The Thaw Altar

Drip. Drip. Drip. The sound was everywhere. It was coming from the gutters. It was coming from the trees. It was coming from the roof of the church where the gray shingles were finally showing through the white. I stood on the porch of the rectory and listened. My jaw was so tight it hurt. I could feel the pulse in my neck, a steady beat that matched the dripping water. Spring was here, but it didn't feel like a party. It felt like a leak.

I walked down the steps, my boots sinking into the soft mush. The snow wasn't white anymore. It was the color of a bruised knee—gray and blue and dirty. I looked at the old stone cross in the middle of the yard. It was leaning a little to the left, like it was tired of standing up. The water was pooling around its base, making a little lake of brown slush.

My breath was short. I felt like my collar was a hand around my throat. I reached up and pulled at it, but the plastic tab didn't budge. I walked toward the cross. The ground felt wrong. It wasn't solid. It was like walking on a giant sponge that was about to burst. I looked down at the water. It was clear in some spots, showing the gray rock beneath the mud. I saw a line. Then another. I stopped. I blinked. I thought maybe I was just tired. I haven't slept well since the winter started. The radiator in my room makes a clicking sound like someone tapping on the wall with a fingernail. I knelt down, the cold mud soaking into the knees of my black pants. I didn't care. I leaned over the pool of water.

The water was moving. It was swirling around the base of the cross, washing away the grit. And there they were. Eyes. Not real eyes with lashes and tears, but shapes carved into the stone. They were wide. They were flat. They were staring straight up at the sky. They weren't like the faces of the saints inside the church. Those faces were kind. These faces were blank. They looked like they were waiting for something. My heart started to hit my ribs. Thump. Thump. Thump. It felt like a drum. I reached out and touched the stone. It was freezing. It felt like touching a piece of meat from the freezer. The lines were deep. Someone had spent a long time making these. But they weren't supposed to be here. This church was built a hundred years ago. The records said the foundation was solid granite. They didn't say anything about eyes.

I looked at the little streams of water running away from the cross. They weren't just water anymore. In the bright spring light, they looked red. Not bright red like a strawberry. Dark red. Like the color of a scab. They looked like veins. I could see them branching out across the yard, carving little paths through the mud. It looked like the earth was a giant body and the snow was the skin. And now the skin was melting off. I felt sick. My stomach did a slow flip. I looked back at the eyes in the rock. They seemed bigger now that the water had cleared more dirt away. There were dozens of them. A whole crowd of stone people buried under my feet. I looked at the church. The white paint was peeling. The windows were dark. It looked small. It looked like a toy sitting on top of a mountain.

"Father?"

A voice made me jump. I almost fell into the mud. I turned around. It was Martha. She was eight years old and always wore a yellow raincoat that was too big for her. She was standing by the fence, holding a stick. Her boots were covered in muck. She looked at me, then at the mud, then back at me. Her face was pale. Kids in this town are always a little pale. We don't get much sun, even in the spring.

"Hey, Martha," I said. My voice sounded like I had swallowed a handful of sand.

"What are you doing?" she asked. She pointed her stick at the ground.

"Just looking at the melt," I said. I tried to stand up, but my knees felt like they were made of jelly. I stayed where I was.

"The water is loud today," she said. She walked closer. She didn't look at the cross. She looked at the little red streams. "Is it Jesus?"

I frowned. "Is what Jesus?"

"The water," she said. She poked a puddle with her stick. The stick came back tipped with red mud. "Is it Jesus crying? My mom says when the snow melts, it's like a new start. Like He's washing the world."

I looked at the water. I looked at the veins. I looked at the eyes staring up from the dark. They didn't look like they were being washed. They looked like they were waking up. They looked hungry. I felt a cold shiver go down my back, even though the sun was out.

"No," I said. The word came out too fast. Too sharp.

She looked surprised. Her eyes got big. "No?"

"It's just the dirt, Martha," I said. I forced myself to smile. It felt like my face was a mask that didn't fit right. "The red is just iron in the soil. It's science. Not... not anything else."

She didn't look like she believed me. She looked at the base of the cross. She saw them. I saw her see them. Her grip on the stick tightened. Her knuckles were white.

"Why is that man under the rock?" she asked.

"It's just a decoration," I lied. My heart was screaming at me. Liar. Liar.

"He looks scared," she whispered. She took a step back.

I looked down. The eye I was looking at didn't look scared. It looked patient. It looked like it had been there for a thousand years and could wait for a thousand more. It didn't care about the church. It didn't care about the prayers I said every morning. It was part of the ground. It was the thing the ground was made of. I realized then that the church wasn't the foundation. The church was just a blanket. And the blanket was slipping.

"Go home, Martha," I said. I didn't mean to sound mean, but I did.

"But my mom said—"

"Go home. It's too wet out here. You'll get a cold."

She didn't argue. She turned and ran. The yellow of her coat was the only bright thing in the world. I watched her go until she was just a small dot at the end of the road. Then I looked back at the cross. The water was moving faster now. The sun was getting higher. More snow was turning into soup. More eyes were appearing. They were everywhere. The whole yard was full of them. I felt like I was standing on a giant face. I felt like if I stayed still long enough, the mud would open up and swallow me. Not because I was bad. Not because of sin. Just because the earth was hungry and I was made of meat.

I reached out and grabbed the stone cross to steady myself. It felt loose. It wasn't bolted to anything. It was just sitting there. I pulled my hand back like I had been burned. The dripping sound was getting louder. It sounded like a thousand tiny clocks. Tick. Tick. Tick. Drip. Drip. Drip. I looked at the church door. I wanted to go inside. I wanted to lock the door and hide under my bed. But I knew it wouldn't help. The church was built on this. The stones of the walls were just rocks from the same field. Everything I thought was holy was just a skin over something very old and very cold.

I sat down on the bottom step of the church. My boots were ruined. My pants were soaked. I put my head in my hands. The air was getting warmer, but I couldn't stop shaking. I thought about the sermons I had planned for the spring. Sermons about flowers and life and light. They felt like jokes now. They felt like trying to fix a broken arm with a sticker. The ground beneath me wasn't coming back to life. It was just revealing what had always been there. It wasn't a rebirth. It was an uncovering. I looked at my hands. They were covered in the red mud. It looked like I had been digging a grave. Maybe I had. Maybe we all had. I sat there for a long time, watching the water run red through the gray slush, waiting for the first eye to blink.