To Return Home

By the time Reverend Ames returned to Harrow’s Hollow, the town was more rust than wood, more fragmented memory than place. Weeds had burst through every crack in the roads. The windows in the chapel blinked dust instead of light. He didn’t speak to anyone when he came home. There wasn’t anyone left to speak to. His childhood home had been reduced to a place where feral animals had once raised their own young, then moved on themselves as the roots took over. The church was still standing, somehow. Warped and leaning, but upright nonetheless, more like an old man who refused to kneel, than a structure of worship. The pews were gray with age and motes of dirt. A bird’s nest clung to the pulpit like a crown and something had died under the floorboards, the smell had been strong but with the amount of time that had gone by, it too, much like his hometown, had faded, only remnants remained. Ames slept in the back room on a cot that smelled of mold and ashes. He had slept there before, on more than one occasion in his youth, and he didn’t mind the return. He lit no fire, and he used no lights. Each morning, he rose before the sun and worked until it was too dark to see. Quiet work. Lonely work. Careful and repetitive. He patched holes in the roof. Scrubbed mildew from the walls. Hauled away broken glass. Dug into the ground near the tree line with a shovel that had no handle grip. Some nights, he was still digging when the moon was high above the steeple. He dug for a week, he dug until he couldn't, his hands became a congregation of blisters, and he could no longer feel his fingers. Then, he dug some more. No one ever asked what for. Nor did he tell anyone. There was no one left to ask, and there was no one left for him to tell. 
In the chapel, he polished the brass offering plate until it caught the candlelight like a sunken coin. He mended the torn hem of his robe with fishing wire, the stitch work was clumsy but devout nonetheless. Every candle was put to use, even the stubs, blackened and too short to be of service in any other house but this one. On Holy Saturday, he wandered into the overgrown field behind the church, where the meadow spilled into a ravine long forgotten by maps. There, among nettles and milkweed, he found lilies, white and soft as breath. They smelled faintly of soap and something sour, like old rain left in a tin pail. He arranged them on the altar with hands aching from effort and memory. He watered them with his tears, unthinking, as he remembered the sound of laughter beneath a high-beamed ceiling, the shuffling of hymnals and the creak of pews filled with the living. There, he practiced his sermon in fragments, half-murmured, half-prayed, his voice small and aching as it echoed through the hollow nave.

Easter Sunday arrived quiet and cold. The morning light was the color of ash, the kind of gray that forgets spring ever existed. Reverend Ames stood behind the pulpit. His eyes were closed and his robe pressed to his frame like it still remembered the man he used to be. The sanctuary was still. No birds sang. No wind moved through the beams. No one breathed. He let the silence bloom, filling the chapel like incense. He let it fill him. Then, slowly, he opened his eyes and smiled. It was not a weak smile. Not a desperate one either. But the kind born from some unshakable joy. The joy of return. Of belonging. As if, for a moment, life had never left this place, and the hollow inside him had not been carved so deep.
“Good morning,” he said softly. There was no reply. There was no footsteps, nor coughs. There was no voice but his. He bowed his head and whispered, “He is risen.”
They sat still and attentive. Upright and dressed in their Sunday best. The townsfolk he had exhumed, his new congregation.
Their faces hung slack and collapsed by rot. Some were little more than bone in moth-eaten coats, others looked halfway to living, with dirt still clinging to their sleeves, and moss curling behind their ears. One had no face at all. The smell was sweet and wrong. Like lilies that had grown in muck and stagnant river water. “I’d like to thank you all for coming,” he said. His voice didn’t tremble. He opened his Bible and the pages fluttered and fell to the floor like brittle leaves. He smiled at his mother, who he had propped up carefully in the front row, held together by wires and dowel rods. Only scraps of skin clung to her bones, like tissue left in the rain. He smiled at his friends and at the faces of the town he once knew. At the empty eyes that watched him with perfect stillness. “It’s so good to be home,” he said, “Happy Easter everyone!”