their smug face is asking for it.”

“No,” Tochukwu agreed. 

“I masturbate, I don’t look at porn with real people in it but I do look at drawings and read books and stuff. I’m bi, but don’t be a homophobe, that is not what I came here about,” Mikkjal said. “I promise you, if you start lecturing me about the teaching of the church about homosexuality, I will storm out of here.”

Tochukwu noticed and calmly set aside his feeling of joy at Mikkjal’s bisexuality. “I will not.”

“Good, because bisexuality is so not my fucking problem. I’m a virgin, actually,” Mikkjal said. “I made a promise in secondary school to wait until marriage and– I figure even if I can’t do anything else I can do that one? Does that make sense? I don’t think it makes sense.”

“It makes sense.” 

“Anyway. I do pray every day but sometimes it’s, you know, in a nightclub while I’m partying and I realize I forgot to pray today and I run off and pray a decade in the bathroom counting off the Hail Marys on my fingers, I don’t know if that’s a sin but it does kind of feel like a sin,” Mikkjal said. “I don’t eat meat on Fridays or Wednesdays. I lie– kind of a lot, honestly, I tried to remember all of the lies I told last year and put them down on the paper but I really can’t do that off by memory. People keep trying to ask whether I’m doing well, you know, and I can’t stand sympathy. There’s nothing in the world worse than sympathy.”

“I see.” Tochukwu understood. He considered his feelings a private matter and disliked when people tried to inquire about them.

“And I lie a bunch about other things just to keep my hand in.” Mikkjal talked quickly. “I dress like a slut. I sneak onto the hyperloop without paying even though I can afford it because I like the challenge. I attempted suicide a bunch of times. I self-harmed any way you could think of. I gamble the rent money–I mean, I always win, but I think that’s still a sin. I eat way too much candy.”

Tochukwu noticed the way that Mikkjal tucked suicide and self-harm between a couple of venial sins, as if shoving his dirty socks into the closet before company arrived. “Is eating too much candy a sin?”

“It’s called gluttony! Half the time I have candy for dinner because it’s the only food I can stand. St. Gregory the Great says gluttony has six daughters and all of them are also sinful, and one of them is talking too much. So you know that I am definitely a glutton.” 

Tochukwu thought that, given the state of Mikkjal’s mental health, this was less like a sin and more like an eating disorder, but it seemed unwise to press the point. “None of this seems unusually wicked, my child.”

“No,” Mikkjal said. “There’s– the big one. The reason I’m not forgiven.” 

Tochukwu made an encouraging yet nonjudgmental noise. (He’d practiced.)

Mikkjal sighed. “My sister and I were both soldiers in the war. She was Special Forces. I… was a scientist in the labs."

Tochukwu nodded. You never asked what part of the labs people worked in, not until they told you. Everyone wanted the plausible deniability that they developed medicine. 

“The chemical weapons labs, not the– I didn’t think about the people I was killing, you know? There was just always a new puzzle to solve, and I was good at solving them, and– I used to play with the mice, before I tested things on them, and I didn’t think – I’ve never been good at noticing things until they’re front of my face–”

Tochukwu recalled the malformed children, all twisted limbs and concave chests, born dead or enduring hours or days in the NICU the nurses had improvised from old deliverybots and tomato growlights. 

The Church told him what to say when he was at a loss. “Do you repent?”

“That?” Mikkjal said. “Yes. God, yes. Firm purpose of amendment and everything. The only time I do chemistry is to bread mold when the antibiotics shipments are late.”

Tochukwu made a listening noise. He didn’t know what could be worse than the weapons, and didn’t especially want to–not from anyone, particularly not from Mikkjal.

Mikkjal sighed again. “My sister died. The Imperium killed her. The Fifth Division, under Commander Chandra Caulfield. I– sort of went mad after that.”

Tochukwu had heard this story– a dozen, a hundred, soon a thousand times– and he still had no script for it. Sometimes silence was enough. Sometimes all they needed was someone to speak to who would die rather than tell another soul.

“I went AWOL and killed them.” Mikkjal hesitated. “I’m not going to lie in confession, I lie enough everywhere else. I tortured them.”

