This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue of cc&d (v225) (the October 2011 Issue, You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:						This is also in this 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback “Up In Smoke” Order this 6" x 9" ISBN# book:

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Ceremony

Rex Sexton

    She wears a gossamer gown and a tiara of stars. The stone walls flicker with torchlight. Incense burns. She is nailed to a cross. Pain stabs through her palms. Her spiked feet quiver together. Phantoms sit beneath her in the grottos of the dark.
    “For your hands are defiled with blood.” A dark voice below her echoes, as rivulets of blood trickle from her wounds, “and your fingers with iniquity. Your lips have spoken lies.
    And your tongue mutters wickedness. You live in the dark like the dead. And you weave a spider’s web.”
    She sighs, shifts, struggles again. Her body feels shapeless. Everything is like hell. In the cavern below her, ghoulish depictions of herself, lighted by candles, appear in each stained glass window. In them her alabaster skin looks like a crude, pastel rendering done with coarse, grainy chalk. Her red hair is witchy, like a tangle of wildfire, storm tossed.
    “Arise! Shine!” The dark voice thunders. “For the light has come!”
    The phantoms lift their dead eyes and glare at her. She sees her mother and father among them, her siblings, relatives, neighbors and friends. She can tell by their expressions they are trapped as she is, captives of Satan. Wide doors fly open. Sunlight floods the church.
    The white pall becomes a blizzard. She falls from the cross into a nether land, tries to run. Earth, wind, sky are one: ghost veils whirling in a winter storm. “Here comes the bride,” the winter whispers, “all dressed in white.” She can see nothing, as she stumbles through the snow drifts. The world is erased. Wind whipped shrouds swirl around like spirits in an holy dream.
    She is awake; her eyes are open. Half human, half shadow, Sarah rises from her bed, her troubled sleep and her troubled life like the frenzied flight of a bat dancing in her head.
    Light streams in from the window’s parted curtains. The room is thronged with ashen men and women. It is from a coffin she has risen. Her bridal gown shimmers in the bright light of the sun. But there is no bride’s radiance in her, just doom and Armageddon.
    “For as much as it is the almighty God’s ordination,” speaks a tall, pale phantom, “that flesh hath soul and thereby is empowered with a spirit, so also may spirit retain the prison of the flesh, even when it leaveth the flesh and liveth as a thing apart.”
    Dressed in the garments of the grave, still and silent, the gathering stares with blank expressions in her petrified direction.
    “And so, forever, as a thing apart,” the dark voice rumbles, “even from all thus parted, the damned must dwell in the realm of the damned, neither flesh nor spirit, neither living nor dead.”
    Sarah opens her eyes. The night is still there. In the blackness she can sense, all aroundher, the presence of the dead. “All dead, all dead.” She shudders trying to clear her head. Her old bones ache as she gropes her way across the room. The shutters bang and the rafters rock.
    Her withered reflection in the mirror, when she turns on the light, meets her with a shock.
    Sarah is awake. Her eyes are open. Through half closed eyes she sees the dead around her bed...

****

    Rain moves in from the sea. Sarah sits in her rocking chair by the garret window and watches it drizzle. A black pall is drifting across the bay. Lightening flickers in the distance.
    She can hear the wind wail and the waves crash across the reefs. Cross Cove will be hit by a hurricane. The thunder echoes with the dark voice in her dream. It is the voice of her husband.
    They were so young. She never loved him. It was a pity she had to poison him. But there was no other way. Sometimes she can sense his ghost around the old house. He had the last laugh.
    Her lover, who was a fisherman, was drowned soon after in a typhoon. “Here comes the bride.”
    Sarah sings softly to herself, as she rocks in her chair and the shutters bang. She remembers the beautiful gown she wore at her wedding. “All dressed in white.”

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