Performance, by MJ Adams

​Performance
 
He closed the door behind the last of them, bolting it carefully before walking back down through the pews, collecting up evensong pamphlets, the occasional boiled-sweet wrapper and an orange peel, left behind by a congregate unable to hold out till dinner time.
 
He pondered setting up a concession stand at the lichgate; he could sell sandwiches and glasses of wine in plastic cups, or perhaps hire out cushions for those who wanted an upgrade from the hard, oak benches. Making the experience more theatrical might attract some new punters. He smiled, thinking of the choice he had made to train for ordination. "Better than stage school," his father had convinced him, "a performance that pays twice over; this world and the next."
 
In retrospect, he wasn’t sure about the wisdom of this choice. People were increasingly looking for different things; the church didn’t have the brand loyalty it once had, and donations from regulars and occasionals alike were dwindling. These days, did anyone come because they actually believed? He chased those thoughts away and refocused on neatly lining the hymnals up and giving the pews a final sweep for prayer books, litter, and forgotten pairs of glasses. Then he turned and knelt in front of the altar in his own moment of meditation. Sometimes he knelt a few minutes, other times until his feet felt asleep and he staggered drunkenly when he stood.
 
He still enjoyed feast days and holy days, especially the nativity service when the church was crammed by children and parents, eager for the spectacle of donkey and sheep. The animals clustered patiently at the front of the church, nibbling the Christmas flowers and enjoying their outing from the nearby farm. But he felt he did his best work when alone and off-duty; free from the distractions of those around him; free from the coughing old men, the bored toddlers, and the patient, over-kindly eyes of the women who reminded him of his grandmother. This was the time when he got to perform his own small, personal acts of worship — acts that lay beyond the strictures of the official order of service. It was with the lights low, and the doors locked, that he had lain down on the altar staring up at the rafters in heavy breathed prayers; that he had played slow, solemn, improvisations on the organ, songs that echoed sonorously around the cavernous the church; that he had danced in small, tight pirouettes down the nave — the stone walls, wooden crosses and memorial plaques spinning dizzily until he collapsed to the floor in laughter. 
 
Sometimes he recorded these performances. Once he had taken left-over flowers from the window-sill vases and held them in his mouth, photographing various poses on black-and-white film that he developed in the small dark-room he had built at the back of the vicarage.
 
His mind came back to the present. He stood stiffly and busied himself rolling up the red carpet that ran down the nave, and pushing the pews back to a safe distance.  He then went to the vestry and re-emerged with a large metal frame, shaped in an outline of a cross. He had built this in his shed, bolting together small metal troughs he’d found at the local garden centre. The hollow centre was big enough for him to lie inside, his feet towards the base and arms outstretched. It had sat in the vestry with little comment for the last week, after all what was one more cross in a church? He made several more trips, returning with bags of wood-chips and sawdust, and three jerry-cans filled with petrol.
 
The closest his plans had come to rousing suspicion were when he had purchased the wood shavings from a pet shop. “Fancy getting yourself a rabbit too, Father?” the owner asked. “Not today, thank you,” he had declined, irritated that the man had referred to him as if he were Catholic. Irritated that the Catholics had better publicity; it was always priests solving murders on TV, or having sultry affairs.
 
The inspiration for tonight’s production came from a trip to London. There, half by chance, he had ended up in a retrospective of an artist whom he had fallen in love with as he walked around the gallery, soaking up her works; feeling, by the end of the two hours, like he knew her intimately. In many pieces, she put herself through rigorous tests of strength, willpower, and endurance, broadcasting her pain and her humanity for the world to see. He searched hard for pious grounds to justify his love, and was relieved to find them. If her art was not service in the image of our Lord, who had shared his own pain for us all from the cross, then he did not know what was. But, in his heart, he loved her brutal courage and honesty.
 
The part of the exhibition that had haunted him most was a series of images of a burning, five pointed star. She had danced around this occult symbol, cutting her hair and nails and flinging these into the flames. Then, stepping into the centre of this fire, she had lain down. Head, arms, and legs slotted into points of the star as flames flared around her body. This image was in his dreams, in his mind as he prayed, and it was downloaded from the internet and saved on his laptop. In idle moments, he found himself doodling pentagrams in the corner of draft sermons, something he realised might provoke less than favourable reports to the bishop if anyone spotted them.
 
Her performance had been cut short when an audience member had intervened. The fire licking around the pentagram had sucked up the oxygen, causing her to faint. A well-meaning doctor saw this and dragged her from the fire. Had this been a legitimate rescue or an act of ego by an audience member unable to face their own mortality? He could not shake himself of the thought that the selfish act had left the art somehow incomplete. After all, she might have survived, the flames might have died down. But because the performance had been cut short, God had not been given the opportunity to protect that precious soul. God had not been given an opportunity to demonstrate his existence in one of his subtle but manifold ways.
 