Tochukwu oughtn’t to have felt shocked. This, too, was a story he had heard; the laws of war had long since crumbled into dust, and only priests and imams and roshis tried to keep them. He knew very little about Mikkjal, and physical beauty didn’t protect a man from sin. But still Tochukwu wondered inanely if it were some kind of sick prank, though these days torture lacked the absurdity necessary for humor. Anything to keep Mikkjal someone that Tochukwu could look forward to seeing. 

“I stole chemicals from my work, and when I ran low on those I used my knife and my hands. I was very good at Anatomy and Physiology in school. I knew the theory of how to keep a person alive for a very long time. And by the time I got to Caulfield I had a lot of practice.”

Tochukwu surprised himself with the strength of his revulsion. When he had spoken to torturers in the past, they were rarely still coherent, and their illness and frailty muted his rage. Mikkjal was healthy, was alive, spoke his confession in words instead of half-nouns and broken syllables. 

Quietly, Tochukwu realized that he didn’t want to forgive Mikkjal, that God’s Mercy might be infinite but Tochukwu’s was not.

“At first I thought it’d be enough to kill the Fifth Division. But I did that, all of them except Caulfield, and I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted Caulfield to hurt as much as I did, before he died, to know what it was like to have the one you love stolen away.” Mikkjal was almost belligerent, daring Tochukwu to reject him. “His daughter was five.”

Disgust surged within Tochukwu, a physical nausea. He felt towards Mikkjal as he would towards a skittering, typhoidal cockroach. 

“Tell me, Father,” Mikkjal said, “is there a number of Hail Marys that wipes that sin clean? How many rosaries do you pray if you gleefully vivisected a child? Do they say that, in the penitentials?”

Tochukwu asked quietly, “did it satisfy you?” He had intended the question to be harsh, but something in his mouth turned it soft with compassion. 

Mikkjal looked disarmed; this conversation wasn’t going as he had expected. “The only thing I ever do is to try to anesthetize myself until it stops hurting that she’s dead.”

Tochukwu reached, as he always did in an uncertain situation, for the surety of the words of the Church. “Torture is intrinsically evil and a grave violation of the dignity of the human person. Of two persons. Tortured and torturer.”

“It’s not the same,” Mikkjal said with bitterness.

The teachings, always the same, steadied Tochukwu. “In such a situation the penitentials say to turn yourself in.”

Mikkjal laughed without humor. “Do you think I didn’t do that? I tried. The brass, they were happy about what I did. Caulfield had been a thorn in their side. I got a medal of valor and an honorable discharge and a pension.” He spat the last word. “Any time I want to come back to the army I can. They won’t court-martial me. The only thing they want is for me to do it again.”

“...oh.” The penitentials ought to have prepared him for this; they did not. 

“I can’t ask for forgiveness. I have tried. I have tried so many times.” His tone was fast, half-hysterical. 

“God can forgive all sins.”

“If you seek forgiveness,” Mikkjal said. “If you regret what you did. If you’re contrite . And I– every time I think of getting on my knees and asking God for forgiveness, I remember the pictures Caulfield took– they were all over the news, the army wanted to drum up recruitment– Caulfield made her piss on the Eucharist and eat it, it isn’t the worst thing but it’s the thing I can’t get out of my head? I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through the rest of it, the rape and the– but I can imagine, imagine the Eucharist–” Mikkjal continued too fast for Tochukwu to get a word in, even if he were inclined. “And then I think about the terror on Caulfield’s face, the first time he switched from begging me for his life to begging me for his death. I can’t regret that. He took my sister from me.”

“Imperfect contrition,” Tochukwu said, “is enough to perform the Sacrament of Confession.”

“I would be damned to Hell a thousand times,” Mikkjal said, “if it meant that Caulfield suffered as much as my sister did.”

The words hung heavy in the air. They weren’t, as you might suppose, Satan’s defiant non serviam. They were broken. 

“‘As you do to the least of my brothers, so you do to me,’” Mikkjal quoted. “What do you think Jesus thinks, if I’m willing to do this to Him and I’m not sorry?”

