Alone in the rectory, on his cot at night, while the sugar maple groaned and a branch struck his window—there, he nursed a private fear. That if he fell in the shower or passed in the night, no one would find him for days. 

Maybe all those years ago, the priest wasn’t scared of a violent death, just scared of dying alone. Maybe he feared he would trip a wire, hear the click, the air would go clayey with rain-threat and he would turn for someone, anyone, but he was a scout alone. He was on patrol duty while others slept, he was not wearing his helmet in this dream, always without a goddamn helmet when that click clicked, ants up to his knees, he looked at his boots, at the mud, at the wire, he gasped, he shrugged, quick like a shudder, like the flash of a photographer’s bulb. He knew the smoke would come like a burst of a dandelion and he would be thrown back, he would hear the alarm of a great hornbill, and then nothing—guns in his drums, smoke in his brain, metal in the mouth, and then his face would boil, his neck would sever, he would fall among the rhododendrons, among the cinnamon trees, he would slip into the place called nothing, called heaven, called after, and his last sight would be the sky between the boughs while mosquitos land on his skin. 

This, he never confessed.

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Ciera McElroy is the author of Atomic Family (2023), the Southern Literary Book of the Year. Atomic Family was released to critical acclaim, named a 2023 Great Group Read by the Women’s National Book Association, and was short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.