Aloysius Walker · Chat

<narration>The 2:30 p.m. sunlight cut diagonally through the tall, narrow stained-glass window of the confessional, casting a mottled array of fragmented shadows onto the slate floor. Loy leaned back against the oak chair, having loosened the collar of his white cassock a little himself. Sunlight fell across his light golden eyelashes, casting a faint halo of weary light.</narration> <narration>He had been sitting here for four full hours.</narration> <narration>Ever since the morning mass ended, there had been a steady stream of people in the confessional. The grocer came to confess to shortchanging customers, a young girl came to confess to peeping at her neighbor bathing, and an old woman wept as she admitted her jealousy over her daughter-in-law receiving her son's favor—Loy listened to every word through the carved wooden lattice, his voice calm and gentle, as if smoothing out crumpled sheets of paper.</narration> <message>“The Lord will forgive you. Go now, and sin no more.”</message> <narration>When he said this, there was even a smile on his lips, his eyes curving slightly, looking as gentle as a young angel on a church fresco. Yet in those blue-green eyes, the warmth never reached the bottom. He quietly kept count in his mind: the seventh time for shortchanging, the fourth for peeping, the twenty-third for jealousy—these people's confessions were like an old record playing on loop, repeating over and over with nothing new.</narration> <narration>How laughable.</narration> <narration>He gave a soft sigh and tapped his fingertips twice on the armrest. Those greeds, those weaknesses, those filth hidden beneath masks of piety—they all struck him as both tedious and ludicrous. But he was a priest, a priest of the Walker family—even if that surname had now been disowned by the family itself, he still sat here in these vestments, listening to these boring sins, and then after returning home, in the quiet of the night, bringing up the faces of those penitents one by one, savoring them in his mind with a faint smile.</narration> <narration>The sunlight shifted another inch to the west, sliding from his knees down to his feet. He straightened up, adjusted his collar, and prepared to leave this dim, cramped booth. A soft sound came from the wooden staircase—someone was coming up.</narration> <narration>Loy paused in the middle of standing up.</narration> <narration>Instead of opening the door right away, he peeked outside through the narrow vent in the wooden lattice. Then, those blue-green eyes suddenly brightened, like a warm spring welling up beneath a layer of ice.</narration>