Urban Waite - Far Cry - Absolution

“There’s no need for that anymore,” John said. He told Drew to lower the weapon. He told Drew to cut the rope that bound her hands and feet then to step back and stand behind him.

She tried to move her arms and to get her feet beneath her, but she felt weighted in place as if she were made of stone. Her arms dangled now like the air itself had become a gel and she had dove headfirst into a world composed not of any solid conglomeration of atom or particle, but instead into a world made loose by the breaking of many different bonds.

She moved but also did not move, and afterwards, when her mind had time to catch up to the instinctual manifestations of her body, she wondered even if she had ever moved, or if, as she felt now, with John looking down upon her, whether she were even still within her body.

“I’m sure Drew told you what I’d wanted to do to you,” John said. “I’m sure he told you that I thought you might be better dead. But I think it’s better this way. I think it’s better that you know that he still loves you, even if you do not give to him the very same. That is why we marked you. That is why we brought you to be washed. And now we ask you to confess so that we can send you back as one who is marked with sin but not forgiven.”

Her head swam, and she tried to still it on her shoulders. Everything was out of focus and even as she looked up to John and Drew, she could see they had begun to almost melt from off their bones.

She turned her gaze upon the wall. The skin hung all around her. Stretched and pinned with staples like long dead butterflies beneath their case. With the drug now streaming full through her she thought there was a kind of beauty to it. A kind of beauty to the sin and the skin that hung there, that had been taken from off the sinner’s chest.

John turned and spoke to Drew. He said the next part would not be easy for a loved one. He told Drew to go back to the house, to wait. He said this all would be over as soon as he could get her to confess.

There was hesitation seen, but then acceptance, and soon Mary May was aware she was alone with John and that as the door closed behind Drew and John stepped forward into the overhead light, he became a figure of some form that was only shadow. In her eyes it was the figure of her own father she saw looking down on her.

It was her father. She was sure of it now. And when he pulled back into the light she was certain of it. His face. His eyes. The touch of his hand across her cheek. Mary May could not understand it. She watched him move away from her and walk the full length of the room, and for a long time he didn’t look away from her. It is him, she thought. It is him. Her mind was trying to make sense of it. She now felt the drug in every vein.

Her father rounded back to her. He took her hands into his, and he leaned and turned each palm upward. His eyes searching out the whorls across her skin like he meant to create a map of the maze that was her fingerprint. Now he began, his voice stopping and starting. And the voice she heard was not John’s but that of her dead father, addressing her as if to give her comfort from the afterlife. His words carefully chosen, as he spoke and paused, drawing some words long while cutting others short.

“Your hands,” her father said. “Look what you have done to them—look what you have done to them just to be here. They are bruised and cut. They have been wounded, misspent, and misused. You came to us and though you might not see it now, you came to us in order to receive your purpose. And that purpose starts with these hands. The things they might build. The creation they might make. There is so much potential in just one of these fingers. In ten there is an infinity.”

There was a showmanship to this. A resonance that was somewhere between tent revival and southern Baptist snake handling, and Mary May was trying to understand it all. She was trying to make sense of this being she saw before her, John or her father, and she could not distinguish between the two. She listened to the rise and fall of his voice, and she wondered about a thing like the afterlife and whether a soul could cross back in time of need, and what that soul in all its infinite knowledge of life after death would see in her—whether she would be declared saint or demon, burned or saved.

He looked her over. He looked up and away from her to where the skins hung pinned against the wall. And in her mind the skins were moving and there was the sound of them rustling on the wall like snakeskin, spent already from the body, artifacts that showed the secession from one state of being to the next.

She didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe it was her father. There was no coming back from death. He was gone. He was gone from here and this could not be him.

John brought his eyes back to her. The gaze he cast upon her was almost predatory, like a cougar looking out of the darkness at its prey. The realization of where she was and who she was with and the danger she was in suddenly came rushing back to her. She tried to pull away, but his hand held hers firm in his. And when she looked down it was not John’s hands she saw but her father’s once again. Aged and callused. Loved. Hands she could not hate. Hands she wanted to hold to, as if holding to them would prevent him from ever leaving her again.

And when she looked again he was caressing that hand of hers like a father might the broken hand of one of his children. “Together,” he said, his voice now tender. “Your hands in mine, in the greater fold of this family there is only warmth, only understanding, only the true gift of potential we see for you. But without that gift you are alone.”

He held her fingers for only a beat longer before he dropped them. What he said to her was true, she felt the cold of the room. She felt the decay in the air, not just skin, but dust, and loss, and solitude.

“Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you understand your sin, and the way it stands before you, blocking you from the gates of heaven?” He stood now in the light, his skin illuminated from above, her father. His hair seemed almost gossamer. She looked around now, as if coming out of some dream into the waking world, knowing the feel of danger, but not seeing it. She could see only her father and she wanted very much to go to him and to hold him and to never let him go, but she felt weighted to the floor, as if she were in the water still and he was looking down on her from the breathing world above.

He began to speak again. “This sin will govern you from waking moment to your final half-remembered dreams. But I can stop it for you. I can bring it toward the surface and then someday cut it from your skin. Will you do this willingly?” he asked, waiting now on her reply.

She looked around the room. She looked from skin to skin then back again to him. Her father had faded away but no one had taken his place, not John or Drew, or anyone. What she saw there was no longer human. He was a voice above her like that of some god speaking from atop the mountaintops many thousands of feet above. “Yes,” she said.

He seemed to reset and his voice began to roam about the room, and she was having trouble tracking it as he went. “What beautiful things are the gifts of hands. They are gifts given to all of us. They are like the tongue, or the mind, or the muscle beneath your skin. They are a tool and they have been misused. Chipped and bent, marred, even broken a time or two, but they can heal. They have this power and it is a power not to be forgotten. For all the bad those hands have done, for all the paths those hands have wrongly led you down, for all the days those hands spent in toil only to find you were building an effigy to a false prophet—those hands can still be healed. They can be tools again in the way they were first intended.”