Hannah Smart

The priest of the Knoxville, IA diocese lived a life steeped in uncertainty. The fact that he could not know the internal experience of every person he encountered—that he could not be sure whether his congregants were tuned in to his homilies or zoned out or (worse yet) thinking about how shitty the homilies were—how absolutely daft and self-evident and devoid of any life-applicable advice—brought him countless nights of anguish. Did they find him embarrassing? 

 he embarrassing, up there, with his face sweat dripping all down his neck and onto his dainty little frock?¹

He often mused about how it was impossible to ever be completely positive of anything, even things he’d taken extensive measures to convince himself were true. The stove had been off when he’d left for confession, sure, but who’s to say his memory could be trusted? Who’s to say stoves couldn’t spontaneously turn themselves on and off from time to time. Maybe not all fatal house fires were caused by mere forgetfulness; after all, the only testimonies we got were from people who lived to tell the tale—it’s not like one could ask the incinerated occupants of the 

 gnarly house fires how those fires had started.

But the priest tried to keep thoughts of burning houses and turned-on, electricity-wasting lightbulbs and unclosed, house-flooding washing machines far from the forefront of his mind as he drove to the house of God for confession (yes, even priests needed their eternal souls scrubbed clean every now and then). Instead, he ran through a precise list of sins, taking care not to miss any.² And then, after confessing his transgressions and receiving his penance, he became, as he always did, mind-numbingly fixated on the bleak reality that he could not ever truly know the precise number of times he’d said each prayer

. I owe God ten “Hail Mary”s, and I think that was my tenth, but what if it was only my ninth? What if the penance is incomplete? Would I rather risk doing one too many or one too few?

 The problem had grown so immense and tortuous in recent months that he had taken to bringing a ballpoint pen and pocket-sized notepad to confession with him and marking a tally each time he said a prayer.³

The mere fact that he was susceptible to this kind of irrational thinking disturbed him—as a priest, he knew better than anyone that it was the 

that mattered, not the precise prayer count. The priest he’d confessed to probably just came up with an arbitrary multiple-of-five number after each absolution. The number of prayers assigned could have just as easily been fifteen, or five. But the fact that it was ten seemed to hold some sort of cosmic significance. And unfortunately, the priest found it impossible to either confirm or deny this notion—the mind of God was yet another piece of universe-knowledge to which he was not privy.

The complexities of the uncertainties that plagued his existence really reared their multifaceted hydra heads⁴ when he was on the opposite side of the confessional. The tightly-webbed screen between confessor and priest was there to give the confessor anonymity, but it secretly drove the priest nearly out of his mind. All he got from these people in the way of concrete bits of knowledge was their voice, a vague shadow of their figure, and their most shameful thoughts and deeds. The ripped-open souls of complete strangers. Priests were supposed to forget about a congregant’s sins as soon as the absolution was complete, but this priest didn’t. He tried to scrub his brain, sure, but he lacked Zen commitment or oneness with the Spirit or whatever the hell was required in order for True Absolution to be achieved. Perhaps no priest had ever managed this feat—he’ll never know, because asking would require him to reveal himself nakedly as the phony he was, or felt himself to be.⁵ And the knowledge that he was even more alone than he’d thought was the one certainty he didn’t need.

He made conjectures about these mystery congregants—tried to commit their shapes and voices to memory, to concentrate on the unique cadences of their speech. Occasionally he’d recognize congregants from the confessional while talking with them face-to-face after Mass or during a Friday fish fry. Something clicked when that happened—some magical, satisfying spark of Knowing—and then, at the realization that he’d broken his sacred vow of Anonymity and Forgetting and True Absolution—his pleasure would be replaced by a crippling, guilty nausea that made his insides seize up and his face go numb and cold.

It was the last week of February when she first made her presence known in his confessional, a seeming materialization out of nowhere. He had never spoken to her—he was sure of that much—but she still had an air of familiarity about her that he couldn’t quite place. She had a smoky, lilting voice that was both self-assured and mysterious. From what he could see of her figure through the screen, he could tell that her hair was long and that she was quite thin and that her perfume smelled of lilac and perhaps lavender, but that was all he was certain of.

She seemed to be really fixated on one sin. She blew through the regular ones—arguing with a coworker, lying to her boss, showing up late to work (he almost wanted to ask her what she did for work—had developed such an acute fascination with her in these few minutes alone—but this sort of prying was even more frowned upon than remembering congregants’ sins)—before she got to the last one.

“Yeah.” The priest knew how these stories typically went. She’d say they were having premature sex. She’d ask whether it was a sin, since they’re technically committed to being married and just hadn’t gotten around to organizing everything yet, and is that really all that different from having sexual relations with someone you’re married to? and he’d tell her that yes, it’s a sin, but just don’t do it again—after all, did he even really believe it himself? The whole engaged-sex-being-a-sin thing? He couldn’t think of any reason why it should be, but God’s wisdom was greater than his.