“Jesus loves you,” Tochukwu said, and to his bewilderment he was as certain as the sun rose. 

“I have trouble with Jesus, these days,” Mikkjal said. “Mary’s easier for me. She’s more human. I say to her, ‘Mom-’”

Tochukwu was startled and yet unsurprised that Mikkjal called Mary ‘Mom.’ Tochukwu had always seen her as the unapproachable Queen of Heaven, to be venerated and adored in her glorious distance. But Mikkjal talked to her as if she was a person. Tochukwu supposed she was. 

“I say, ‘Mom, I’m having a really bad time, and I’m not sorry,’ and I can feel her arms around me and her love. I don’t know what God thinks of me, but Mary is my mother, and mothers don’t stop loving you because you’re bad.” Mikkjal seemed to want to open up into Tochukwu’s silence. “And so I go to Mass and I pray the Rosary and I talk to her, just sort of– telling her about my day and bitching about the purity of the drugs I get and the stupid rationing policies and what’s on TV, you know, and I go to Confession once a year. Not to get anything, because– even if she puts in a good word for me I don’t expect that to mean anything. I’m going to Hell. But you don’t stop loving your mom because there’s nothing to get from it.”

“You go to Adoration every week,” Tochukwu noted.

“I like the Adoration,” Mikkjal said. “I don’t have to ask for forgiveness I don’t want or make petitions that it would be embarrassing for God to listen to. Just hanging out there in the Real Presence, you know? God is there, incarnate in front of us, Body and Blood, preparing for people to consume Him and take Him inside them. I mean, not me, but other people, you know. I’m soaking it up now, while I can. I’m not good, and I’m not trying to be good, and I don’t want to be good, but I like– sitting next to the good and thinking that, you know, in the abstract, 'good' is a nice sort of thing to be.”

Tochukwu felt an impossible desire to reach to the other side of the confessional and give Mikkjal a hug. 

“I help the refugee kids,” Mikkjal said. “That’s my job now. I work at the refugee camp. They can’t afford to pay me much, but I have the fucking pension, and I figure the money’s otherwise going to go to buy more bombs.”

“Those too,” Tochukwu said, “are the least of these. The face of God.”  

“So I do some evil, and I do some good, and it all comes out in the wash?” Mikkjal said. “Not how it works. We’re not utilitarians.”

Some other priest would have something wise to say, to show Mikkjal God’s eternal love and forgiveness, to teach him about the nature of contrition, to bring him to Christ. Tochukwu had nothing to say at all. 

“For these and all my sins,” Mikkjal said, “I wish I could ask forgiveness of God and absolution from you, Father. –You can give me a penance if you want, I’ll do it. I figure I gotta do this thing right.”

The penance stuck in Tochukwu’s throat. Mikkjal was right. There was no amount of prayers or fasting, mortification or good works, that felt like they wouldn’t be almost a blasphemy. 

Instead, he said, “May the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; may the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”

Mikkjal left without a word.

—

Confession, it seemed, had great power to return the prodigal to God, even a confession as unusual as Mikkjal’s. At any rate, Mikkjal’s name began to show up on the parish soup kitchen rota next to the phrase “dish duty.” 

The first time Tochukwu saw Mikkjal, Mikkjal moved with exaggerated casualness, almost goading Tochukwu into challenging his presence. Tochukwu said nothing. He’d always been good at situations where the correct action was silence.  

Dish duty was unpopular. The dishwasher had broken years ago. Even if the electronics needed to repair the dishwasher made it through the blockade, they went to spaceships and airships and drones. The soup kitchen provided three hundred meals a day, far more than anyone had originally intended; people ate outside and crammed close on the benches and sat on the floor. 

There were a lot of dishes.

 Mikkjal never asked for acknowledgement or approval; he never complained and he never stopped. He simply arrived, started washing the first dish, and continued, up to his elbows in soapy water, until every dish was clean. He sang to himself as he worked, mostly hymns, mostly bad, though his voice drew inspiration out of the most insipid lyrics. (The radio had stopped working, and no one had been able to find a replacement.) He never left before the job was done, even when none of the other volunteers showed and he was washing dishes until 2am. Usually they only had enough dishes for the next meal, sometimes not even that; but twice a week every dish was spotless. 