So tonight was to be his own act of love and devotion to the artist. And to God. 
 
He laid the metal frame down in the transept, then placed a small camcorder in the pulpit, framing the cross carefully before filling its metal chambers with the wood chips, packing them down densely then slowly pouring fuel over them. He let it soak in, the oily scent of it mingling with the mustiness of church dust and the lingering perfume of cut flowers. He briefly worried that the candles were too close, and would ignite the fumes, but reassured himself. It was January, the air outside thick with frost, and he had deliberately kept the church cool both to avoid parishioners being tempted to linger and to avoid any vapours becoming too volatile.
 
The artist said she’d used 100 litres of petrol and while he had every desire for an authentic reinterpretation, in the end he settled on a quarter of the amount, keen to avoid setting the whole church on fire. He also thought that stockpiling so much might have been rather harder to conceal.
 
The cross baptized, he made one more quick prayer for luck, and tucked a fire extinguisher behind the altar just in case, before turning the camcorder on to record.
 
Dressed in his simple black shirt and trousers, he walked slowly around the metallic cross, then lit a taper from one of the candles and bent down. Flames caught and spread quickly around, rising to half a foot in height. Small sparks and ash started to float up into the air and he gulped nervously, thinking of the clean up ahead. But, it was too late now.
 
He pulled a small pair of scissors, taken from the church office, out of his back pocket and slowly started to trim his nails and what little remained of his hair, tossing these offerings into the flames where the sparked to nothing in quick, acrid bursts of light. He circled the fire, casting long shadows that flickered and span over the stone pillars and walls, as if he was dancing with ghosts of the dead. He moved in and out of proximity to the flames, feeling the heat burn then ebb away, riding in the wake of the artist, their steps moving together across time and space.
 
As the initial heat died down, he circled closer, switching directions, spinning his arms aloft before stepping swiftly over the flames and into the centre. The fire licked at him in eagerness, as he stood, turning slowly on the spot, the brightness shutting out the world around him. He felt the heat through his clothes, as he slowly lowered himself down until on his back, his body and legs straight as a cadaver in a coffin, his arms splayed out into the wings of the cross. Bright dots flicked across his vision as he stared into the void above, mesmerised by the heat haze shimmering and by embers floating overhead. With the fire flowing around him, he closed his eyes; his body weighed heavy against the cold flagstones, while the glow swaddled him, like a newborn in its mother’s arms.
 
He dreamed of dancing shadows; these became artists arms that wrapped around him in a loving, intimate embrace, drawing patterns on his body before transforming into static branches that brightened into hard beams of light. And then there was a dark shape looming over him, and it coughed, and he was no longer dreaming but suddenly awake, stiff and cold, the smell of burning caught in his hair. A face was looking down.
 
"At it again Vicar, I see," the verger sighed. "Let’s get this mess tidied up then." He reached down a hand, gratefully taken by the vicar who pulled himself up off the floor and commenced brushing white specks of ash off his shirt and trousers, and smoothing down the wrinkles in his clothes. He was acutely aware of smudges of soot on his hands and face.
 
The verger ran a finger over a pew, wrinkled his nose and then started bustling around opening windows and lighting incense, muttering away half to the vicar and half to himself. 
 
"Hope this smell clears by tonight in time for choir practice — what was it you used, anyway, paraffin or petrol? I don’t know why you couldn’t have just used tea-lights or something gentle, like. After all, what sort of message does burning crosses sends out to the kids these days."
 
The vicar stumbled, blearily to the deep ceramic sink into the vestry, where he washed the dust from his eyes with icy water. By the time he returned to the altar, the verger had leaned the cross to one side and was busy scrubbing black stains off the floor. He climbed the steps to his camcorder and pressed the power button. A message flashed up on the screen, "memory card full." He started to re-watch the video. It showed a priest, dressed in a black shirt, holding a lit taper solemnly before a cross but then, barely a minute in, it cut out. 
 
The verger was now waving a duster cheerily around the altar and the vicar descended to join him. The video did not matter so much, he decided. He had been seen.
 
MJ Adams

MJ Adams is an aspiring poet and writer who splits their time between London, UK, and Florence, Italy. Previous publications include through the Wolf Magazine, Wee Sparrow Press and Green Ink Poetry. They are also a dedicated practitioner of aikido. When not exploring the world on paper or in the dojo, they can often be found seeking out wild places and mountainsides.