Knox sat fumbling with his camera. Although the pinkish sliver of light outstretched by the sun carried its searing heat no more, he, and his friend from Religion class, Mary Clyde, has come up with a unanimous verdict that the shade from the parish’s boutique could spare them a couple beads of sweat. And so there they were, perched by the phantom of the store’s shadow, overlooking the premise of the hallowed ground.

A faint whisper of the slumberous afternoon gently sliced through the convent’s courtyard. Crisp leaves were carefully budged as daylight breathes its last. From behind the church’s colossal, wooden double doors, a soft tinge of melodic chants resonated as women from a couple of blocks away clustered inside for the daily praying of the Holy Rosary.

They were huddled together, facing the convent where they have suspected the priests’ secretive routine is being executed behind the establishment’s blinded windows. On their right was the church with the magnificence of its domes and aged brick walls. On their left was the Holy Sacraments building.

“What do you think are they doing there?” Mary Clyde’s childish gaze had its weight on Knox, depriving him of his focus. She gestured at the direction of the convent. “Don’t you think they just kneel about their altars and pray the whole day?” she asked. “It must be really hard for them.”

Knox shifted on his position, irk itching by his temples. “I don’t really know, Clyde,” he just answered with his voice set on a brotherly tone, pushing aside the fact that both were of the same age of 16. “Don’t you think they just sleep the whole day?” he added, a humorous tone of malice stirring about his words.  “I mean it could be very tiring, waking up early in the morning for the congregation that isn’t listening at all.”

“That sounds pretty boring.”

“I just don’t really know,” Knox defended. “All I know is that life is taking it easy on them than on us. Last Friday, on my way home from the rehearsals, I saw Father Pete down by the shops paying for their Wi-Fi Connection.” There was also this morsel of information he had uncovered from his dad, who happened to be a doctor, about one of the priests. But he thought better than to believe it, or more so, tell it to somebody.

“I’m pretty sure they’re entitled with their right to do whatever they wanted.”

“They’re supposed to be restricted by their vows, Clyde,” Knox felt a surge of heat from within his chest. “What I’m trying to say is that it’s just so unfair how life is taking it easy on them when they’re ought not to feast on that luxury.”

But before he could resume with an allotment of his knowledge about the vow of poverty, he endured the desperate throb of his heart, pulsating with a stream of blood which ever since churned with a frail pang of anxiety. He was prompted of their reason of being there.

“Whatever,” he pulled himself up to his footing. His camera was dangling heavily about his neck as he offered Mary Clyde a hand. “We are here for that short film.” His friend’s bemused glance was relieved. “The deadline’s tomorrow and everybody in class would make out of us some holy martyrs if we can’t comply in time.”

The cobbled ground had been scorched by the earliest hours of an afternoon; Knox could feel it in the soles of his ragged shoes as they trudged from across the courtyard to the West wing of the church. The spoken meditation rang in his ears a little louder here.

“Now you know what to do, am I right?” Knox’s neck was inclined, trying to match the bewildered gaze of his petite friend.

“I didn’t know they were any dialogues involved.” Mary Clyde marveled at the Toyota Hilux G parked by the alignment of rooms comprising the Holy Sacraments building. The car’s luster reflected the bleeding hue of the setting sun. Beside the vehicle was a sign written in diminishing paint saying, No Parking.

Knox snorted, giving out a specter of a laugh. He turned his attention to Mary Clyde, who was noticing just the same scenery. “No, Clyde,” he said, lifting his camera to level his one eye, the other he forced onto a quivering squint, then clicked on the capture button whilst focusing on the car. He skimmed through his gallery, and found the photo in line with all the previous shots from their short film. Knox was satisfied and caught up with Mary Clyde by the looming double doors.

“We’re making the final shot of the film- the epilogue,” he clapped a hand by Mary Clyde’s shoulder. “So you’re just going to kneel by one of the pews, act like your praying and I’m going to show off my hand while holding the cam so it’s going to look like a mysterious presence consoling you.” The girl nodded.