You can wash dishes drunk or high or hungover; you can wash dishes in dirty sweatpants or a miniskirt or last night’s clubwear; you can wash dishes sleep-deprived or antsy or missing a tooth. The self-harm injuries migrated to Mikkjal’s legs. He called in sick, apologetic, when he was throwing up. He still had better attendance than most volunteers, who had a tendency to drift away when they realized the soup kitchen offered less dramatically saving the souls of the fallen and more 1001 Things To Do With A Beet.

Beet stems are edible. They used– unimaginable wealth– to throw them out.

Tochukwu worried, at first, that Mikkjal would run late. Then he checked and realized that Mikkjal, no doubt with the same concern, always signed up for the Thursday shift after Adoration and the Sunday shift after Mass. 

The older women, who were most of the volunteers, were suspicious of a man who was so obviously a homosexual drug addict. But Mikkjal didn’t acknowledge their whispers, didn’t even seem to hear them, and they didn’t make a point of it. None of them wanted to wash dishes either. 

Once, one of the employees, a single mother, apologetically brought her son to work because childcare fell through. Mikkjal knelt before the boy, his expression very serious, and Tochukwu couldn’t hear what he was saying but soon the boy was laughing. The boy sat on the counter beside Mikkjal as he worked, and Tochukwu heard snippets of their conversation, Mikkjal listening intently as the boy told him about the interminable dramas of the primary-school set. From time to time Mikkjal gave the boy a piece of candy from his pockets. Afterward, the older women made insinuations about the known proclivities of homosexual men and the absence of any innocent reason for a single man to carry candy in his pockets, but a lift of Tochukwu’s eyebrow returned them to their business. 

Tochukwu had always thought Mikkjal was beautiful. But nothing was more beautiful than his hands, red and raw from spending too much time in dishwater, and the pockets that Tochukwu now saw bulged not with drugs but with the candy and coins that he gave to the street children. 

One day, Tochukwu looked at Mikkjal and felt the warm soft affectionate glow in his heart and thought, ah. So this is love. 

—

A hillside on Skaeri. By epitree on Flickr.

Skaeri had never evolved trees, and terraforming efforts outside the vertical gardens had been sacrificed to the war. So, when Tochukwu hiked, he hiked through a forest of enormous mushrooms. He rather liked it. The riotous rainbow of colors, smooth and rippled and feathery and sometimes resembling nothing so much as a brain, seemed far more exuberant than the staid greenness of trees that he’d seen in pictures. 

Tochukwu heard a whistle, and a familiar voice. “Going on a hike, Father?”

Mikkjal was sitting on top of an enormous rufflecap; the cuticle still had indentations where Mikkjal had made handholds and footholds. He was wearing a sleeveless shirt, decorated with a painting of St. Sebastian that was either homoerotically blasphemous or from the Renaissance. The halo used to have electric lights in it to make it glow, but like everything else it was now on the fritz. It blinked on and off erratically.

“Can I join you?” Mikkjal asked. “I’m thinking about taking up hiking. It’s better than clubbing, don’t you think? Fewer drugs. I guess maybe not fewer drugs. It depends on whether you eat the interesting mushrooms. But you’d be contemplating nature while eating the mushrooms, which has gotta be more wholesome than doing bliss off a girl’s ass. Not that I would ever do bliss off a girl’s ass, Father. I do it off the bathroom sink to prevent the sin of lust.”

Tochukwu found the question in that stream of words, and thought about it. His knee-jerk reaction was that his alone time was supposed to be, well, alone. But the warm glow in his heart was clear that time with Mikkjal was time alone. 

Finally, he said, “you may.”  

“Cool.” Mikkjal climbed down out of the rufflecap. 

Mikkjal was a relaxing conversational partner. Tochukwu often worried about doing his part to maintain the conversation. But Mikkjal cheerfully monologued at Tochukwu, apparently indifferent to whether Tochukwu responded or was even following. The halo on his shirt flashed on and off in a way that always seemed like it would form a pattern if you just looked at it a little longer.

