Cadaver by Betty Stanton

Image via Karl Fredrickson

We built our temples out of what was left of the body. Skin turned to plaster, ribs into arches, the hollow of the mouth a place to echo prayer. Blood dries faster when it believes in something and ours hardened to stone, iron made bright as gospel on the wall.

The saints were human once, but no one remembers that part. Their faces burn through varnish, their bones humming in their glass cases. Pilgrims kneel before whatever still glows; candles, skulls, and small miracles sealed in airless gold. The chapel roof caved in, but the candles kept burning, caught fire. Ash fell like snow into the aisles, soft and radiant. Icons melted but the eyes remained. Someone swears they saw them move, a slow closing and reopening, as if the painted heaven behind them were breathing.

We washed our wounds in holy water until the pain began to sing. Each scar became a psalm we could not ever stop reciting. Skin learns to glow where prayer touches it, light gathering in bruises, in the soft hollows of knees and throat. Grace tastes thin and metallic on the tongue, iron, the flavor of the body remembering how to believe. We named the silence between miracles eternity. The small breath held after the light finally went out.  We kept the incense burning long after the gods left. The smoke bends itself into the shape of wings and, for a moment, everyone in the ruin believes again.

Miracles rot slower than flesh. Light seeps from the bones for years after death, a slow confession of the body’s refusal to go dark. Everything in the dust remembers the shape of devotion. Holiness crystallizing around absence, turning emptiness to matter, turning prayers into mineral bloom. This is how the divine left fingerprints on everything it touched, and some of those prints still pulse under the right light. Every offering eventually becoming bone.

Ashes cling to what refuses to be forgiven. The mouth of the dead tastes like gold leaf: soft, bitter, eternal. Even rot has rhythm, and faith is only the body learning how to decompose. We are what remains when belief turns to residue, when relic becomes the only river running toward survival. Our tongues bloom with dust. Our veins hum with light. Somewhere, a god is still listening to its own quiet, fading echo. The bones glow faintly through the glass. We kneel because we are holy, and because we are afraid of what still answers.

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Betty Stanton (she/her) is a Pushcart nominated writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in various anthologies. She received her MFA from The University of Texas - El Paso and holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review. Follow her @fadingbetty.bsky.social