Member-only story
Going the Jerusalem Mile
A story for All Soul’s Day…
[This is a few days late — All Souls’ Day is November 2nd — but fiction rarely aligns with the calendar, so…]
Ten days in every year — Easter week, the solstices, All Souls’ — the canons of the cathedral have a great many chairs removed and a vast square of canvas taken up from beneath them, to reveal a maze laid out in lines of bronze and time on the stone flags of the floor there, a channel worn by centuries of barefoot and chilly faith.
I think they’re mad, entirely insane, and I have told them so. That cursed measure should be dug up and melted down, it should be ripped out and filled in, ploughed under and cemented over. That tainted bronze that marks the path should be cast into ingots and then into the sea, into the deepest trench of the deepest sea, where no man might ever see or touch it. Let it do harm to demon-fish in the darkness, I don’t care. The maze should be deleted, expunged, destroyed; beyond that, I dare not go.
No blame to the good canons, I guess, that it is not. Small lives are small concern to them, who overlook a thousand years of history in stone and height and symbol. Easter congregations flock to walk the maze, jostling each other from its concentricity; its fame draws in tourists and townsfolk with forbidden cameras and outré shoes, both tolerated for that short season…