Tochukwu allowed the words to flow over him: “lactate dehydrogenase” and “glycolysis” and “gel electrophoresis.” He hadn’t taken a science class since secondary school. It didn’t matter. He understood what really mattered: that Mikkjal was happy; that Mikkjal thought the universe was beautiful; that (as strange as it was) he wanted to be here.

It felt uncanny to think he was taking such pleasure from the company of a torturer, so Tochukwu didn’t think it. 

Eventually, Mikkjal said, “I need advice. Priestly mentorship. Spiritual direction.”

Tochukwu took a moment to realize the conversation had returned to a topic that made sense. “We’re hiking.”

“So? Aren’t you supposed to be available at every moment for a soul in need?”

Tochukwu shook his head. “The Holy Father has ordered every priest to have two hours of recreation weekly.”

“Out of curiosity,” Mikkjal said, “do you ever take, say, two hours and five minutes of recreation?”

“This path takes one hour and fifty-eight minutes to walk at my current walking speed. I sit for two minutes at the end.”

A grin split Mikkjal’s face in two. “You’re fantastic. Irreplaceable. This is why you’re the only possible source of spiritual direction, Father. –Look, counsel me now and you can come over to my place later. We can watch a movie, eat nachos, shoot the shit. I promise you’ll get your two hours. Maybe even two hours and fifteen minutes.”

“You aren’t here by coincidence,” Tochukwu noted.

“Your watch automatically logs all your hikes and posts them on a running website. You should probably turn it off. It’s amazing how privacy-violating the default settings on all our possessions are.”

Tochukwu glared at the innocuous object on his wrist, which he had not predicted would betray him.

“Okay. Priestly advice time. Give me the honest truth, Father,” Mikkjal said. “Straight-up. No messing around. Should I stop going to church?”

“The church is a hospital for sinners, not–”

“A museum for saints, I know.” Tochukwu flinched internally; he had once again failed at providing comfort instead of cliche. But Mikkjal didn’t sound particularly annoyed. “But you’ve got to at least be trying, right? It’s one thing if you’re trying to walk and stumbling, another thing if you’re just sitting on your ass.”

“Why do you want to go to church?” Tochukwu asked.

“I told you. Mom wants me to,” Mikkjal said. 

Tochukwu looked doubtful. 

“Look.” Mikkjal, caught up in emotion, accidentally crushed a mushroom under his foot. “Everything I do is to feel numb. Trying to fast-forward time as much as I can, until the next time I’m asleep. Except when I’m at Mass, or Adoration, or mucking out toilets at the refugee camp, or doing dishes at the soup kitchen, and it’s– I don’t know what it is. Something.”

Tochukwu nodded.

“Like, okay. The prodigal son comes back, we kill the fatted calf, all is washed away in the blood of the Lord, yay. But what if the prodigal son doesn’t think he wasted his inheritance? What if he would rather have the parties and the pig sty than neither? Can he, I don’t know, put his face up against the window to look in at what he’d have, if things were different? Like a street kid staring at the candy store?” 

“It isn’t addressed in seminary.”

Mikkjal looked up at the sun, which shimmered behind the veil of Skaeri’s rings. “At the refugee camp, I saw someone with the bluepox.” The bluepox came from Zavalite, one of the nastier chemical weapons. You didn’t see people with it often; most people exposed to Zavalite died. “And it reminded me of seeing Caulfield’s arms, covered in those oozing blue sores, and I felt happy.” Disdain dripped from Mikkjal’s words. “I mean, I also had normal person feelings, I helped her figure out which classes her kid ought to be in, I’m not that much of an asshole, but– the first thing I felt. The first thing was gratitude that I’d gotten to hurt Caulfield the way that refugee was hurt.”

“I’m not good at counseling people,” Tochukwu protested.

“Father, I didn’t spy on your watch because I didn’t know where the signup sheet for spiritual direction was. I picked you on purpose.”

Tochukwu’s stomach flipped over. 