The women wore white veils embroidered with just the conservative pride of alluring patterns that obscured their faces: closed eyes, muttering lips. They were all in unison to the enthralling chorus of their prayers, lost in the sincerity of their devotion and the gist of their spoken words.

With most its doors closed, the interior of the church was layered with humble darkness. Light barely crept through the stained glass windows that punctuated the brick walls with the extended version of the Sorrowful Mystery. They soared high and magnificent with their colors. Fixtures drooped from the towering ceiling that arched into a dome, looking down at the pews aligned to face the splendor of the altar.

Knox was suddenly struck by an inexplicable force that aroused his conscience and for a brief moment he fumbled for his side, as if Mary Clyde had been of dust and diminished into the densely consecrated atmosphere of the parish.

He asked: “Shouldn’t we be asking for permission first?” in such startling means.

Mary Clyde agreed and with several tiny steps they were met by the bleeding of the dusk’s luminescence which barely poked along the linings of the darkening clouds. It was as if the devouring sight manifested by the Church’s interior served a portal, somehow a time machine that accelerated the churn of every clock. A lot has changed in those brief moments.

The sun-scorched courtyard was now stifled by the layering shade of the twilight. Attendants to the priests were conducting their brooms into a repetitive rustle as they swept off the dust to the rusted drainages punctured at certain locus across the cobbled space. The night was falling in, and so was their rage to finish up their job.

Perhaps the remarkable flux of all was the distinguished scenery frozen to the image of Father Dante, with his plump physique promptly clapped against the Hilux. The immature size of his feet, and his physical statistics in general, cost him the additional height of a plastic stool to rub the soapy sponge across the car’s roof.

Father Dante was one of the younger priests, a pristine addition to a bunch who was often acclaimed for his insightful ministry and effective spiritual leadership achieved through unflawed appeal to the younger ones, but nobody usually likes this when he projected this asset of his.

Knox could remember him leading the congregation with a sermon of how thou shall not indulge into gossip; thou shall not entertain, within one’s self, derisive judgments of one’s neighbor. And above this, the boy could skim through his memories clearly and recollect the snort he had subtly made upon ingesting the double standards of this sermon.

He had taken in the glory of his chore as a mild diversion; the ghost of a smile was plastered across his shaven face. He was cloaked with the casualness of a thin white shirt and loose, black trousers that stretched down to his flip-flops. Strands of his graying hair were sticking on his sweaty forehead, and his swollen nose reaching out to the air in a sinister arc. From all this, the children were almost certain that he is of middle-age as, for a matter of fact, he was out of breath.

Knox pruned the distance between them and the occupied priest. With his stride was his mental knitting of the permission he dared to ask of the man, and Mary Clyde who was biting her lip in full reluctance.

They went far enough as to feel tiny beads of lathered water landing on their skin in faint kisses. Father Dante’s husky breaths came into earshot. They stopped just where the boy could see the car’s luster reflecting its own picture of the sunset.

“Good afternoon, Father Dante,” Knox was hesitant his greetings sounded more of an inquisition. “We would like to have your permission. There is this short film we are all aiming to comply, you see, and it’s due tomorrow. Now there’s this scene that-“

“Just tell me where you’re heading at, kiddo.” Although Father Dante might have said this through gritted teeth and a muffled tone, the words were never deprived of its thunderous message that got Knox forming out the words high-strung and irritable in his mind.

The next things the boy has to say came out in stutters. “We need to take a shot of this scene where my friend here, Mary Clyde, is praying by one of the pews,” he said, cringing.

“Listen here, kid,” with a quick stroke of his face towel across his glistening face, Father Dante turned to the children with a clenched jaw. He ascended from his plastic lift and rendered himself an inch shorter than Knox.

He looked no older than Mary Clyde, with his belly protruding before him, visible through the translucence of his soaked shirt. 

But then Knox compelled himself with the words from a beloved saint- that it takes you to stoop a little more for a grasp on a little flower of which size never degraded their scent and beauty. The boy thought, with restricted humor, that he might break his back on this one.

Also, for the next few moments that Father Dante spoke, his words went off along the flailing tone of derision. Knox could feel Mary Clyde recoiling as the priest said: “Just what is this all about?”

