The Pretty House With Nothing In It

by Sophia Hudson

Runestone, volume 7

The Pretty House With Nothing In It
by Sophia Hudson

Runestone, volume 7

The gaunt face of Jesus Christ stares down at me with smooth, empty eyes. His full lips gape as if in wonder, or perhaps disgust, and I gape back from the long, empty pew I kneel at. 

Aside from the quiet murmurs of my fellow classmates scattered throughout the otherwise empty church, there is nothing. The silence is a heavy weight on my shoulders, and as I unfold my hands for the umpteenth time to fiddle with my hair or itch my face, I wonder why the statue isn’t bleeding. 

The priest speaks in a hushed voice, but I can hear him in the confessional all the way from where I kneel. It is conspiratorial, almost, how he plucks from each of my classmates their sins, smooths over unseemly blemishes with a primer of whispered prayer.

I pretend to pray, and I can’t help but stare at the crucified statue whose skin is smooth and white. Each individual rib is revealed by the graceful spread of his long arms, split wide like eagle’s wings. His fingers are elegant and thin. Pristine white locks glide down his shoulders in slender tendrils that would put the most pampered celebrity to shame. Christ, the cover model of Calvary. There is no blood. There is no anguish on his flawless face, no regret. Jesus died beautifully, apparently.

Another of my classmates flees the confessional. The long line spanning the leftmost church wall shuffles forward, and the grim Pontius Pilate stares down from where he is painstakingly put together by colorful glass. It is the first stage of the cross: Jesus is condemned to death. He is sentenced and punished gracefully within the clean frames of thirteen other beautiful windows. The sun pools the green of his thorny crown like a halo across the shabby carpet of the church, bathing my peers in emerald. I watch my classmate kneel down at a pew nearby, and she, too, pretends to pray. Her small hands form a backwards sign of the cross, a malformed signal to something high above us that screams I have no idea what’s going on.

Jesus and I lock eyes again. He is so perfect, I think. I wonder where they hid the blood. 

In mass, the priest walks below that pretty Jesus and reads pretty things from his pretty book. Yet Jesus died, and he did so gruesomely. Another student exits the box to my left, and they are soon replaced. The confessional is quiet, and I wonder if the priest has drowned in this quiet we’ve created.

I sit there, lost in my thoughts, counting down false Hail Marys, until our teacher comes to collect us. We file out in our neat line through wide church doors that weigh more than any of us. As I step outside, I continue to think about the statue of Jesus, about the blood that they wouldn’t show, about what other truths they have hidden away with the blood.

I gaze up at empty clouds. In them, I think I can see a lonely man. The man is drained of blood, his body empty as his smile, as his white marble eyes. I wonder what he thinks of this pretty story we’ve put together for him. 

This echoing, silent house. 

What we’ve built is braced on clouds like the ones the wind plays with high above my head; they are pushed and pulled, stretched until the sun can shine through. I admire the shape of them, but even I can see that they are empty.