“Don’t you hate it? That a drone can drop a payload of Prennide and Dioriclein on a city, and for the next eight months every newborn in a six-mile radius gets a conditional baptism because we can’t tell if they were born alive, and then the drone pilot can go to their priest and ask for forgiveness and do a penance and they’d get joy forever in Heaven, the same as anyone else?”

Tochukwu thought about it. “No.”

“You wouldn’t.” It wasn’t a criticism. 

“Someone is grateful for the deaths of the parents of every orphan in the camp,” Tochukwu said gently.  

“Revenge, much like children and farts, is different when it’s your own.” This time Mikkjal stomped the mushroom on purpose.

Tochukwu noticed how Mikkjal descended into crudity when he wanted someone to hate him as much as he hated himself. Instead, Tochukwu said, “You loved your sister very much.”

Mikkjal inhaled. “I did. Do.”

Tochukwu waited. He knew he could outlast Mikkjal.

“She could sing anything.” Mikkjal was wistful. “You could hum a few bars and she’d catch on and make up her own tune if she didn’t already know it. She had the most beautiful contralto. I– I haven’t been able to sing since, not anywhere except in church, it reminds me too much of her. In church I know she’s there, part of the Church Triumphant, and it’s the only way I can get to sing with her again–”

Tochukwu said, “your voice is beautiful.”

He must have let some of the warm glow in his heart slip into his tone, because Mikkjal turned and looked very carefully at Tochukwu’s face, as if searching for something. Then he stepped forward, took Tochukwu into his arms, and kissed him. 

Tochukwu was startled, too startled to push Mikkjal away. He had had inchoate ideas about the practices of homosexuals, half extrapolated from the definition of ‘sodomy’ and half learned unwillingly from anti-gay speeches he’d been unable to flee. But these ideas had nothing to do with what he was doing with Mikkjal at that moment, dry lips pressed to dry lips, the warm breath from Mikkjal’s nostrils on his cheek and the pounding of Mikkjal’s heart against his chest. It felt as ordinary as any other kind of touch, like touching the shoulder of a parishioner to comfort them, like offering sips of water to someone too weak to drink, like placing the Eucharist on a waiting communicant’s tongue.

He felt no lust. Tochukwu’s desire was so intense it took his breath away, but all he wanted was never to let Mikkjal go. 

Mikkjal pulled away but stayed in Tochukwu’s arms. “That was my first kiss,” he said, disbelieving.

Tochukwu had believed, without noticing he’d believed, that Mikkjal had kissed dozens of people at nightclubs. Tochukwu hadn’t expected to want to be special. He felt as precious as a pearl. “Mine too.”

Tochukwu tugged aside Mikkjal’s shirt to reveal the LED tattoo on his shoulder. Two snakes wrapped around a test tube: the symbol of the biochem research labs. 

“You know,” Mikkjal said impishly, “Sister Kovač back in school said kissing was only a sin if you kissed with tongue.”

Tochukwu raised an eyebrow.  

Mikkjal licked the side of Tochukwu’s face, jaw to temple. “You committed the sin of lust!”

Tochukwu smiled slightly. He trusted that Mikkjal would know how much was contained within that twitch of his lips. 

Mikkjal licked Tochukwu’s cheekbone; he was almost laughing too hard to be able to stick out his tongue. “Unchastity!” Tochukwu’s eyebrow, his chin, the apple of his cheeks. “Unchastity! Unchastity! Unchastity!” 

Mikkjal collapsed to the ground in shrieks of laughter. Tochukwu followed, feeling slightly drunk. Mikkjal arranged himself in Tochukwu’s arms  to his own satisfaction, then licked Tochukwu’s nose like an ice cream cone. 

“Unchastity?” Tochukwu tried, nipping at a bit of Mikkjal’s hair.

“You’ve wound up corrupted into the sins of the flesh by an unbeliever!” Mikkjal said, delighted. “Don’t they warn you against that in seminary?”

“Now and then.”

Skaeri’s ring, pale like milk, arced across the south part of the sky. Mikkjal plucked the leaf of a fern–Skaeri had no flowers– and wound it around his fingers. St. Sebastian’s halo shone. Tochukwu contemplated the laugh lines at the corners of Mikkjal’s eyes, which would one day (God willing) deepen to wrinkles. 

