November’s bleak light stretched narrow in empty spaces, sieve-filtered through thin birch branches stripped clean. An antiseptic light that mapped the day in two colours: blue so pale it was a blatant white, and the unyielding grey of wet chainmail. The light moved behind high clouds stretched thin; they appeared like veils, lending the sky a brittle translucency as gusts lifted dead needles into a sleet-haze.

I’d counted every hour since last evening by the peal of the bells. Each note rang out with the clarity of shattered glass, followed by a silence that crawled on skin. Some mornings, in the hesitant pauses, I thought about a swordfish cutting through the river’s black seam. Something long, beautiful and blind. Purposeful. A thing made for piercing. It reminded me of what it meant to be a purposed man: to be sharpened by necessity, and to keep swimming until the cold itself became home. Every day for a year I had heard the bell, its single throbbing resonance cutting through the distance as regular as a tremor in the wrist. There was a medieval bell tower, covered in white obstruction lights, half a mile north of the covered narrow bridge. I could never see the tower from where I walked. On clear days, the topmost crossed spire might glint through the haze like a sliver of surgical steel. But most mornings it was buried, rendered indistinct by fog or the steady rain. Yet the bell rang half-mad, unwavering in its static hum of an empty network, and in its persistence I found some comfort. I didn’t know why, but I would think the bell was for Him, and that only I could hear it. It didn’t belong here. The only things that did were the river, the wind, the muted brown foliage, and whatever grew teeth sharp enough to outlast the breeze.

At the last ringing of the hour I’d left home. It tolled in the background, in the chest cavities, as though its chain were tied directly to the thin divide between my ribs. Every hour, on the hour, it called me out, all the way down to the river. This was the first time I had crossed the area in a year. The world felt thinner than usual. Calloused fists and a broken nose, signs of how a fevered mind could slip, or a dream shedding its last layer of weakness.

But the wind hit the white, fur-laden parka I was wearing. The early morning was nearly nothing at all - here, on the axis between the skeletal forest and the treeline, I felt flayed. The wind dragged branches together overhead. Head ducked under a fallen birch, the bark unzipping as I passed, arcing deliberately at me, and the cold was constant. But it pressed in sharpest when the wind, with its trembling lisp, shifted off the river. I stared through the branches overhead, watching the way they jittered in the wind - like nerves - and felt a familiar kinship with their raw nakedness. Somewhere beyond the birches a tower blinked, its slow radar sweep carving invisible circles through the mist.

I walked the path with hands burrowed to the wrist in deep pockets, breathing in this very light air, feeling it rattle inside. It was not yet cold enough to be fatal, but it rehearsed the part well: thin, high-pitched, and full of wind that seemed intent on practicing for a harder season, chewing through the day’s last gristle and making me think what comprised it, as I thought about purity, as I did when the headaches started, which was every morning and most afternoons.

Where is the horse gone? What remains as pure and divine as the hardship of submission to God once you’ve brought sin into the body? I had never been able to answer this. And I walked. I tried to make it deliberate, to give my life the dignity of intention: accepting the brutality of the next memory to surface.

I remembered how, when I was eight, I buried a dead dog on this path, and made a little burial mound for it with a stick cross. The next morning, the cross was gone, and there was a braid of grey fur on the path leading all the way to the stream. Sometimes I thought I heard it out there, the scrabble of paws or a low bark at the brink of noise. I missed her a little more when I knew the ground could not hug her as well as I could. I had been unable to sleep for days, sure that the dog had walked away on stilt-legs, the cross in her snout, and would return at night to watch me sleep. I did not sleep much any more. When I had buried this dog under a pile of stones and knelt to pray for the poor soul of this five-year-old mutt, I dared not go further than the second row of trees. I had avoided that place, convinced that this faint, white-toothed memory would slip back into my life.

The river traced my right flank, its surface shot with grey, and the way it ran westward reminded me of the hypnagogic nights when my mind was a kettle and all the water inside seethed with voices. I passed the river bend where, last spring, a tragic fate unfolded, and I stared at it for a long minute, arm heaved over one shoulder, panting out something that didn’t feel like fatigue. I remembered the story my grandmother told, about the sirens who once swam in this crystal-clear water. How they’d gather in the sleeping fog, how their singing could lure out a man’s soul. That day I begged to be able to hear it again. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? To find something out here that would scare the sickness from me, or at least put a shape to the grey figure that had crept up inside my body, since October, but instead the world just hovered, lightless and indifferent. I had traded witch-fears for anhedonia, and it was not clear if this was what was meant with taking care. Then the bell hit again. A nest of birds squatted under the eaves, and every so often one would dart out, startled by the droning sound.

At that moment the sky above was still the laundered grey, but in it I saw - in between the seconds of my eye being open and for what had to be the end of a delayed blink - an artillery angel, white and armour-plated. Or rather, a negative space where an angel should be. Nothing but light, cast through the wounded mist with the sound of a thousand organistra. It moved slowly, as if the sky was a viscous medium and it was wading through it in perfect stasis. Wings fanned out, shimmering like a digital screen, and arms at its sides. There was nothing human in its bearing. It hovered there, terrifying and beautiful, narrow white wings spread, face made of kindness from someone I had disappointed.