But she didn’t say anything about premarital sex. Instead she continued, “Well, he has this ex-fiancée—he was engaged briefly before me. He hadn’t talked to her in years, but they just recently began communicating again after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.”

“That’s terrible,” he replied, though he still wasn’t seeing the “sin” aspect. “During times like these, it can often be hard to believe that God still has a plan–”

“Is it bad that I’m jealous of her?” she blurted.

“Can you still forgive me if I’m going to keep doing it? If I’m going to leave this booth and kneel down in the pews and say my twelve ‘Our Father’s or whatever but all the while be thinking, 

like that. When we were long distance, he didn’t call

up to ask me how I was doing or remind me to drink water and breathe and

A long pause. “No.” Another long pause, which the priest felt no reason to fill, because the woman was clearly shaken by this discovery about herself—that she had the capacity to be jealous of a dying woman. “You probably think this is fully insane, right?”

“I don’t think—I simply absolve.” But it was a lie. He added “lying to congregant” to his mental list of things to confess the next time he was on the other side of the screen. “And hey,” the priest added. “Try to support your fiancé during this time. Losing someone you were once that close to…” He noticed that his hands were folded together more tightly than usual in his lap. “…well, it never really goes away.”

And the priest’s ruminations about this woman didn’t go away either—at least not in the days following their first encounter. He found himself examining the shapes of the congregants in the pews, trying to imagine seeing them through a confessional screen. In the call-and-response portions of the Mass (“The Lord be with you.” “And with your spirit.”), the priest tried to pick her voice out from the crowd, but it was no use—the congregation sounded like a bored, amorphous collective.

While pushing his cart through the pasta aisle at Target, a thin, long-haired lady who looked to be about twenty-eight briefly met his gaze, and for a second, he was convinced that this was the woman from the confessional. “You’re going insane,” he muttered, grabbing four packs of fettuccine.⁶ Before he entered the priesthood, his wife would do most of the shopping. The woman who had just passed him looked a bit like his wife, with her petite figure and straight brunette hair and understated makeup—perhaps that was why she had jumped out to him.

He wasn’t even sure what he expected to do if he found the confessional woman. Would he tell her he remembered her? Strike up some kind of lifelong friendship? She surely wouldn’t want more than that, what with him being a priest and her being engaged.

But as it turned out, he didn’t need to find her outside the confessional—she found him 

 it about four days after her last appearance.

“I remember you,” he blurted. He couldn’t help himself.

“I know.” He bowed his head in shame. “I know.”

“Do you tell this to everyone who shows up for repeat confession?”

She didn’t reply for a few seconds, and without her facial expression to factor in, the priest was unsure whether this was a tense or tender moment. “Anyway, same sin. Fiancé’s ex is still dying. Did you know he sent her 

“Not necessarily a romantic gesture.”

“Listen up, bucko; there are only two times a man gives a woman flowers—either because he likes her romantically or because she’s dead and he’s visiting her grave.”

“Anyway, she’ll be dead soon, at least. If he’s even telling the 

 about her being ill. Maybe he just wanted to talk to her.” Brief hesitation. “Oh, God, is that horrible? Is it a sin to wish death upon someone like that?”

The priest’s mouth had inexplicably begun twitching. He felt a bead of sweat roll down his forehead and barely miss the corner of his mouth. “Yes.”

“This whole thing has really done a number on me. I’ve become a paranoid wreck. I even snapped at my scene partner the other day, so you can add that to your ongoing list of my sins, I guess.”

At this, the priest sat up straight in his chair. “Anything I’d know you from?”

“Can’t—need to remain anonymous.”

Perhaps this was the root of the familiarity he sensed—the familiarity of seeing a C-list actor you vaguely recognize in a side role on a low-budget comedy. “Are you famous?”

Standstill. “And you’re working on a movie right now?”

“Yes. Look, does this have something to do with the confession? Because you’re boring me.”

The confessional fell silent. “Sorry,” she muttered.

“You’ll be forgiven. You’re lucky I haven’t done the absolution yet.”

And then she laughed—a full-throated, head-thrown-back (this much he could see through the screen), belly-jiggling laugh, but it seemed insincere somehow.

After he absolved her and assigned her twenty “Hail Mary”s, she said, “Thanks. I’ll probably be back.”