Mikkjal pushed himself up on his elbow and kissed Tochukwu again. Tochukwu tended to find touch overwhelming, outside of the grounding ritual of the sacraments. But lying here, his body against Mikkjal’s, Mikkjal’s closed mouth soft against his, breathing in Mikkjal’s exhalations like at any moment they would become one, Tochukwu felt nothing but safe and home. 

“Do you understand why the Catholic Church is against homosexuality?” Mikkjal asked.

“The marital act has two purposes,” Tochukwu said, “the unitive and the procreative, which morally ought never to be separated–”

“No, I mean, really. Do you understand?”

Tochukwu was silent for a moment. “No.”

“Why do you stay?” Mikkjal’s tone was curious, nonjudgmental. 

Tochukwu was silent for a much longer time. He could feel Mikkjal fidgeting against him, his thigh bumping into Tochukwu’s thigh and his shoulders into Tochukwu’s chest. 

“The Eucharist,” he said finally. 

“...yeah.”

Tochukwu fumbled for an explanation. “Catholicism is embodied. We eat God, we speak love with our bodies, we–” He fell silent, suddenly conscious of how close his body was to Mikkjal’s, of what truth his body was speaking.

Mikkjal wrapped his arms tightly around Tochukwu.

“‘In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven,’” Tochukwu quoted. “Earthly sexuality points to something greater. Union. Beauty. Creation, as God creates.” This was private, something he had never said before. “In the last days, I think, my sexuality and a heterosexual’s will both be purified, and then they will be the same.”

“But I won’t be there,” Mikkjal said.

Tochukwu rested his forehead against Mikkjal’s.

“You’ll be there,” Mikkjal said, “and my sister. But not me.”

“You think your sister is in Heaven?”

Mikkjal grinned sharply. “Well, she did wear a brown scapular. ‘Whosoever Dies Wearing This Scapular Shall Not Suffer Eternal Fire–’”

Tochukwu surprised himself with a laugh.  

“They say that Hell isn’t torture, it’s just the absence of God,” Mikkjal said. “But that’s worse. Torture I understand. Caulfield tortured my sister, so I want him tortured for eternity. I tortured Caulfield, so God wants me tortured for eternity. It’s justice. But the idea that He would– leave me–that someday the prodigal won’t be able to return, won’t even be able to press his nose against the glass to see what he lost–”

It occurred to Tochukwu that, in a certain sense, Mikkjal was a better Catholic than he was. Tochukwu was not at all sure that he would still love God if he had lost all hope of Heaven.

“I only feel happy when I’m with God, praying or doing the, the fucking corporal works of mercy– and someday that’s all just going to be– gone– and if I could just say I’m sorry I could keep it but– but I can’t, I’m not sorry–”

Tochukwu felt a miracle of words come to his lips.

“One time I gave last rites to a soldier, one who was more– present– than most I serve in this fashion.” He considered what he could say, given the seal of the confessional, then continued, “She did great cruelties. She asked me how God could forgive her, could love her, knowing what she did. God guided me to see her locket. I asked her what was inside. She said it was a picture of her son. I asked her if there was anything her son could do that would make her stop forgiving him and loving him. She said, no, of course not. I said–God has a picture of you in a locket around His neck.”

Mikkjal stared at the fern in his hands.

“God has a picture of you in a locket around His neck, Mikkjal.” Tochukwu tucked a stray bit of Mikkjal’s hair behind his ear. “It isn’t permitted to believe that everyone goes to Heaven. That is the heresy of universalism. But it is permitted, I think, to hope.”

Mikkjal said quietly, “I miss the Eucharist.”

Tochukwu stayed silent, as if he were in the presence of a sacred thing. Then he reached into his pocket and gave Mikkjal a piece of candy.

Thanks to Sheila, Lindsey, Nika, and Eric for their feedback on drafts of this story. Thanks to hearts for inspiring the original idea. All mistakes about Catholic theology are my own.