Another nightmare.

I cannot sleep.  For the third time this month, I have awoken in the dead of night, shaking uncontrollably, the bed linens damp with sweat and clinging uncomfortably to my body.  In my dreams, I see Father Matheer’s face before me, a mass of melted, pus-ridden flesh.  The room stinks of death and decay, and the stench alone is enough to make me want to flee, but somehow, I stand fast.  Matheer’s one good eye, the eye that wasn’t seared away in the fire, slowly opens and looks at me.  Is that disappointment I see there, or is it only despair?  Does he know what I have done?  Oh, Lord…  Why now, after all these years?  I thought I had put the past behind me…

He is too weak to speak, but he continues to stare at me, with his one good brown eye, until his last ragged breath has been exhaled, and his chest moves no more.  I hear my mother’s voice somewhere behind me, sobbing a prayer, and in my periphery, Brother Antoni makes the sign of the Chalice before closing Father Matheer’s motionless eye.  It is the end of Februarius, and I am not yet fourteen years old.  Until this moment, I have never stood so close to the corpse of someone I have known.  The Father’s bowels release their contents as he expires, and suddenly the odor becomes unbearable.

As if by their own command, my legs turn and take me from that room, that horrible stench, and I find my way to the back door through the vestry.  I am barely two feet from the church when I lean over and wretch, emptying my breakfast over the shrubbery that lines the back wall.  My stomach heaves again, and with it, I feel a wave of gut-wrenching guilt.  I stand there for fully five minutes, swallowing my shame and holding back the tears that threaten to come.

When I return to the corpse, I find my father’s gaze from across the room.  His hand is resting on mother’s shoulder calmly, his face a practiced mask of composure.  But I can read the thoughts behind it… the disappointment and the disgust.  I have failed him once again, and this time would be the last.  Two weeks later, he would send me off to my uncle at Abbas Hall.

I would never see him again.