Graham Mort

He walks through a cloud of blue moths — one for each apostle — into a round tower with a peaked chapeau of tiles, the oak door rotted, wasps fierce in the vine, limestone steps hollowed. Rows of nesting boxes dark as the eyes of city whores; pigeons sleeping; a wedge of sun chiseling mica through dusky air. Now the quiet clamor of roosting birds kept for the eggs he candles in the sacristy; for the sweet meat of their breasts and dung dug into the Abbé’s onion beds; for music of a sort: the crooning of forbidden sex, blood bubbling from a man’s cut throat. The boy reaches to their stink, peering at novices working the pump below: their creamy thighs and sleek-dipped heads, their oxter hair and sideways looks; soapy laughter, stiff nipples, wide eyes, and slender hands. Now this back- plumage black as smeared soot; iridescent necks; this underwing down dense with heat and lice and suffocating dark. Their amber eyes stare incuriously as he kills, wringing out last sobs of life, lining them up neat as martyrs cut down from a cross of air.