Found in a tattered parish logbook.
November 1983
Confession heard privately. Penance given: vigil and fasting.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been twelve years since my last confession.
I am not a cruel mother. I know that is not how these things are usually begun, but I need to say it first.
The children will not sleep through. They lie down and close their eyes and then it starts. Not screaming straight away. That comes later. First the sounds, like someone working their hands through wet clothes, slow and close to the ear.
They say there are things in the room that do not finish being themselves. Arms that do not know where to stop. Faces that shift when you try to look straight at them. I tell them it is bad dreams. I tell them it is the bread, because people are saying that now and it gives them something proper to blame.
But they wake with marks. Not bites. Pressures. Like fingers that were there and then were not.
I have taken the mirrors down. I have stopped the rye. I sit with them until my back aches and my eyes will not stay open. Still they wake and say the same things in the same words, even when they have not been together.
Last night my youngest said, very calm, that the thing by the door was trying to remember how many legs it was meant to have.
I struck him for saying it.
I know that was a sin.
I am confessing that I am tired, Father. That I dread the night before it comes. That sometimes when they cry I feel anger first, and fear only after.
You told me to keep vigil and say the prayers for protection, and I have done that. I will keep doing it.
But I need to ask whether penance still counts when the failing does not feel as though it began with me.
March 1996
Confession taken at a roadside stop. Penance given: sobriety and rest.
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been eight months since my last confession.
I drive nights. Long ones. I always have.
I keep myself awake with coffee, tablets, whatever does the job. You know how it is. Everyone does something. I know it is not right, but it has never caused trouble before.
I started seeing things a few weeks back. Not like the drink, not like the powder. I know what that looks like. You get flickers at the edge of your sight, shapes that jump when you blink or vanish when you turn your head. This is not that.
These stay with you.
They hold level with the cab along the verge and the ditches. Not running. Not darting in and out of the headlights. Sliding, as though something underneath is drawing them along at the same pace.
They are not whole. That is what gets me. Like they have not quite settled on what they are yet.
I tell myself it is lack of sleep. I tell myself it is the rye I used to pack, because that is what they are saying now. Bad grain, bad dreams. It makes sense if you do not look too long.
But I am not dreaming when I see them reach for the road and pull back, like they are practising.
Last night one of them stood up too far. Got the shape wrong. I felt it in my teeth, like biting foil.
I did not stop.
That is what I am confessing. I did not slow. I did not pray. I kept the speed up and watched it fold itself back into the dark.
You told me to rest. You told me to stop taking anything that keeps me awake.
I will do that. I promise I will.
But if I sleep and see them anyway, Father, I do not know what I am meant to repent of then.
Undated
It has been over forty years since I first stood in that pulpit and lost my voice halfway through.
I have not spoken of it properly since.
This is not fear. I know the difference.
What is loose now is not new. It never was. We pretend it is because that is easier.
People want rot to look like collapse. They want beams down and plaster in the aisle. It is not that. It is when things do not sit as they should. When they try to hold a shape and cannot keep it.
I have heard the same words before, in other years, under other names. The air carries it first. Then the children. Then the tired ones.
It does not rage. It does not argue.
It presses.
Bread will do for an answer. So will nerves. So will lack of sleep. They are tidy things to lay it on.
Penance is not the point.
What matters is not giving it room to practise.
I did not understand that the first time.
I do now.
That is enough set down.