The Infinite Starr

He was the confessional without the collar.

No stained glass. No wooden booth. No priest waiting patiently on the other side of a little brass screen.

Just a telephone that was almost always on speaker and a man who could never keep his sins inside his own mouth.

Behind closed doors, they poured out.

The late nights that disappeared into powder and sunrise. The women rented by the hour in hotels where nobody used their real names. The jobs that vanished one after another. The new girlfriends with old records. The night an eighteen-wheeler sat stranded across an intersection with an empty tank and nowhere left to pretend he was going.

There were other hungers too.

Those were spoken about differently.

Carefully.

Some truths spend their entire lives standing at the back of the throat because saying them aloud would require admitting the mirror had been right all along.

So he confessed everything to the one person he probably shouldn’t have trusted.

His best friend.

His enemy in disguise.

The man behind the pulpit.

That was the strangest part.

The preacher could stand before a room and make lies sound holy, then step outside and tear his closest friend apart with the same mouth he’d just used to speak of righteousness.

Terrible things.

Cruel things.

Things a friend should never say.

And still, the confessions continued.

Because some people mistake familiarity for loyalty.

Some mistake obsession for friendship.

And some men will return to the same knife simply because they recognize the hand holding it.

His only friend was the heathen.

Or perhaps the heathen only pretended to be one of us.

It was difficult to tell.

But some of us had been working with the moon in our backyards long before we knew there were names for such things.

Before books.

Before spells.

Before anyone told us what we were supposed to fear.

We knew enough to recognize something hungry when it entered the room.

The old stories called such things incubi.

They came at night.

Sat heavy upon the chest.

Drank from sleeping men.

And disappeared before morning, leaving their victims exhausted and strangely willing to invite them back.

This one didn’t need darkness.

Whenever something went wrong, he appeared.

Another job gone.

Another woman.

Another secret.

Another disaster requiring rescue.

There he was.

Always standing close enough to watch the fire and far enough away to swear he hadn’t lit it.

He had perfected the art of living on both sides of the fence.

Perhaps because he envied what stood on the other side.

Perhaps because some men would rather poison a thing than admit they wanted what it had.

Then one evening, the Devil came to the High Priestess’s house.

That was his mistake.

Her walls had been protected long before he crossed the threshold.

Not with anything polite people would understand.

There were things beneath the soil.

Things above the doors.

Things whispered into corners.

Things nobody with good intentions ever needed to ask about.

Still, the fool entered sacred ground.

He ate from the harvest.

Took what had not been offered.

Stole from the children.

Carried pieces of the house away as though sacred land were merely another place to take from.

Fools have always confused an unlocked door with permission.

The High Priestess said nothing.

She didn’t chase him.

Didn’t threaten him.

Didn’t demand the stolen things be returned.

She simply watched him leave.

And when the door closed, there was a key sitting on the table.

No one remembered putting it there.

Perhaps it had always been there.

Perhaps some doors only lock after the wrong person has walked through them.

The old women had a saying about people who entered protected places with dirty hands:

You leave carrying exactly what you brought.

So he left.

And life began doing what life does when the wrong guest finally exits.

The rooms became quieter.

The harvest grew back.

The children stopped losing things.

Even the air seemed to remember how to breathe.

Outside those walls, however, the two men continued their strange communion.

One confessed.

The other listened.

One lied.

The other believed.

One hated what the other possessed.

The other desperately needed someone to witness what he refused to admit about himself.

They deserved each other in the peculiar way certain people do.

Years passed.

The confessional eventually became unnecessary.

Secrets have a way of growing tired of hiding.

One man had spent years believing his appetite would remain invisible.

Now strangers could read it before he ever opened his mouth.

The other had been certain his body would forgive everything.

It didn’t.

Funny how curses work.

People imagine thunder.

Black candles.

Latin whispered backward beneath a blood moon.

Usually, it is nothing so theatrical.

Sometimes the curse is simply being left alone with yourself long enough for the harvest to come in.

The High Priestess never asked what became of either man.

She didn’t need to.

The key remained on the table.

The moon continued moving across her backyard.

And somewhere beyond the protected walls, two old friends kept passing the same cup between them, each convinced the poison belonged to the other.

The old women had been right.

You leave with what you gave.