Fat Priest, A Passion
The priest, whom everybody had come to know by that most affectionate of nicknames, Fat Priest, an epithet of singularly lazy superficiality that was comprehensible to anyone within one second of laying eyes upon Fat Priest, being, to the fullest extent, both of those things: fat, and a priest, rang the sacristy bell. The bell rang out with a fat ring to proclaim the mass’s beginning. The ring rang out in a clang lacking sonority, the fat doughy hams of the priest’s fat hands rather dampening and swallowing the bell’s authoritatively resonant note. He was so fat that he couldn’t kneel in requisite supplication upon entering the sanctuary’s hallowed perimeter, and, to make matters worse, a safety pin had burst open and pinged outwards and away, in farcical and metallic adventure, from the imposing roundness around which his cassock was wrapped in an uncomfortably tight hug, ricocheting off the tabernacle and bouncing off the nose of the one server present. He walked, billowed in a cascade of white flying festoons, like so many doilies and flames of lace, the alb and stole which he had dutifully kissed between the squelch of his big fat lips before draping his fat self in them, and in cloaked culmination, over all of it, the green and gold and greengold vestments. But the cassock, because of the safety pin, slipped down as he bent pitifully, as far as his fat body could lower itself, before the tabernacle in the six-o’clockish English gloom, and when he rose again and set off round the side of the altar he slipped on the rogue white fold and fell over. He rolled with surprisingly spherical grace onto his back where his limbs writhed like those of an enormous and gilded woodlouse. A noise of plaintive vexation came out of his mouth as Fat Priest rolled around and writhed and gesticulated on his back on the floor, calling out to the apathetic congregation before him. The server who was ringing the angelus bell with learned and attentive regularity, abandoned his bell task, and helped Fat Priest onto his feet. Red-faced and glistened in the most ailed of sweats, the priest pantingly reared around the side of the altar like a maimed heifer and dropped into the seat closest to the tabernacle. He began the angelus in his exasperated voice, calling out the phrases to which the congregation responded with anxious haste, and then shot a look of pitiful help towards the server who hurried over to help the priest make the sign of the cross, he was so tired already that he couldn’t do it. The priest managed to get through the confessional rite, pronounced swift and unfelt absolution, and then fell back into his chair as the reader began reading the old testament, the psalm, and the epistle. Then the congregation broke into faltering Alleluia and the priest’s face was gripped with painful pathos. He rose to his feet, grimaced, bowed a tiny bow before the tabernacle, and began reading the gospel at the lectern. Exhaustion clogged the folds of his fat throat with phlegm and tears, and his eyes were as red as fire. His voice slurred through the words of Christ for which all attendant were upstanding. Fat Priest hadn’t written a sermon. After he’d cried out rather painfully: the gospel of the Lord! he clambered the small steps on the server’s arms to say the rest of the mass. He raised his eyes to heaven, but closed them, and he saw a great blue and gold light burst out at him with searing intensity in his mind’s eye, his only eye, because his actual eyes were closed. He reached forward for the unconsecrated host, felt its crisp disc, and elevated it, feeling some strength enter his blood-strangled arms, armbanded in fleshy jelly. The bell rang out and the priest looked through his piggy little eyes, cushioned in fat, through his raised green arms, at the congregation, and he looked at the host beginning to burn with summoned holiness (but not really) and the host looked at him. He fell forward in awkward genuflection with a splat. He did the same with the chalice of wine. He was doing well. He was doing better. As the people began saying the Agnus Dei he fractured the host as must be done, and then turned to fetch the ciborium from the curtained cupboard behind him. Around the tabernacle, angels and saints watched and looked surprised and made their mouths into strange O’s through which a heavenly music seemed to hum. A giant cross flowered out of the cupboard. Mary, blue with melancholy in her blue shawl, looked down in pity, pitifully at her dead son. Or was it at her baby son? The father looked down at the crucified son, the mother at the baby. The priest was approaching his physical limit now. He looked at the server with an ocean of flabbergasted, mortal melancholy and mouthed the words: help me, I’m about to shit myself, get a bucket! But the server didn’t understand. Communion: and the people were edging forward hesitantly, as Fat Priest shovelled the host into his mouth and washed it down with his cup of blood. He uplifted the ciborium of host in his hand to feed to the people, watching them come forward with puppy-like obedience and falling forward onto their knees at the altar-rails. Then he stopped. Shit fell from his backside. He pissed himself, the impressive festoons and folds of white got damp. He stank. Sweat wetted his hair, his cheeks gleamed, his gleaming vestments stopped gleaming as rank filthy sweat pooled outwards. He was spent, he’d had enough. He didn’t want to part with the hosts. He didn’t want to feed them to the people. So he gobbled them all up. The people were quite discouraged, perturbed, appalled. He chugged down the flavourless biscuty discs and then turned quite white. A pale angel told him to sleep, descending white clarity, touching his hair and his lips, saliently female among the faceless figures crowding around him in his clogged and fuzzy delirium. Sleep, she said. His heart burst. He was side-pierced with pain. He fell back onto the altar with a dull thud, and his arms opened wide. His hands spread like fans, and wounds in each of his hands began pooling. Blood words. His wounds were like mouths, they spoke crimson. The blood dribbled onto the floor. The altar candles got knocked over. They shuddered out with a series of about five clangs. The people, sore at the lack of host going into their mouths, bent down at the stained altar cloths beneath Fat Priest’s bleeding fat hands to try and get as much of the priest’s sordid, ailed, coronary wine as they could, drinking it, opening their mouths and trying to catch as much of his blood as they could on their tongues, like a fountain of rainwater at which they lapped. He was very dead. Turning more pale, and more stiff. The blood stopped pouring and pooling. And though his fat body remained, dropped and slumped with absolute fat heaviness on the dressed stone of the altar where he had died, Fat Priest went up to heaven. They all said so.