02/23/2026
Title: Parish of Ash and Echo:
The boy was small for ten years old,
With scuffed-up shoes and manners bold,
He raced the twilight down the lane,
Through mist that tasted faintly of rain.
The chapel bell had just been rung,
A hymn half-whispered, half-unsung,
When headlights split the evening’s seam
Like some deranged, unholy dream.
The priest came swerving, red-eyed, pale,
With bourbon on his breath like hail,
His collar crooked, conscience blurred,
A shepherd strayed from his own Word.
The tires confessed with shrieking cry,
The boy looked up, asked only why,
Then silence laid him in the street
Beneath the parish’s cold retreat.
They said it tragic, said it fate,
They locked the chapel’s iron gate,
They washed the blood with holy speech
And kept the scandal out of reach.
The priest knelt long before the cross,
But prayer dissolved in choking loss;
For every psalm he tried to sound
A small fist thudded underground.
By candlelight the frames would tilt,
The crucifix would drip with guilt,
The organ groaned without a hand,
A tremor moved the altar stand.
The boy came back in rapping knocks,
In shattered glass and ticking clocks,
In whispers curling through the nave
Like breath displaced from a shallow grave.
He tugged the sheets from off the bed,
He perched beside the priestly head,
He traced the tire-marks in the dust
Across the man who’d broken trust.
No sermon soothed, no wine consoled,
The haunting fed on growing cold;
Each bottle drained became a bell
That tolled the priest’s descent to hell.
The townsfolk watched him come undone,
A shadow shrinking from the sun,
His hair gone white, his hands unclean,
His eyes fixed on what none had seen.
The vestry walls began to split,
As if the boy still ran through it,
Laughing not with childhood glee
But with a graveyard’s certainty.
At last the priest could bear no more
The knocking at his chamber door,
The rustle of a small boy’s tread
Around the vows he’d left for dead.
One dawn they found the chapel bare,
The collar folded on a chair;
No hymn remained, no saving breath—
Just echo pacing after death.
And some nights, when the road is still,
You’ll hear the tires upon the hill,
A child’s quick steps, a cleric’s plea,
Entwined in parish memory.