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Apr. 6, 2007 The Third Floors In the darkness of the streets there was a quiet, and the old houses stood proudly, but not with the wrong kind of pride, not with the kind of pride that the Bible speaks of. There, spaces in between enveloped in darkness, and by the handsome porches some soft electric lights. Those grand homes, and the busier streets out and away, where the angry world bustled, with too much strength, and too many signs and colors. Up in the sky there were wires without birds, and in the houses, someone would read, or drink tea, or be conducting some small amount of business or friendship over a telephone. Some of the houses had three stories, but not like modern houses. The top floors were small, and were something between attics and actual rooms. What was there, beyond old curtains, thick curtains? There were the history families, scrapbooks, and medals, postcards, and plates. There were faces of people that had lived and died long ago. Each one of the people was born alone, and died alone. Did they worry about the state of their souls? Did they peal grapefruits in the afternoon in summer? There were desks there, and dust. Some big heavy blankets, and other, smaller things, that old ladies had crocheted in late mornings while food cooked on stoves. Objects lasted longer than people, and what was on the third floors usually attested to that. The third floors looked on a bit, to the outside, and the darkness of the streets, but mostly those third floors looked inward, to their own contents, warm and rich and dusty, kept and waiting and outliving, lonesome and quiet and above. A Spinning Witch Every time he walked past it he thought the same things. He wondered why someone would design a house to look like a castle. It stuck out like a sore thumb, and was overdone and overbearing. Nobody ever seemed to be around there, and the place seemed to exude some kind of sadness. It was always getting to be dark when he got around there, after having taken the train and the bus, and he dreaded the walk home. On this day, he felt more anxious than he usually did, because he was later in walking past the castle house, and it was darker. He looked over and up a bit as he was going past, and there was a light on in the middle upper room. Right then a woman in the window rose and started spinning around circles so fast that she became a spinning wheel of a person and he couldn’t tell her face from her back. His heart skipped, and he looked away. He was not sure if it what he had seen had been real, or his imagination. He decided that the best thing to do would be to walk as fast as he could and not look back. He finally got home and looked back to the streets, and there was nothing there. Down by his feet there was a cat that had followed him. He went in and closed the door, trying to keep out the animal. Some clouds parted, the sky seemed to break up a bit, and rain began. The cat clawed at the screen, and called out cat sounds loudly. It was calling out because it was in heat, or calling out in some otherworldly malevolence, like some hungry ghost or a stalking shape shifter spinning witch. The Adoration There was a long lineup to receive the sacrament of reconciliation, and the one man got in the line while the other went to sit in a pew. Mass had ended and a few people still stood and talked, but soon they went out from the place, and back to their worlds. The choir finished packing up and exited also. The building became quiet, and when a soul had to cough, or sneeze, it echoed. There was nobody at or close to the Altar. As the one man waited for confession, he read from a prayer book. The other man, sitting in the pew, sat and read from a large green paperback Catholic Bible. He noticed that his back hurt, and kept adjusting the way he was sitting, kept favoring his back muscles that were not as muscular or strong as they should be for a man of his age. Sometimes, he looked up from his Bible to the surrounding area. There was a woman, in her thirties, sitting across the way, and she was praying intensely. The man liked the church, and liked this time, because it was night, and the crowds had gone away. After a long time, the one man received his confession, and came up to the other, asking him quietly if he was ready for the Adoration. The man closed his green Bible, marking his spot with a St. Joseph prayer card, and slowly got up. They began the walk to the back of the church and down the steps to the basement. When they entered the room where the Adoration was taking place, it was quieter than quiet. There was nobody there at all. At the other end of the room was the Eucharistic bread that had been taken out of the Tabernacle. There were, in front of it, two sections of small rows of blue plastic chairs, about five deep. Both men knelt down on the marble floor. The man that had the green Bible said a few prayers and then sat. The other man, the confessor, knelt there without moving for the next thirty minutes. He put his face in his hands, and stayed like that, and often tears came, but always devotion and gratitude were present. The other man stared ahead, and sometimes his eye looked at the candles. There were four groupings of candles, each with seven candles lit. Two of the rows of seven were white, and two of the rows of seven were red. There were flowers on the floor, and the room would be called more dark than light, though there were a few lights on somewhere. It was quiet, but not the quiet of a house in the middle of the night, or a vacant field, or anything like that. It was true quiet, a silence with a depth to it that was fathomless, as if to give a hint of the silence of existence before the world. The man sitting had known the silence before. It was a benediction. Everything poured out from this silence, and forms of mind, or shadows over the heart, began to fall away. Soon footsteps could be heard as an individual would come in, sit, and then, after a few minutes, get up and leave. The man kneeling got up, and sat in a chair. The other man still looked ahead. Soon the man that had been kneeling gently tapped the other on the shoulder, having reached across a makeshift aisle, and whispered, asking him if he was ready to go. The man shook his head, and slowly picked up his coat and green Bible from the chair next to him. Having gathered his things, he followed the other man out. There was an older lady sitting in one of the chairs now, in the second to last row. The Adoration would continue until midnight, but surely the room would contain a measure of sacred silence even after the candles and flowers had been taken away and the Eucharistic bread had been put back in the Tabernacle. ------------ Email Brian Michael Barbeito: Brian1750@Hotmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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