And as soon as he got home, the priest began rifling through his DVD collection—dozens of films, mostly purchased in the early 2000s and all lined up neatly on a shelf under his TV. They’d been there for years, collecting dust—he hadn’t touched the things since becoming a priest. He didn’t even know whether DVDs still got made or whether Blockbuster’s bankruptcy had been their death rattle. He and his wife had watched every DVD on that shelf several times. The two of them used to work through the collection in a systematic fashion, left-to-right, and when they’d finished, they’d go straight back to the one on the far left (

). His wife had loved movies with lots of explosions and blood and people getting shot in unconventional places and falling off high things.

The priest sat down in front of the TV,⁷ viewing movies into the early hours of the morning. Could she be Alicia Silverstone, the star of 

 (1995)? No, Silverstone was too old—would have to be about middle-aged by now. He imagined the woman as being in her late twenties, probably due to the whole recently-engaged thing.⁸ Was she Natalie Portman, as seen in the 

 prequels, scantily clad and stumbling her way through Lucas’s pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue? No, Portman was too soft-spoken; the confessional woman had more edge to her voice—spoke as if every sentence required immense effort and care to expel.

As the daylight’s first rays began to emerge from behind his neighbor’s house,⁹ the priest found himself getting lost in thought spirals, his sleep-deprived mind forcing him deeper and deeper into the recesses of his mind where the memories he’d tried so desperately to block out were stored.¹⁰ At times, he wasn’t sure whom he was even supposed to be looking for in the faces of the actresses—he was going off mere wisps. And beginning to contemplate the sheer quantity of uncomfortable uncertainties involved in this fact-finding process overwhelmed him—he was attempting to find a single actress within his limited stock of three dozen or so movies, only about six of which he’d have time to watch before morning Mass.

 he found himself muttering, half-delirious, with a pounding headache and a throbbing neck. 

At eight a.m., he brewed a cup of hot, black coffee, microwaved a bagel on a disposable paper plate,¹² splashed a bit of cold water on his drooping face, and headed out for morning Mass.

While he recited his homily, he found himself actually looking 

to taking confessions, though not in a happy sense—more of an anxious, unquenchable-thirst-for-knowledge sense. Like confession now represented, for him, the potential to resolve uncertainties, which were like the mental equivalent of those evil sinister itches you get in the wee hours of the morning when you’re hot with overnight sweat and it feels like with every scratch, that same itch instantaneously respawns in a different part of your body, and you almost find yourself wishing you could just dive into a pool of nails and grind off every square inch of impure or compromised skin and never have to so much as think about what it feels like to have an itch ever again.

After a few standard, unmemorable confessions, the woman was back, and at the smell of her perfume, the priest subconsciously readjusted his position in his seat, as if trying to make a postural impression despite knowing she couldn’t really see him. “You don’t need to come this frequently, you know.”

“But it seems like it’s been compulsively ramping up.”

“I think it’s got to do with my finally confronting the reality of death—it’s all my fiancé talks about these days—and how sucky it would be to, like, burn in Hell forever.”

The priest nodded. He’d had the same thought. Oftentimes, he felt like the relief he got from being Catholic—that he was not alone and that everything was part of a greater plan and that he’d see his deceased loved ones again someday—was counterbalanced by a kind of dread—that he might as well be alone with how often God speaks to him and that the plan might not have been constructed with his personal feelings and desires in mind and that his loved ones might actually be sizzling at the proverbial stake for what essentially amount to technicalities, and when he finally joins their realm of existence, he’ll either get thrown in there with them or have to somehow live comfortably in paradise with the knowledge that the ones he most wants to spend eternity with are suffering immense, unceasing pain. It all became a bit stressful and convoluted if he thought too hard about it.

The weeks passed, and the woman continued to show up and confess the same sin, and her fiancé’s goodwill toward his ex continued to ramp up, with the confessional woman each time asking the priest whether 

it’s okay to be jealous and concerned and to long for the terminally ill woman to just graciously bow out already—now that her fiancé had gotten dinner with the dying woman, now that he had accompanied her to chemotherapy, now that he had spent the night at her place. And all the while, the priest continued to methodically work through his remaining DVDs to no avail.

“What’s the movie about?” he asked her one Friday. “The one you’re working on.”

“Oh, a lot of things. Death, love, life, existence.”

“I know what you’ll do if I tell you—you’ll go look it up online and find a cast list and find an interview with every cast member and check them against my voice. The real fucked up part is that I could totally pull your leg and you’d never know.”

He swore he saw her shrug. “Or would it be acting? I am an 

“Anyway, if you want a hint, the director-slash-auteur of this particular film is infamous for one thing.”

“Ending all his films with a suicide.”

“Kind of. A spiritual suicide, of sorts. Or perhaps a rebirth. They don’t pay me to interpret it. Hey, is suicide a sin?”

The priest clicked his tongue dryly against the roof of his mouth, suddenly aware of a concerning lack of saliva. “I don’t know. Why? Are you thinking of doing it?”

