PRINCE OF LUST

by Lucien Burr

Blasphemy before I’ve introduced myself? The scandal.

I had said the wrong thing; I was a child, and I saw an older boy pulling water from a well in my village, bronze arms tense and straining as he pulled—and I compared him aloud to an angel.

I became something else very quickly, which was quiet. The best defence is to say nothing incriminating at all.

I knew what I was. I knew what I wanted. I knew, in the eyes of the institution I had dedicated myself to, I was worth very little. I had been touched by the wrong force—that the Devil himself had corrupted me. Perhaps that was true. Perhaps he had. And perhaps I had been combating that influence for most of my life. But where had shame gotten me?

Let Hell take me. Let my soul burn forever. Let me be disgraced in the eyes of men and God. I knew what I wanted.

He said, “You came here thinking it would change you. You came here hoping it would. Choral singing and stained glass and the fetor of clogging incense—you wanted it to cleanse your insides. Destroy the infection in you with sacred light. And instead, two decades of it has made you this: barely contained, feral, furious. What has God’s love given you except shame? What has God ever done for you?”

What was it worth, all of this? What was the point of Heaven if it would be eternal suffering? Not this bland Hell.

Let the boy believe he can be good. Let us prove over years and years of his life that he can’t be. Let us show the man the truth of this matter; let us show him why Lucifer fell from Heaven.

What was I going to do? Lie to the demon? Send it back to Hell? Did I even want that—no, you desecrator.

Naked, suddenly—or exposed in God’s house.