I fell backwards, in horror. I started to pray, listening as the bell’s toll slowed, each strike pulling more fiercely at my ribcage. Its eyes were cold, surgical. It was not here to save me, but to bear witness. I realised I had always known this. I wanted to call out, to ask for something - comfort, maybe, or erasure, or perhaps the simplicity of feeling okay - but the bell had migrated fully into my chest, and all I could do was exhale in time with the notes tunnelling behind my eyes. Þe drawbrigge of þe castel of þe soule is lowed, and þurgh þe breche cometh in þe leme and þe softe mercy.

The body proves it is a witness.

It is a never-ending ledger of a man’s existence, where every indulgence, every violent act, every act of cowardice etches a permanent mark. While the mind deceives, rewrites, represses, the body keeps score in bone and sinew, in the optic nerves, in the ribcage of the chest as if forever bracing for a blow of unending onslaught. Sin isn’t always a brutal image. It’s often a slow accumulation, measured in what festers silently in the darkness of man. The bear hunter’s heart once wide open beating behind impenetrable spikes. The man who betrayed his own ideals finds his breath shortened to gasps, his sleep tormented by cursed sigils, his touch as cold as hoar frost. You see it in the hands, worn threadbare from grasping at the sword. You see it in the eyes, where shame flickers like a desperate candle behind suffocating glass. The body is honest, shattering where the man refuses to bend. It limps where he feigns running. It swells with a ravenous hunger for something irretrievably lost. And through all that, it battles to save. Every agonizing ache, every sickness, every bloodied mouth, every scramble in the skull, is a warning. Manhood seems like some rabid, doglike thing, frothing at the mouth and circling back to bite, loyal when yoked, wild and destructive when free. Something dangerous when untamed. It is reduced to feral appetite. Raw and violent, defined by conquest and glory, admired when useful and feared when unleashed. But that is not manhood. Manhood does not froth or bite. It bleeds. Not a beast, but a lamb. Meekness without weakness, authority without arrogance, power anchored in submission. Manhood is not measured by how much control one exerts, but by how much one can lay down. A man who dies daily to himself. It is to be a guardian. To bear being a man is to fear nobody, except God.

The angel waited and I waited in its presence. The wind pressed against the outer stone, cold and relentless. I thought of the dog with its cross, of how things that ought to stay dead often did not. I thought about what it would mean to submit, to truly give purpose to my life.

I sat like that for what felt like an hour, though it was likely only minutes, the November air eating at my knuckles and lips. But nothing happened. The angel did not reach out, did not urge me onward. It hung there. Then, as if the moment had been spent, it dissolved into the weather. The sky returned to its blank self and the bell within quieted down to rest. I felt its absence as a burn, a white-hot spot between my shoulder blades. I recognised the angel. It was not new. It first appeared a week after I buried the dog. It had visited in sleep, in the flicker between television channels, even once in the wet reflection of a passing metro blotting out the mirrored sky, the way a tidal wave engulfs a glacier.

In my dreams, the angels were always at war: for me. For a year I had told myself it was a symbol for my trust in faith, or a sign heaven was coming. Now, with the air vibrating around and the bell ready to drop its next note, I knew it was neither. But I felt both of them stutter in my heart. The wind rose, and with it, a sound like the grinding of distant metal thrumming along every nerve of my skeletal being. The cold air sliced my throat raw as I saw my face reflected in the dark water, hair uneven, nose crooked from a heavy break, eyes ringed with blue. Beneath it, an aimless, inexpressible splinter of silver moved in the current. As I came closer to this reflection of myself, at the first touch of rock, I scraped the skin off my right hand and swore so loudly that it rippled across the surface towards the other side as I found myself peering into the same eyes of the boy that buried that dog.

I crouched down, lowered my hand into the water, and as I withdrew it, flexed it, watched the water bead and run off my skin. Kneeling, hands folded, back bent like willow branches. The wrath was senseless as I bowed my head. A man can’t be a man without submission. I listened for the bell, or for the sound of wings, but all I heard was the river, the wind in the reeds, and the slow thump of my own heart.

The pallid light now was neither blue nor grey but white. It seemed to pulse faintly, as if the morning itself breathed with me. It was not punishment. It was a request for sacrifice - not in the crude sense, but in the sense that every hour, every day, I was being asked to surrender something: anger, fear, violence. It was to fill my own inscrutable purpose.

I lifted the stones and decided not to end that bleak November day early. And if I listen now, in the blue hush of dawn, I may hear the bell toll once, softly - no hand upon its chain and no wind in its mouth - only a prayer circling between the branches with a glance of heaven.

Penitence.

In the end, all I had wanted was to be seen and heard.

Fin’Amor to a stitched prayer to soften the clench of my jaw.