“Jesus in contemporary times,” the boy forced out a bold sound of dexterity. “We ought to project it with our own little visual interpretation.”

“Jesus in contemporary times,” Father Dante echoed. His demeanor bespoke of unabashed disdain. “Do you even know what that means?”

“Yes-“

“Do even really know who Jesus really is?”

“What I know might be too little to make me say I do, Father,” Knox was defensive, imparting his liberated ideas and relativist way of thinking. “But then again don’t we all know too little?”

Knox could tell he was about to regret what he’d done. Father Dante’s lips delineated a scornful curve. He was drawing breaths that stunk of cigarettes and red wine. “You’re a clever young man, aren’t you?’ the priest said. “And by the looks of it you don’t even know Jesus or, at least, that’s what your behavior suggests.”

By the time Knox and Mary Clyde were able to attend to their errand and sauntered onto the enthralling chants of the women reverberating from inside the hollowed walls, Mary Clyde had thawed herself out of the ashen disposition she was petrified into just as she had perceived that Knox was down for some philosophical debate with a priest; Father Dante had resigned to his chore.

The soap he had lathered about the gloss of his prized possession had dried out sketching the notoriety of crusted white strips. The priest had to cut the children off. His bitter affirmation, although rendered vague by disdainful gestures, resonated within Knox’s mind which was clouded with constricted predicaments he would have lashed out to the two-facedness of the priest.

The boy is scrupulous of his own opinions. But as much as he channels sincere reverence to everyone’s entitlement to their own array of ideologies, the priest’s negligence violated his personal decrees. He had comprehended Father’s Dante’s detestable rant not literally; Knox never dared to confront the message that reeked of nicotine and barefoot-stomped grapes through its own words. Instead, Knox rummaged through its poetic depth- the abstraction. There was more to the priest’s tone. There was a hushed odium and a hidden obscenity. 

That was the same priest that spoke, with demanding boldness of the voice, of how we ought not to lie; that we ought not to bear personal contemptuous verdict of our neighbors. It was the same man who, with all the might of his insincerity, provoked the naivety of the people to adapt to the godly, possibly fictional, perfection among our unchangeably blemished state. He was that man, and he was the same man who infringed his own teachings.

Knox could remember it in vivid nostalgia the night when he had told his dad about catching up with Father Pete paying for his internet bills. The boy was jolted with an abysmal pang of incredulity. They don’t have wages. Knox’s father had said.

“They have a budget- a heap of it. His shock didn’t even speak for the mildness of this fact, and for a moment Knox didn’t anticipate there was anything worse than this- or at least that is what he thought- before his father sunk down by the couch in weary resignation.

His dad’s tone had been reluctant. “Father Dante,” he surmounted his disinclination. “The younger priest, he has syphilis. He came by, probably thinking none of the doctors was from where he resides.”

Knox had felt disbelief fogging his eyes in shimmering gloss.

“Are you sure it was him?” he could only ask.

“His face is something you couldn’t just forget, Knox.” His father had said. Knox agreed. “I can’t believe it. He couldn’t have just acquired it in any other way.”

Knox couldn’t believe it too.

“Damn,” his dad had scrambled to his feet, feeling the stubbles about his chin. “I don’t know if I’m ever going to look at them the same way again.”

Knox and Mary Clyde did what they ought to, occupying the same side of the church where it flaunted the radiance of its core majesty. The muttering women, for once, casted slumberous gazes at their direction through the sheer concealment of their veils, but they quickly entrapped themselves in the reverie of their prayers. They were afloat among the waves of their voices.

Since their encounter with Father Dante, the words of Knox’s dad echoed, as if his raspy, fatigued voice strolled along the marbles and scraped at their smoothness. I don’t know if I’m ever going to look at them the same way again.

Knox pursed his lips, content with the conviction to this creed. The world had been altered for him. It can be hinted by how he couldn’t extricate any sincerity from the mumbled chants of the women. Their sentiments had only been beguiling the truth; rendered monotonous and drenched in pretense.

And that is when Knox wondered if there was ever a voice to hypocrisy.

If there ever was, he ascertained, this was it.

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