Our Lady of Perpetual Help

The burnt church up the street yawns to the sky, its empty windows edged in soot, its portals boarded up and slathered with graffiti, oily layers, urgent but illegible. All that can be plundered has been, all but the carapace—the hollow bell tower, the fieldstone box that once served as a nave. The tidy row of homes that line this block have tended lawns and scalloped bathtub shrines. Each front porch holds a chair where no one sits. Those who live here triple lock their doors day and night. Some mornings they step out to find a smoking car stripped to its skeleton abandoned at the curb. Most afternoons the street is still but for a mourning dove and gangs of pigeons picking through the grass. Our Lady of Perpetual Help is gray, a dead incisor in a wary smile. A crevice in her wall allows a glimpse into the chancel, where a sodden mattress and dirty blanket indicate that someone finds this place a sanctuary still, takes his rest here, held and held apart from passers by, their cruelties and their kindnesses, watched over by the night’s blind congregation, by the blank eyes of a concrete saint.