? The Catechism is pretty black-and-white about it. The Bible too. 

“I just think that, uh…I mean, in order to do something like that, you kind of have to be…”

“What if you do it out of, like, spite?”

“I’m just not sure that happens all that often. I think that generally, the mindset required isn’t one that…”

When the priest got home, he frantically Googled “directors whose films end in suicide.” When the internet didn’t seem to have a consensus, he Googled “films that end in suicide.” Opened the first list that came up, clicked on each director’s name, scrolled through his or her filmography, and read each film’s plot synopsis. If he could just find someone who had directed two or three movies that fit the bill, it would be good enough for him, but for most directors, it seemed like one film was enough to get it all their suicidal ruminations out of their systems.

Though the priest hardly knew anything about the woman who haunted his confessional five days a week, he knew a lot about her fiancé and the specifics of her fiancé’s ex’s worsening medical condition. It had spread to her lymph nodes. Then it had spread to her brain. Then she had made the decision to quit chemo, because it was no longer buying her any extra time.

“How do I stop feeling so eaten up with guilt over this? Over wanting her to die?” The woman scooched her chair, which made an audible 

. It was the only time the priest had ever heard any non-vocal sound from her, and the full weight of the reality that she was an actual, physical person as opposed to a disembodied voice, and that she was sitting only a foot away from him, came as a startling jolt.  “It’s only going to get worse once she actually 

 die, because then I’ll feel happy, and the happiness will intensify the guilt because I’ll have some weird sick confirmation that I really 

 want her to die—that I wasn’t just one of those lethal-injection audience members who think they want closure but feel gross and dirty and complicit afterwards.”

“Guilt is good and natural. It’s God convicting your conscience.”

“But it’s getting downright debilitating. Like yes, God, I know I’m committing thought crime, but will you maybe let up on the conscience-convicting for like thirty minutes or so so I can fold my fucking laundry in peace?”¹³

The priest had some experience with guilt of this sort, so he decided to go completely off-book—off doctrine, so to speak. “Sometimes it helps to view yourself from a more objective vantage point.”

“Just come out of yourself. Imagine you’re watching yourself from afar. A disembodied spirit observing a living body.”

“Isn’t that a kind of lonely and detached existence?”

“Maybe. But it helps. You would know, wouldn’t you? You’re an actress.”

. I mean, sure, it sometimes serves as a welcome break from needing to be myself, but living like that all the time?” She let out a dramatic, voiced sigh that reminded him of the one his wife used to make when she wanted him to know there was something bothering her but didn’t want him to know what it was. “I think it’s cowardly. Shows a real lack of accountability. You’re shoving all your responsibility off onto some figurant husk of your real self.”

But perhaps it was easier that way—perhaps there were certain things the human brain was not prepared to 

 confront, God on your side or no. “Look, lady, this is just my off-the-record advice. Advice that most priests wouldn’t even dream of giving. You can take it or leave it. But if you take it, the key is complete detachment. You can see your thoughts, but take them as the value-neutral ponderings of some stranger. Maybe you don’t even know your own name.” He paused. “Which is…?”

“Just tell me who you are,” he pleaded. “If you want to keep coming here, you have to tell me who you are.”

“Not sure. I suppose I just can’t stand uncertainty.”

“And you’re the same way,” he insisted, his face heating up. “You come to me nearly every day to tell me about the immense guilt you feel about wishing this weak and dying woman would just hurry up and die already because you think she’s having an affair with your fiancé. But you don’t 

that. Wouldn’t it be easier if you just knew? Doesn’t it eat you up inside to watch him leave to go see her and have no idea what they’re doing? To sit idly at home unsure of whether they’re playing cards or fucking each other’s brains out? Doesn’t it kill you when you ask him whether there’s anything going on, and he says there isn’t, and you want to believe him, but some part of you knows you’ll never hear the thoughts running through his head, and when you fuck him, you can’t be sure whether he’s thinking about you or the other woman, and when he does something nice for the other woman, you can’t be sure whether, if you were in her position, he’d do the same thing for you? And you can’t know whether the guilt you feel over your place in all this is really God convicting your conscience or just a fucking obsession or a mental illness, because you can’t know whether God is even real, and if He is real, you sure as hell can’t know whether He cares about you.”

The woman didn’t say anything for a long time, and the priest couldn’t blame her—he had laid it on a bit heavy, but the words had come spilling out uncontrollably like one of those prank snakes out of a can—weeks of pent-up thoughts, all of them culminating in the revelation that she and he weren’t any different. Maybe nobody was—maybe a fear of the unknown hung like a noxious cloud over the entire human race.

Hannah Smart

Hannah Smart

Fiction

Spring 2023 - Decoy

Brief Rumination on the Unknown and the Unknowable